Brother Phap Luu is a Zen Buddhist monk at Deer Park Monastery in Southern California, founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. He co‑authored Hiking Zen, which explores walking and hiking as mindfulness practices that cultivate presence, awareness, and connection to nature. Drawing from monastic life and meditation traditions, Brother Phap Luu shares how slowing down outdoors can help us reconnect with ourselves and the natural world.
Brother Phap Luu is a Zen Buddhist monk at Deer Park Monastery in Southern California, founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. He co‑authored Hiking Zen, which explores walking and hiking as mindfulness practices that cultivate presence, awareness, and connection to nature. Drawing from monastic life and meditation traditions, Brother Phap Luu shares how slowing down outdoors can help us reconnect with ourselves and the natural world.
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Shelby Stanger:
I have a busy brain. When life starts moving too fast, spending time outside helps me slow down and come back to myself. I feel that presence when I'm surfing, running, or hiking, but sometimes I want a bit more intention behind the pause. That's where Deer Park comes in. Deer Park is a Buddhist monastery about 40 minutes from my house in San Diego. And over the years, it's become a place I return to for meditation retreats. Founded in 2000 by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, Deer Park is a rare kind of space. Quiet, but close to the city, rooted in nature, community, and simple practices like walking meditation, gardening meditation, and even eating meditation.
One of the monks who lives there is brother Phap Luu. He recently co-authored a book called Hiking Zen, which explores how something as simple as walking and hiking can become a powerful practice for reconnecting with ourselves and the natural world around us. It teaches us to slow down and live more in the present moment.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
I was lucky to sit down with Brother Phap Luu at my home in San Diego, which was the perfect setting for an in person conversation about the present moment.
Brother Phap Luu, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Phap Luu:
Thank you.
Shelby Stanger:
I actually think I met you in 2006, the very first time I went to Deer Park Monastery.
Phap Luu:
I was the novice monk in 2006.
Shelby Stanger:
So if you're listening, it's a really cool scene right now. I'm talking to Brother Phap Luu and he sounds like anybody I'm talking to on Wild Ideas Worth Living, but he's wearing a brown robe, he doesn't have hair, and he's a monk. You've dedicated your life as a monk. The team knows that Deer Park Monastery and Buddhism was very special to me. And we were trying to figure out a way to have you guys on the podcast for quite a long time because nature is such a big part of your lives. When you came out with a book about Hiking Zen, I was really excited. I'm just curious, before I get into your background as a monk, tell me a little bit about your background in nature and the outdoors.
Phap Luu:
Well, I think it has a lot to do with my dad, especially he loves nature. My grandpa was a hunter and my dad grew up loving being out with my grandpa. Everything got ruined when they would shoot a deer. But the part leading up to that he loved. So then he became a lifelong hiker and kind of wilderness enthusiast. I was always outside when I was young. And also my dad was a kind of amateur, almost professional water ski. My grandpa had a boat shop, so he grew up water-skiing when that was really getting big in the '60s. And he used to do the pyramids where people would all be-
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, that's so cool.
Phap Luu:
Yeah. Or do the clown show. They'd have water ski shows.
Shelby Stanger:
Like the circus clown shows with water skis. Yeah.
Phap Luu:
He'd be the clown on the skis or going over the jump and then falling and things like that. But also, he was a slalom expert in water-skiing. Anyway, I grew up in that space where it was just natural to be outside all the time. I think especially when there was difficulty in the family, if my parents were arguing, and eventually they got separated, the forest was always there as a refuge place for me. I was a cross country runner too and I was right next to a kind of state forest, so I'd go out with my dog running, trail running basically. I didn't see it as a meditation at that time, but now I see clearly that you go into a deeper state where you forget about any idea like, I am this person, I am anything. You kind of empty yourself in the woods.
