Being Peace

I’ve spent the last 10 months sitting with the teaching of Gandhi and Martin Luther King on non-violent resistance, which inevitably has raised the question of what it might mean to embody peace.

The Resistance

·

July 12, 2025

The theme of resistance has been showing up in every corner of my life. In my body, in my mind, in the books I’ve been reading and in the deep contemplation of what wise response to the rise of authoritarianism might be.

During my recent time at Dharmagiri, I felt the presence of Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thay) very viscerally. I came across a booklet of his in the Dharmagiri library on guiding walking meditation - with instructions to bring a half smile to the face, and to place each foot on the ground as if a lotus was blooming underneath it. Peace in every step.

I have an aversion to being told to be calm or to be peaceful (I often hear it as a patriarchal “settle down, little lady”). But my response to the essence of peace conveyed by Thay was totally different - a true lightness of being that arises uncoerced.

John Welwood was the first to name the concept of “spiritual bypassing” - essentially where spiritual practice is used to suppress or defend against the messiness of feeling, embodied sensation, needs and relational difficulties. The risk certainly exists in meditative practice of disembodiment - sitting, seemingly peacefully, but with life force either located in the mind or having disconnected entirely. Walking meditation, mindful movement, somatic practices of safety and breathwork have all been powerful tools that has supported my own ongoing (and yes, MESSY) journey with learning to feel more, gently melting old freeze responses and learning how to have my awareness more fully rooted in my body.

The realisation of recent weeks has been that, in order to experience true peace, I have to create the space and capacity for feeling whatever needs to be felt. I have strong patterns of appeasement: a learnt vigilance, and a moderation of my own expressions, words and actions that favours the comfort of others over mine. Appeasement is reactionary, a rushed effort to soothe and smooth. Like true compasssion which is non-directional (i.e. accounts for the suffering of all beings, my own included), true peace is also non-directional and must have room in it for the experiences of all beings.

The wonderful Ela Manga, founder of Breathwork Africa, helped me recently to give feedback on a tricky situation by encouraging me to engage both my inner Kali and my inner Kuan Yin. Kali is a fierce Hindu goddess often associated with death and destruction. Kuan Yin is the boddhisattva of compassion (a bodhisattva is an enlightened being who chooses to return in human form to serve humanity). In this particular case I need to feel and process my rage and the ferocious protectiveness before the possibility of a wise, discerning and kind response emerging. In other words, I had to ensure I wasn’t bypassing Kali in order to truly move from my inner Kuan Yin - and not just a plastered-on mimicry.

I am extending an invitation to you to practise walking meditation: pick a fixed start point and end point, walking with no goal in mind. Bring a half smile to your face. Be aware that you are breathing in when you are breathing in. Be aware that you are breathing out when you are breathing out. And feel the lotus blossom of peace bloom beneath your feet.

What needs to be fully felt in order for you to find peace with a current situation you are dealing with?

I was beside myself
(an out-of-body experience)
for so long.
I've been coming back
returning home
in increments,
testing out an embodied
life,
waiting patiently for the
centre to hold.