Beginning Anew: Thich Nhat Hanh's Practice of Reconciliation

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

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Beginning Anew is a practice of reconciliation taught by Thich Nhat Hanh and kept in the Plum Village tradition. People sit together and take turns to appreciate one another (“flower watering”), to say what they regret, and to say with loving speech how they have been hurt, while everyone else listens without interrupting. “Beginning Anew is not to ask for forgiveness,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote; it is a way of changing your own mind and heart.

What is Beginning Anew?

Plum Village’s practice page defines it in one line: “To begin anew is to look deeply and honestly at ourselves, our past actions, speech and thoughts”, and to make a fresh start within ourselves and with others. The community calls it “a key Plum Village practice for maintaining healthy relationships and healing difficult relationships” (Family Beginning Anew, 2024), and the practice page says it “helps us develop our kind speech and compassionate listening.”

It is not a sitting technique, though it belongs with the tradition’s meditation and mindful living. The book by Sister Chan Khong, Thich Nhat Hanh’s closest collaborator for more than fifty years, presents it as a way to address problems while they are small; Thich Nhat Hanh says it can prevent hurt from building up over the weeks.

The parts of Beginning Anew: three or four

Plum Village’s own sources do not all count or name the parts the same way, so here they are side by side:

Flower watering

Each person names the good qualities they have actually seen in the others: a kindness, a skill, a way of being patient. Thich Nhat Hanh was firm about honesty here: “It is not flattery; we always speak the truth.” In every version it comes first, before anything difficult is said.

Sharing regrets

Next, each person names something they did or said that hurt someone. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s 1998 account this is the second part of the ceremony, and it comes before anyone voices their own hurt.

Expressing a hurt

Then a person may say how someone else’s words or actions hurt them, without blame and without argument. “Loving speech is crucial,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. (The early texts’ standard for speech that is timely, true and kind is on our page on right speech.) Plum Village’s practice page adds a step: before expressing a hurt, first water the other person’s flower by naming two positive qualities you have truly observed in them.

A long-term difficulty (the plumvillage.org fourth part)

The plumvillage.org version adds a fourth part. Old pain sometimes surfaces in the present; sharing it, the page says, lets the people around you understand you better and offer the support you need. Thich Nhat Hanh’s three-part version folds “difficulties” into the third part instead.

Asking for more information (Sister Chan Khong’s fourth step)

In Sister Chan Khong’s 2025 version the last step turns the question around. You ask the other person whether something is bothering them, even whether you said or did something to annoy them, and then you listen without correcting or arguing. In her words, “this is the time to listen and understand.”

How a Beginning Anew session is done

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s description, everyone sits in a circle around a vase of fresh flowers. When someone is ready to speak, she joins her palms, walks slowly to the centre, takes the vase back to her seat, and speaks while holding it; when she has finished, she returns it to the centre. (In this account the vase is fetched from the centre and returned there, not passed from hand to hand.)

The rules of listening matter as much as the rules of speaking:

• No interruptions. “No one can interrupt the person holding the flower.” She may take as long as she needs.
• Deep listening. The others listen fully and, the plumvillage.org page adds, follow their breathing.
• No reply, no correction. “If we reply to her or correct her, the practice will not bear fruit,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. If what she said rests on a misunderstanding, it can be cleared up a few days later, privately and calmly.

The ceremony closes with a song, or with everyone holding hands in the circle and breathing together for a minute; sometimes with hugging meditation. The circle is a small picture of a sangha, a community that practises together.

How often? The sources differ. “At Plum Village, we practice a ceremony of Beginning Anew every week,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in 1998. The current plumvillage.org page says the practice centre does it as a community every two weeks and individually as often as you like, and suggests a daily form too: expressing appreciation, and apologising promptly.

Plum Village’s own page on the practice, with video explanations by its monastics, is at plumvillage.org/articles/begin-anew.

Between two people, and in families

Beginning Anew is not only a group ceremony. For practice at home, Sister Chan Khong suggests that you “set aside a regular, agreed-upon 30 minutes” each week, in a calm place where no one feels rushed, and begin by sitting together silently for a few moments, following the breath. “You can practice beginning anew with just one other person or with your whole family,” she writes.

At a practice centre, the plumvillage.org page says, expressing a hurt “is often performed one on one with another practitioner rather than in the group setting”, and you may ask for a third party you both trust and respect to be present.

In a talk given at Plum Village in January 2024, Sister Chân Đức (Sister Annabel Laity), a senior Dharma teacher in the Plum Village community, describes the listener’s side. Having heard someone’s pain, you can simply thank them, perhaps apologise; if you feel the other person’s perception is badly wrong, that can be addressed later, on another day. Later in the same talk, speaking of forgiveness in general, she says that asking someone to “forgive me” can be “a lot to ask of somebody”, and that real forgiveness needs understanding first.

Families are a central setting. Writing in 1992, Sister Annabel suggested that “once a week, if we possibly can, the whole family comes together”, sometimes with two or three families meeting at once. In her 2024 talk, Sister Chân Đức says Plum Village always teaches the practice on its retreats, “especially for the children and teenagers”, who learn to do it with their parents. Plum Village’s Family Beginning Anew page adds that its summer retreat offers a session for families every week, and points to a short video in which children learn flower watering. (See also Buddhism and relationships, Buddhist parenting, Buddhism and family and mindfulness for kids.)

