Dear ones,

I’ve recently made a big move! If you’ve ever moved homes, you know that no matter how organized, disciplined, or prepared you are, something inevitably goes differently than planned. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably discovered how quickly the mind can turn those unexpected changes into a source of unnecessary suffering.

Well, that’s what I’ve been sitting with for the past week. Despite meticulously coordinating calendars, packing schedules, moving arrangements, and farewells to loved ones, not everything has gone according to plan. Our movers gave us a twelve-day window for delivering our belongings, while reassuring us that everything would likely arrive within the first couple of days. Well, nine days later, our belongings still haven’t arrived.

Technically, we’re still within the original delivery window. But try explaining that to my mind, which had conveniently transformed the optimistic delivery estimate into a firm promise. And so, I’ve had the humbling opportunity to watch my mind do what minds do best: create stories. First came irritation and judgment. Then impatience. And before long, an entire parade of what ifs:

I’m sure you’re familiar with the impressive storytelling capacities of the human mind, so I’ll spare you the details. What has been interesting, however, is how much of my suffering has come not from the actual circumstances I am experiencing, but from my resistance to them. After all, right now, I’m safe. My loved ones are safe. I have a home. And chances are, in a few days or weeks, this entire ordeal will become a distant memory.

Yet my mind has been conditioned to live in anticipation of a future that hasn’t happened. And what matters far more than the precise arrival date of our belongings is the quality of presence I bring to myself, my partner, our loved ones, and the new community we’re beginning to call home.

From Personal Impatience to Collective Anxiety

Alongside this personal transition, I’ve been observing the many transitions unfolding in our wider world. The elections in Serbia, Brazil, and Israel. The student protests in India, Albania, France, Italy, and beyond. And of course, our very own upcoming elections here in the U.S.

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, many of us are receiving an endless stream of messages, headlines, appeals, and warnings about what’s at stake. From affordable housing and healthcare to immigration, jobs, artificial intelligence, climate change, and the future of our institutions.

These questions affect real lives and deserve our attention. Beyond the elections, we are also navigating global conflicts, technological disruption, and profound uncertainty about the future.

Even as I write about these challenges, I feel my body tense up. Perhaps you can relate.

While waiting for a moving truck and confronting the consequences of an election are obviously very different situations, I’ve noticed something familiar in my mind’s response to both: an urgent desire for certainty, control, and a particular outcome. I find my mind racing:

With each imagined scenario, I find myself experiencing the suffering of a possible future in the present moment.

Of course, much of this anxiety arises because we care. We love our families, communities, countries, and the world. We want people to be safe. We want justice, stability, and opportunities for everyone to flourish.

But does caring deeply about something require us to suffer over it continuously? Might there be a way to transform our concern into something more nourishing and constructive?

The Buddhist Teaching on Anxiety, Restlessness & Worry

In the Buddhist tradition, anxiety – and its related mind-states of worry and restlessness – are recognized as one of the five hindrances. They are called states of mind that obstruct our capacity for mental clarity, calmness, happiness, and insight.

What I appreciate about this teaching is that it doesn’t ask us to judge ourselves for experiencing these states. Instead, it invites us to become curious about them. When restlessness is present, can we recognize it as restlessness? When worry arises, can we recognize it as worry without immediately becoming entangled in its story?

This may sound simple, but in my experience, it’s a profound shift. When I’m lost in my worries about the moving truck, I’m no longer simply sitting in my new home. I’m imagining lost photographs, damaged furniture, and a sequence of unfortunate possibilities.

Likewise, when I become absorbed in anxious predictions about the future of our country or world, my attention is pulled away from the very moment in which I might be able to respond meaningfully. The mind travels into imagined futures, while the body experiences the tension of those possibilities right now.

In those moments, here’s what I’ve been reminding myself:

We can stay informed. We can participate in our communities and civic life. We can encourage others to vote and participate in the democratic process. We can vote, speak up, engage in dialogue, and take action on the issues that matter to us.