I always had the feeling also, that there's some kind of presence in the forest behind the trees. You always feel like it can be tough in the forest, but somehow there's some benevolent spirit that's looking out for me. I had that feeling, that feeling of presence when I'd be in the forest. I just learned to love also walking in the forest at night, this sense of being with other senses than just my eyes, with my ears, my nose, smelling, the contact my feet make with the earth. It's always seemed something very sacred to me.
Shelby Stanger:
Along with skiing and hiking near his childhood home in Connecticut, Phap Luu especially loved running. The rhythmic nature of the sport helped him to clear his mind. After high school, Phap Luu went on to run cross country at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
What did running do for you? Hiking is one thing, water-skiing is something else, but running is a whole other discipline.
Phap Luu:
Yeah. I think running was really the sport that I got most deeply into. Because on those long runs, as you know, when you're getting 11, 12 miles and you're out, then you get in a space where your body is making this motion, but it feels like there's no effort. People call it runners high, whatever it is, but there's something that happens that's very... It's beyond what you can put into words and it just feels so effortless. There's something I discovered now later in my life, deeper in human evolution, about running and the structure of our feet and the achilles tendon. Even just the fact that our head can stay relatively steady while we're running. That's all what we evolved on the African Savannah. So somehow there's something deep in our humanity that we touch when you're running that is...
I didn't know any of that when I was younger, I just knew that this feels incredible. There's something, you're trail running through the forest and it's, how do my feet know where to put themselves? If you watch your feet moving, it's like, what's going on? How does it adjust? It's just a beautiful kind of flow that happens adjusting to roots and stones and whatever comes your way so quickly. We used to... I remember up around Hanover, New Hampshire, we'd be sprinting down the hillside and you think, this is completely reckless. How can nobody get hurt? And yet somehow our bodies know just super-fast how to adjust to it. So that kind of beauty of the architecture of the human body, I thought there's something beyond what can be described in just words that goes on here. That was kind of meditation for me.
Shelby Stanger:
So many people say running is meditation, but you're a monk. So you really actually do think running can be meditation.
Phap Luu:
Of course.
Shelby Stanger:
After graduating from Dartmouth, Phap Luu headed to Europe to teach English. While he was there, he met a man in Madrid that would change the course of his life, a spiritual mentor who inspired him to walk away from a traditional career and begin experimenting with a much simpler way of living.
Phap Luu:
I met this spiritual teacher in Madrid. He's the first one who looked at me and said, "Don't be a Buddhist, be the Buddha." Because I mentioned something about Buddhism. He had spent a lot of time in India and he's the first person I thought who could read my mind, he knows exactly what I'm thinking. He was living with no money for more than 25 years and I was very surprised, how does somebody do that? So his way of life really got me interested and I said, "Okay, I want to try to live with no money and see what that means in the world." So partly his example of just meeting him that set me on the spiritual path, but he wasn't teaching meditation. So I was kind of struggling to figure out how to get what he's got.
Shelby Stanger:
As he explored alternatives to a conventional way of living, Phap Luu spent time with an activist community in Spain. The group initially lived together in abandoned buildings before relocating to a quiet rural village. There, they focused on growing their own food and living with a closer connection to the land. But like many experimental communities, differences in perspective emerged, and the resulting tension deeply affected Phap Luu.
Phap Luu:
I didn't know what to do, but somehow I just decided to stop eating and I fasted for three days, which is a relatively short fast. But for me at that time, I had never fasted even for a day. I remember sitting in the town square because I felt the violence in this village I was living in. Because we didn't have precepts, we didn't have an ethical framework. We were a bunch of anarchists living in this village and trying to figure out how to live in harmony, but we never talked about living in harmony. Then I just decided, okay, I'm just going to stop eating and fast. It was kind of like a protest for the violence that I felt coming up in the village. So I just sat in the town center and made clover tea every day and didn't eat for three days. That was a kind of meditation practice. I went in myself and I was aware of my body and I thought, there's something really interesting here. I had this intuition, I need to learn to go inside myself.