Where Beginning Anew comes from, as Plum Village tells it

The two Plum Village accounts of the practice’s roots that we read both trace it to the monastic ceremonies of the Buddha’s time. Thich Nhat Hanh, in Teachings on Love, says the practice dates to the time of the Buddha, when communities of monks and nuns practised Beginning Anew on the eve of every full moon and new moon.

Sister Annabel Laity, writing in 1992, says the ceremony “goes all the way back to the Buddha” and ties it to the Pavāraṇā, the “invitation” in which monks and nuns invite one another to point out their shortcomings. She places it “at the end of the rainy retreat and also in conjunction with the uposatha days when the precepts were recited”, and says monastics still hold much the same ceremony before the twice-monthly precept recitation. “We have translated Pavarana as ‘Beginning Anew,’” she wrote. She also notes that “traditionally, there is no Pavarana ceremony for lay families”, and asks why lay men and women should not share its benefits, even if the ceremony has to be modified for them.

Neither says the Buddha taught the practice in its present form, and this page does not either.

What the older texts actually say

The early monastic texts do contain the rites Plum Village points to. In the Pali Vinaya, at least, the annual one and the fortnightly one are separate.

The Pavāraṇā happens once a year, at the end of the three-month rains retreat. Each monk in turn asks the community to correct him in regard to what it has seen, heard or suspected. The story behind it, and its wording, are on our page on the rains retreat, Vassa.

The fortnightly observance on the new and full moon is the recitation of the monastic code, the Pātimokkha (see Uposatha). Before it, a monk with an unconfessed offence must confess it to another monk (Kd 2:27). Both Plum Village accounts point to this fortnightly timing. Sister Annabel calls the rite Pavarana, but in the Pali Vinaya the Pavāraṇā proper is the annual end-of-rains ceremony, and the fortnightly rite is the Pātimokkha recitation with the confession that comes before it. (Vietnamese Mahāyāna monastics, like those of China, Korea and Taiwan, follow a different code, the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya, which we have not compared here.)

The discourses show the Pavāraṇā at work. On one full-moon invitation day, the Buddha himself goes first:

Sāriputta answers that there is nothing, and then invites the Buddha in turn.

The canon also has a procedure for a community that has been quarrelling: a close parallel, though not one cited in the Plum Village accounts of Beginning Anew that we read. Among the seven ways of settling disciplinary issues in the Sāmagāma Sutta is “covering over as if with grass”. The two sides sit together in harmony, and a competent monk from one side rises and tells the assembled Sangha:

A monk from the other side then says the same. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Joyfully Together (Parallax, 2003) has a chapter titled “The seven methods of resolving conflicts”; we have seen only its table of contents, and none of the sources we read links those methods to Beginning Anew.

Another discourse opens on the monks of Kosambī, “continually wounding each other with barbed words” (MN 48), and the Buddha’s answer is six warm-hearted qualities, beginning with kindness of body, speech and mind towards one’s companions, “both in public and in private.”

Side by side, the old rites and Beginning Anew share a core: owning one’s faults aloud and asking others to help one see. But neither the Pavāraṇā nor the confession before the observance day includes appreciating others or voicing one’s own hurts. Neither element appears in the Pali rites quoted here, and none of the Plum Village sources we read traces them to an older text.

Related Plum Village practices

• The Peace Treaty and the Peace Note. Thich Nhat Hanh described the Peace Treaty in The Mindfulness Bell in 1992 as an agreement for when we are angry with a partner or friend, signed after reflection, ideally in the meditation hall in the presence of the sangha. You have twenty-four hours to tell the other person; within that time you tell them calmly that you are suffering, ending with the hope that “by Friday evening both of us will have had a chance to look deeply into this matter”, and you make an appointment. If you cannot say it calmly, you can hand them a written “peace note” instead. (For anger itself, see Buddhism and anger.)
• The Six Harmonies. Plum Village’s talk archive summarises a 2006 Dharma talk by Thich Nhat Hanh as building community on the Buddha’s Six Harmonies (the summary’s list, not his own words): living together, observing the precepts or Mindfulness Trainings, sharing the essentials of daily life, loving speech and deep listening, sharing insights, and respecting others’ views. It overlaps with, but is not the same list as, the six warm-hearted qualities of MN 48. (On the community itself, see what is the sangha.)

When Beginning Anew is not the right practice

Beginning Anew assumes people who are each safe, willing and acting in good faith. It asks you to soften, to listen without answering back, and to own your part. In a relationship where one person controls, threatens or harms the other, that same request can be turned against the person being harmed.

So we say it plainly: this practice is not meant for a relationship where there is abuse, coercion or fear. There the priority is your safety and help from outside the relationship; if you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. Official guidance on getting help is available from the UK Home Office (domestic abuse: how to get help) and the US Office on Women’s Health (get help); most countries have an equivalent service. None of the Plum Village texts we read addresses this case; Plum Village’s page on the practice lists a Dharma talk by Sister Dang Nghiem titled “Trauma and Beginning Anew”, which we have not reviewed. These are our words, not theirs.

A few other limits are worth knowing:

• It can be hard at first. Sister Annabel wrote that in families where suffering is great and long-lasting, the first ceremony “can be difficult. It may only scratch at the surface of years of pain.” One of the big dangers the first time, she warned, is the tendency to blame.
• It is not therapy. It is a practice of speech and listening, not a substitute for couples or family counselling where that is needed.
• It does not require forgiveness. Releasing resentment and repairing a relationship are different things; you can do the first without the second. See Buddhism and forgiveness.

Where it does fit, the practice is modest and repeatable: a flower in the middle of a room, a few honest sentences, and people willing to listen to the end before they reply.