Since humans grew thumbs, our planet has not stopped taking punches. Every breaking news story has the capacity to break one’s heart. As I’ve not left my home in two years, my phone has become a tiny window through which I watch our world ache. At the beginning of the pandemic I wrote, “Let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t.” But what does an unbroken spirit look like? How do we keep ours intact? And how do we remind each other how important it is for our spirits to be whole if we are to truly change our world for the better?
Thích Nhất Hạnh said, “Working for peace in the future means finding peace in the present moment.” Saving our inner world and our outerworld do not just go hand in hand, they are the same thing. In the west we have made some big mistakes in interpreting such sentiments. In fact, it’s been distorted so much that peace has become synonymous with apathy, indifference, sipping fresh squeezed coconut water at a $10,000 meditation retreat while turning one’s head away from the many wars of the world. Because of that, I’ve watched peace get a bad reputation. I’ve even had folks tell me peace is problematic. But it isn’t, of course. Our western interpretation of it is.
Peace is not something that is available to only the privileged. In fact, in my own life, I’ve witnessed privilege being a wall between myself and it. I say this because the peace I felt within me prior to my cancer diagnosis was far less than the amount of peace I have had access to since. When I went searching for the why of that, I landed on this reason– I stopped turning my head away from the truth. I looked directly at the thing I had spent my entire life most afraid to look at–my own mortality–and instinctively, in every cell of my being, made the decision to never look away again.
This was the catalyst for my learning that the more I looked directly at anything, the more peace I could find. The more I stopped denying the ways both my body and our world were sick, the less I suffered. This is an important note: when I say I suffered less, I don’t mean I did not feel grief. I mean my body welcomed the truth so wholly I became a clearer space for the grief to move through quickly, which resulted in having far more energy to show up to our world. My thesis: the least privileged part of my life—my health—has been the catalyst for harmony within.
Though I spent my whole life fearing a cancer diagnosis, I wish I’d tapped into a different possibility earlier. I don’t know why I hadn’t, as nearly all the folks whose work I lean on for support woke up further in moments of unspeakable pain. Eckhart Tolle, in the lowest depths of depression. Angela Davis, in prison, when given a book on yoga to help her migraines. I’ve even read texts over the years that suggest women are more inclined to wake up than men because they are universally far less privileged. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Prior to this year I struggled to let go of the idea that I had to be ruined by the pain of the world to be someone in touch enough to advocate for the planet’s healing. But that narrative is an activist’s pipeline to burnout. I’ve no doubt that’s why the most energized voices tend to be young. But our world can’t handle us growing out of our activism. We are all needed too much. Working for peace in our inner landscape will support our longevity and in turn support the longevity of our world.
I want to leave you today with a few quotes by teachers whose work I return to over and over. Advocates for peace both inside and out. I think you’ll be as inspired by these folks as I am. I hope so.
Love, Andrea 🖤
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“My actions are my only true belongings.”
“We were simply trying to change the way we went about our everyday lives so that our values and habits of being would reflect our commitment to freedom.”
“Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace.”
“I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”
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