Shelby Stanger:
Eight months after his first fast, Phap Luu returned to the United States. His time abroad had sparked a deeper spiritual curiosity. He moved back in with his mother and he began reading everything he could find on Buddhism and meditation. At the same time, he was juggling multiple jobs to pay off his student loans. The pace was demanding and the lifestyle felt increasingly out of step with his desire to live off the land and build community. Feeling disillusioned, Phap Luu dove even deeper into his Buddhist practice.
We have to get to where you decide to become a monk.
Phap Luu:
It was in that moment when I was in this multi-month depression and just suddenly discovering joy again just by mindful breathing and being aware of my body. Then reading the Buddhist sutras and about monks at that time, I just thought, wow, I want to do this. I don't care if it's 2,500 years ago, I want to realize this in my daily life. Then I started looking for places, should I go to Thailand and become a monk there?
Shelby Stanger:
As it turned out, Phap Luu didn't have to travel halfway around the world to deepen his Buddhist practice. A new monastery had opened in New Hampshire, rooted in the teachings of the renowned Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Phap Luu began visiting regularly, immersing himself in the community's traditions and philosophy.
Phap Luu:
Mainly it's learning to be present with our breathing in the present moment, right here, right now, and staying with the breaths as a way of cultivating mindfulness. So all the practices are helping us, whether it's walking meditation, eating meditation, sitting meditation. These are all forms of meditation that help us to cultivate the quality of mindfulness, which is to be aware of what's going on within and around us.
Then we get in touch with Mother Earth, what's going on beneath our feet, the earth that we touch, the plants, the animals, extended out to the whole changing climate of the earth and how we're influencing that. So you see the meditation starts from within our body, but then it can go outwards. With the basic practices of breathing, walking, sitting, eating and mindfulness, it's just the daily way we cultivate a good habit of being present. Especially not getting lost in our thinking, in thinking about the future, about the past, but just being fully present with what's here and right here right now.
Shelby Stanger:
Phap Luu continued practicing Buddhism while working to pay off his student loans. On the day he made his final payment, he packed his bags and moved to Plum Village, the primary monastery founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in France. It was a decisive turning point. Phap Luu lived and worked at Plum Village for years, and in 2003, he became ordained as a monk there.
In 2006, Brother Phap Luu moved to Deer Park Monastery, about 40 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. The 400 acre property includes dormitories for monks, nuns, and visitors, along with a communal dining hall, kitchen, and a stunning and serene meditation room. But most of the land remains wild, with trails winding through a coastal desert landscape of rock, sage, oak trees, and succulents. It feels like a glimpse of what San Diego may have looked like a hundred years ago. When you're there, you can hear the wildlife that keeps its distance from the city nearby. Owls hooding, insects chirping, and coyotes howling at night.
During his time at Deer Park, Phap Luu has helped expand both the monasteries programming and its sense of welcome. He played a role in starting the organic farm, and even helps lead a mindful music festival. But one of his favorite offerings is the walking and hiking meditations. That practice eventually became the foundation for a book he coauthored this year titled Hiking Zen.
Let's go into hiking. So many of our listeners are hikers. Why did you decide to write a book about Hiking Zen?
Phap Luu:
We decided to do a seven-week hike on the Appalachian Trail as a retreat. Myself and my Dutch brother who ordained the same year as me, Brother Phap Xa, who's a co-author. So we didn't plan to write a book, we just wanted to do this. We really wanted to do this retreat. We really wanted to spend seven weeks on the Appalachian Trail, but we wanted to see how we could do it as a retreat. So we walked from Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York to Washington DC. That's a kind of precipitate cause for the book.
Shelby Stanger:
And that's on the Appalachian Trail?
Phap Luu:
Well, the beginning is on this trail called the Shawangunk Ridge Trail behind Blue Cliff. And then the last week is on the Chesapeake and Ohio Towpath.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, that makes sense. I was like, because I didn't know the Appalachian went right into DC.
Phap Luu:
No, no, right.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. I was a little confused there.