And we can undertake some or all of these actions from a place of greater awareness and discernment rather than perpetual anxiety or worry. I have learned that the invitation is not to care less, but to discover how to care more wisely.

I’d love to hear from you: Where are you noticing urgency or anxiety in your own life right now? And what helps you return to presence, compassion, and wise action?

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An Invitation to Press PAUSE Here & Now

One practice that has been especially helpful to me is PAUSE, a five-step process I’ve developed with my partner, Justin, to create space amid the urgency, expectations, and relentless pressures of contemporary life.

PAUSE invites us to move out of our habitual habits and stories of our minds and move into the wisdom of our bodies, hearts, and souls. The next time you notice yourself getting swept away by impatience, anxiety, or worry about the future, I invite you to experiment with PAUSE.

P: Presence

Begin by noticing and naming what is happening in your experience. Worry is here. Anxiety is here. Impatience is here.

Rather than immediately following the story your mind is telling, become curious about how the experience feels in your body. What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel it? For example, where do you notice tension, pressure, warmth, contraction, or restlessness? What happens to your breath?

For a few moments, simply be present with what is here.

A: Acceptance

Allow your experience to be what it is without trying to fix, suppress, or escape it. You can offer compassion to yourself, recognizing that your worry may be connected to your noble aspiration to alleviate suffering for yourself or others.

Take a few gentle breaths. See whether you can soften around the experience, even slightly. Acceptance doesn’t mean approving of difficult circumstances or resigning ourselves to them. It means acknowledging what is present so we can respond more clearly.

U: Understand

With these gentle breaths, remind yourself that although you cannot control every outcome, you can influence how you meet this moment. What is within your power right now? What genuinely requires your attention? And what might you be carrying that is not yours to control?

You may find it helpful to bring to mind a prayer, mantra, or affirmation that resonates with you. One of my favorites is the Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

You needn’t hold any particular religious beliefs to appreciate the wisdom of that invitation.

S: Stillness

Having acknowledged your experience, rest for a few moments in the felt experience of your body. Notice the ground supporting you. Feel the touch of air on your face and hands. Feel the gentle movement of your breath. If your mind continues chattering, that’s okay. You don’t need to silence it or force yourself into stillness.

Simply return your attention, again and again, to your body and heart. Stay there with the gentle rhythms of your breath.

E: Enjoyment

Finally, allow yourself to savor and delight in this moment of being alive. Notice what it feels like to breathe, to inhabit your body, and to rest without needing to accomplish, prove, or optimize anything.

Perhaps there’s a sense of ease, gratitude, or simple contentment available. And if there isn’t, that’s okay too. The invitation is not to manufacture happiness, but to remember that life contains possibilities beyond the worries that occupy our minds.

Stay here for as long as it feels nourishing.

I’d love to hear from you: how did this practice land for you?

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Bringing Our Practice Into the World

What I find most meaningful about PAUSE is its ability to help me experience moments of greater calm, and how such moments change how I engage with the world.

When I’m less consumed by my own restlessness, I have more room to listen. When I’m less attached to a particular outcome, I can respond more creatively. And when I remember that my own wellbeing matters, I can show up with greater compassion for the people around me.

Our inner lives are not separate from our relationships, workplaces, families, or communities. The quality of attention we cultivate within ourselves inevitably shapes how we participate in the world. That’s why I encourage you to experiment with PAUSE not only on your own, but also with colleagues, friends, partners, or family members.

Imagine beginning a challenging meeting, a difficult conversation, or even a family gathering with a few moments of shared presence. What might become possible?

Returning to What Matters

As I write this, our belongings still haven’t arrived. And yes, a part of my mind would very much like them to get here already!

But I’m learning, once again, that I don’t have to wait for everything to go according to plan before I can enjoy the life that’s unfolding around me. I can care about my belongings without spending every waking moment worrying about them.

