A Wordless Plea to Humanity
When in doubt, listen to your heart.
Today, as the wheels of war turn, I don’t know what to write.
I try to share glimpses of peace in my writing—islands of sanity where the mind can rest and find respite.
As a mental health professional, I counseled my clients to watch the discursive mind but not to identify with all the stories and beliefs that came with thinking.
As a yoga instructor, I taught my students to breathe, to settle into the hara center (the point often felt as the center of gravity, a hand’s width below the belly button) and breathe into the knots of trauma that result from lived experience.
As a meditation teacher, I guided retreatants into a state of deep peace, so they could find a moment of calm, and eventually the insight that arises when we are not regurgitating our experience incessantly.
As a writer, I’ve often thought of my role as a witness—a commentator on the process of identifying how the sad human predicament can prove to be surprisingly fun, or even funny.
I’ve tried, in all of these roles, to bring a voice of wisdom to whatever I do.
I don’t have any wisdom today.
Watching the world devolve into a mess of machismo, a parody of humanity, an egoic, tragic, stupid, expensive disaster, I have nothing to say. The systems have gone haywire. The leaders have gone mad.
There are no words.
And if you are here, I suspect you may understand what I mean.
My wisdom is this: get quiet, go inside your heart, and listen. Whether you do this in a quiet place indoors, or somewhere in nature, listen.
Not to the news, or your socials, or to some podcast’s interpretation.
Listen to your heart and feel what you know.
I don’t know what comes next. But your heart does. As does mine.
May our hearts lead us to peace, together.