Phap Luu:
Yeah. Then it's actually the last weekend when we just... Phap Xa remembers it differently than I do. I seem to remember the last day we were camping just outside of DC and he came up to me and said, "We've been doing this for seven weeks. We should write a book about it." So we just high-fived each other and that's how the book got started.
Shelby Stanger:
Is there a difference between hiking and hiking Zen?
Phap Luu:
Yeah. I think the important part is to recognize how athleticized and even competitive hiking has become. That's not the default, right? That there's ancestral traditions of pilgrimage and immersion in nature. So I think it's a response to that. There's nothing wrong with being competitive and athletic, but if it's the only way we are when we're out in the woods, then I think we're missing a key point, which is just being present with the natural habitat, which has nurtured us for hundreds of thousands of years. It helps us when we slow down a bit. Because it helps to slow down first to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is not slowness, but it helps at the beginning to train yourself, to retrain yourself, how to do walking, how to really be present with the contact your foot makes with the earth, being aware of your breathing and so forth, coming down, being with your body instead of in your thinking.
So those, I see it as a kind of balm to the aggressive way we can treat going out into nature. We are a living, walking, geological phenomena, and we forget that when we think of ourselves as separate from the earth. But I think we've gone too far and we've forgotten how to live in community and how to be in community with the earth. That means being in harmony with the very cells and organs and processes in our own body. I think this immersion in nature... Of course, we can practice meditation wherever we are. Here we are, we've got synthetic carpet below us, television on the wall. It's normal, it's a normal household, right? I appreciate the surfboards, it make me think of-
Shelby Stanger:
We didn't have a TV for like 10 years.
Phap Luu:
No, no. It's not... We also watch our teachers dhammatalks on a television in the monastery.
Shelby Stanger:
It's okay, but I like that you called me out on that.
Phap Luu:
No, no, it's fine. There's nothing wrong. The point is that that's what most of us live in, right?
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah.
Phap Luu:
So I think that environment can contribute as well. In the monastery, we live in a building. We just built a new monk's residence building, but what we try to do is to be outside as much as possible so that we can remember. The daily schedule of the monastery includes walking meditation outside, and that was really an innovation. So that practice means that for the 22 years I've been a monk, I'm going out every day, I'm walking meditation with my brothers and sisters in nature, walking slowly, breathing. This is the training ground. This is the basis of Hiking Zen, really. We just extended that out into multi-day trips where we, instead of having people stay in rooms in a retreat on the monastery, we're actually bringing our own tents and hammocks and packing our own food from backpacker pantry or whatever. It's not like we're foraging for food, but we do it together as a retreat, so it's simplifying.
One other thing I love, which one of the frequent participants in our retreats told me, he said, "I love doing these events because when I come on a Hiking Zen event, nobody's going to talk to me about gear, ask me why I bought this sleeping bag or whatever, and nobody's going to talk about past trips." And I thought, "Wow, that's true." So many times you go out hiking and it's like people are like, "Oh man, I got this backpack." Then two hours later like, "Who cares about the backpack?" Sorry. And then the other thing-
Shelby Stanger:
It's okay.
Phap Luu:
Then the other thing is, we talk about you're out in this beautiful nature and you're talking about trips you took 20 years ago. Why not enjoy this present moment? That's the discipline that we train in on a Hiking Zen retreat.
Shelby Stanger:
While remaining fully present might seem hard or even boring, it can also be deeply revealing. There is no multitasking at Deer Park. If you're gardening and want to talk to someone, you put your gloves and your shovel down so that you can focus on your conversation. When someone is talking, you are only listening. Spending time at the monastery has inspired me to try to bring this practice into my conversations and especially my own adventures.
How does one hike more mindfully?