I can care deeply about the elections and the future of our world without surrendering every moment of peace, beauty, and joy to imagined possibilities. And I can continue to act on what matters, even without knowing exactly how things will turn out.

For example, I so enjoyed writing postcards to prospective voters to encourage them to exercise our hard-earned right to vote.

Perhaps this is a gift of contemplative practice: a growing capacity to meet uncertainty without losing ourselves in it.

As we navigate the elections and all that will come with it in the coming days and weeks, I hope you can remember that your attention is one of your most precious resources.

May we use it wisely. May we continue to care more wisely without becoming consumed. And may we remember to make room for the beauty, love, and joy of being alive, even when the world feels uncertain.

With love,

Anu

Dear Ones,

Have you smiled today? Can you recall some of the things that made you smile?

As you remember those things now, how do you feel? Go ahead, I give you permission to smile again. :)

Today, I want to treat you to something truly special and a bit meta. I hope you’ll go there with me. With the conflicts, polarization, and tech acceleration happening in our world, do you find yourself pulled into feeling hopeless, overwhelmed, and/or cynical? What if I told you that these feelings that biologically arise in us are symptoms of the attention economy? The more we doomscroll, read mainstream news, or engage in the topics of the day, the more we’ll “vibe” with that frequency, as my niece reminds me. Meanwhile, those who design these systems bank on our attention.

How We Miss the Progress We’re Making

We often talk about history repeating itself as a bad thing, as harmful things from the past happening again. We rarely say “history repeating itself” positively, to highlight how the strategies our ancestors used in past collective movements are still at work today and have helped us progress more than we realize.

From an interspiritual wellness perspective, the law of polarity is a fundamental universal law of our existence. Light and shadow, good and evil, joy and sorrow. Could we truly appreciate joy if we never experienced sorrow? No, it’s not possible. In that same vein, many bad things happened and continue to happen, but when we focus on the darker history repeating itself, we risk overlooking the passion, labor, and ingenuity of millions balancing shadows and evil with their light and goodness.

Recently, I had the pleasure of going deep with Tulaine Montgomery on her Say More podcast. Tulaine is the former CEO of New Profit, the nation’s first venture philanthropy firm, and a leading impact investor dedicated to building a more just, inclusive, and beautiful nation.

Tulaine and I discuss the power of interspiritual wellness to support us in overcoming our separation from ourselves and the world, and how the freedom movements our ancestors fought for have always been grounded in love, hope, and interconnection—not separation. As our ancestors knew so clearly, we must develop the inner capacities to connect with the outer world.

Listen to the Conversation

Connecting With Our Bodies, Spirits & Ancestors

These capacities begin with what the Buddha called the first foundation of mindfulness: the body. At a time when so many of us feel disembodied, the invitation is to come to our bodies and get out of our minds. Tulaine put it so beautifully when she said, “The brain is where spirit and science dance together.”

As we navigate the collective shifts we’re experiencing today, our choices aren’t between passivity and activity, but about intentionality: what is our posture to meet the world around us?

I would love for you to listen to our conversation and let me know what you think. How are you cultivating spiritual connections to our ancestors and honoring the people who came before us?

Remember what made you smile today? What if we met the world from that feeling that arose in your heart? That is the beginning of the revolution we’ve been waiting for. And the good news is that millions are already practicing this revolution.

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Love,

Anu

Dear ones,

Happy Fall! I hope this finds you at ease.

As many of you know, I took this summer to pause from writing and refuel. Much like my pause in 2025, this most recent pause was extremely nourishing. It helped me notice what happens when my body and being have some distance from the constant distraction of screens and devices.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that this is a season of many changes. This is true in the world at large, but also in my own life and work. Over the past decade, my work has lived under many banners, from education technology and professional development to social entrepreneurship, health and wellness, DEI, and Soul Force. Across each of these shifts, I have remained focused on cultivating the inner capacities required to alleviate suffering—and developing the foresight to cultivate greater resilience, ethical leadership, and human flourishing.