Phap Luu:
I think the first is to be aware of two main things, is our breathing and our step and coordinating the breathing and the step. First it's just where you are. You might like to take a moment and just practice, stand up and bring all your attention back to the breathing. Of course, you hear my voice, but that's just the guidance. You bring your attention to your breathing and then you take a step. So maybe one step on the in breath or one step on the out breath. You're aware of the contact your feet make with the earth. You're aware of your breathing, you're aware of your step. And then if you notice you get off in your thinking, then bring your attention back to the breathing, then reconnect with the step. You can start just in, out, in, out. That's slow walking meditation we often do inside.
Outside, you might take two or three steps on the in breath and then three or four steps on the out breath. Usually the out breath can be a little bit longer. We don't try to change the breathing, we just see what number of steps naturally falls with the in breath and with the out breath. That bare attention to the step and the breathing then keeps our mind directed in the present moment with our body and our breathing and our step. Another development you might like to try with your mindful walking meditation is practicing what we call, I am arrived, I am home. We don't need to be at this place or that place and say, "That's the place at home. That's where I feel relaxed. Everywhere else outside of that, I have fear. I just want to get back to that place where I'm safe." You train yourself to see that this moment right where I am, right where my step touches the earth, that is home. You start to learn how to understand your fear and then how to take better care of your fear.
This simple practice of arriving at home with each step. You might take on the in breath, arrive, arrive, arrive a few steps. Then on the out breath at home, at home, at home. So it's not just repeating the words, but it's actually realizing it. Do you feel arrived? Do you feel at home? Is there still that rushing towards a future happiness that you imagine or are you really able to dwell happily right here and right now in the present moment? Because that is the hallmark of an awakened person, of a Buddha, is to dwell happily in the present moment, not to have something out there that we're running after.
You probably are very aware of the tides in every moment, and it's like, "Oh man, okay." Whatever. I'm not a surfer. But it's like, the tides like this, I got to grab my surfboard and go out. So there's a rushing feeling, I got to get it before it goes out, the sun's going down, maybe there's sharks today, dolphin. I don't know. Those kind of things. We just enjoy sometimes just sitting on the beach, we don't have to surf, just enjoying whatever is going on. Wherever we are, we train ourselves not to get caught in expectations, planning and all these kind of tendencies. So really learning to be present, free from your plans and your expectations, which is the training of Hiking Zen, this training of just being with the step, being with the breath, is wondrous existence.
Shelby Stanger:
It's so interesting. Many adventurers struggle with FOMO.
Phap Luu:
Yeah. Right.
Shelby Stanger:
I think that's what you're describing. And when I hike, I'm often concerned with the view from the top. I just want to get to the top and I want to see the waterfall and the vista. I was at Deer Park and hiking with some nuns and they stopped and just sat in the middle of the hike and enjoyed a snack and water. And I was like, "What? Why wouldn't you just hustle and get to the top and then go do that?"
Phap Luu:
We worked with this trekking company in India. We did a few hikes. But the first one, we went to Annapurna Basecamp. We noticed that it was really difficult to do as a meditation retreat, because once we got to the base camp, as we were coming down, everybody forgot everything about their mindfulness practice. So I started to say, "Okay, next time we do a backpacking retreat or trekking retreat, no destination." Because destination actually makes it more difficult because it's that habit of like, okay, when you're going there, there's the expectation of arriving and then once you're there, it's like, "Okay, now we just party."
Actually, it shows in the evidence, most people get hurt coming down because they lose their awareness after the buildup of this training to get to the top of the mountain or whatever it is. That's a metaphor for our life, we try to build ourselves up to arrive at certain attainment. That's why you read it in the Heart Sutra, famous Mahayana Sutra. There is no attainment with nothing to attain.
Shelby Stanger:
Next time you get outside, try not to get hung up on the destination or the accomplishment at the end of your adventure. You don't necessarily need to meditate, but there's so much to gain if you can focus on enjoying every step in the present moment.
You can find Brother Phap Luu's book, Hiking Zen, wherever books are sold. You can also learn more about Deer Park Monastery at deerparkmonastery.org. I highly recommend a multi-day retreat or visiting on a Sunday, which is their day of mindfulness. You can find out more on their website.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
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