Today, I want to share a bit about some of the extraordinary interspiritual experiences that have gifted me with hope and inspiration over the past few months, especially at a time when so much around us feels unpredictable, uncertain, and even hostile.

The Power of Pilgrimage: A New Chapter

Lately, I've been thinking about the power of pilgrimage. Earlier this summer, I attended the annual Self-Realization Fellowship World Convocation, gathering with fellow seekers from around the world in the teachings and practices that have nourished me for much of my adult life.

Across spiritual traditions, people have always traveled to places made sacred by prayer, practice, revelation, suffering, awakening, and the presence of those who devoted their lives to something larger than themselves. We travel to mountains, temples, monasteries, rivers, shrines, churches, mosques, graves, and caves. This isn’t because the Divine exists more fully in one geographic location than another, but because some places help us remember and surrender.

My spiritual teacher, Paramahansa Yogananda, taught that places where great saints have lived and meditated can become permeated with their spiritual vibrations. When we visit them with a receptive heart, something in us can be awakened.

My pilgrimage reminded me that the sun always rises after night: even when the world feels dark, the dark will eventually come to an end. After every period of disruption comes a period of rebuilding. The real question is not whether change is coming, but whether we are ready to shape what comes next.

Over the past few months, I have found the clarity and integration I needed to know what this next chapter will look like. As I wrote earlier this summer:

Somewhere in the midst of all of this movement, I found myself quietly accepting the completion of a chapter.

The methodologies and programs I have designed through Be More, along with the teachings in Breaking Bias, remain foundational to who I am. They changed my life. They gave me a path. They allowed me to serve more than 100,000 people across institutions, communities, and sectors.

But I am beginning to feel an undercurrent of expansion.

Breaking Bias, Two Years Later

It’s hard to believe that my book, Breaking Bias, came out two years ago. Since then, I’ve been honored to bring Breaking Bias to stages, classrooms, workshops, retreats, and other venues around the world, where I’ve witnessed firsthand the power not just of the ideas, but of the contemplative, embodied practices I offer in it.

As many of you know, my book grew out of my twelve years of work through Be More, where I taught and guided more than 100,000 professionals across 300+ organizations, impacting over 30 million lives. At the heart of this decade of work is the PRISM Toolkit, a science-backed methodology for cultivating awareness, compassion, perspective-taking, mindfulness, and behavior change.

Breaking Bias remains the foundation of my broader work, even as this chapter closes and a new one opens. The words that I wrote at the end of the book continue to hold true for me, too:

In the last 500 years, particular members of our human family whom our indigenous relatives call their younger siblings have forgotten this truth in their quest for more power, fame, and, ultimately, the human-made fiction of money. They’ve designed and forced all of humanity into a global political system that breeds hatred, competition, and separation; an economic system that requires at least 3 percent annual growth to avoid stagnation and recession; and a culture that severs our connection with our bodies, one another, more-than-humans, and the living Earth. Scholars point out that for our current global system to remain stable, it requires a doubling of the global economy every 23 years.

Where does such growth come from? Deforestation of rainforests, polluting the oceans and air, mining, fracking, extraction, and the destruction of living ecosystems and ancient human cultures. At this point in our history, we have crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries and are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. The doubling of our global economy every 23 years is a material impossibility.

We feel the impacts of this separation in the polycrisis of ecological collapse, wildfires, atmospheric rivers, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, mass shootings, rising authoritarianism, meaningless wars, extreme inequality, mental health crises, and entrenched poverty and suffering among our human and nonhuman relatives. The roots of every single one of the crises are seeded in the minds of humans like you and me. Albert Einstein, one of the most famous humanists of the 20th century, is supposed to have said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

I share this not to invite despair, but because so many people I meet—leaders, educators, social entrepreneurs, futurists, and spiritually inclined activists—are overwhelmed by constant crisis. They care deeply, yet aren't sure how to stay humane without burning out, hardening, or shutting down. Something new is being asked of us now. For me, this something new is not panic, nor is it paralysis or urgency. Rather it is staying the course with steadiness, imagination, and daily practice.

Closing the Chapter on Be More with Anu

Some of you may already have noticed that my company’s website, Be More with Anu, looks a little different now. You might also have noticed that my Anu Gupta website is different, too. Be More’s chapter culminated with my book, Breaking Bias, especially after it was blessed with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Today, the work continues through my writing, speaking, advising, and teaching.

Over the past few months, I’ve realized my calling has shifted. This shift might not seem dramatic on the surface, but it’s still significant. I’ve come to understand that my calling is to help people and institutions cultivate the inner capacities needed to meet a rapidly changing world with clarity, compassion, courage, and connection. I call this interspiritual wellness.

Whether in my speaking, workshops, retreats, writing, or transformative learning experiences, my calling is to teach practical tools for wellbeing, ethical leadership, mindfulness, emotional regulation, dialogue across difference, and moral imagination.

This work continues to be rooted in a simple but powerful belief: the outer change we seek in the world requires inner development first. I firmly believe we must learn to see clearly, relate wisely, and act with integrity to build more compassionate institutions and societies. You’ll see that I’m writing from this lens of interspiritual wellness going forward.

A Note of Gratitude

To my clients, partners, funders, teachers, team members, advisors, collaborators, and community who made Be More with Anu possible for over a decade: thank you.

As all of you know, Be More was never just a company. It was a living experiment in what becomes possible when organizations commit to mindfulness, compassion, courage, and belonging.

You helped us bring this work into hospitals, law firms, law schools, boardrooms, classrooms, retreat centers, conferences, and communities worldwide. You helped us test, refine, challenge, deepen, and grow this body of work.

As this chapter evolves, I carry deep gratitude for everyone who made it possible. The work continues in a new form, with a wider lens, and with the same commitment to helping humans remember who we are and what becomes possible when we lead from mindfulness, compassion, and the wisdom of interbeing.

Going Forward

As always, thank you for reading, supporting, reflecting, and walking with me as this work continues to unfold. I do not take your presence for granted. As this next chapter continues to be written, you’ll see my Substack evolving in its focus, too, though the core will remain consistent.

I will continue to focus on embodiment. I’ve said this many times before: the longest journey we’ll ever take is from our heads to our hearts—about 18 inches of distance. Knowing in our minds is one thing, but knowing it in our bodies is where the real work happens.

I’ll also continue to focus on compassion. As I said during a conversation with my friend and teacher, Sharon Salzberg: “Compassion is the healing balm that enables transformation.” I closed the meditation by sharing the magic word that I believe makes compassion possible: love. Love for one another across our similarities and differences. Love for our Mother Earth. Love as the foundation for our community. Love for ourselves.

Last but not least, I’ll continue to focus on wisdom. As the poet Rumi said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” This quote has been a source of mindful reflection and inspiration to me over the years.

With all that’s happening in the world, we can often find ourselves directing our attention and energy outward, to feel like the world around us needs to change so we can live our lives free from challenges, distractions, and struggles. Instead, what I’ll share here are tools for changing ourselves.

I wish you moments of stillness, integration, and deep rest in the days ahead.

In service,

Anu

Dear ones,

I hope this message finds you with ease.

I’ve been quieter here over the past six weeks, not because there has been little to share, but because there has been so much to integrate.

June carried me through many worlds.

It began with teaching at the Omega Institute with my partner, Justin, where we piloted PAUSE, an embodied and integrative approach to wellbeing, repair, and reconnection that we have been practicing and designing for several years.

From there, I traveled to London to graduate from the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity program, and to become a Global Fellow with the Atlantic Institute. While there, I gathered with friends and UK-based change agents around Breaking Bias, visited the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, spent time at the Self-Realization Fellowship temple, walked through parks, communed with our more-than-human kin, and tasted England’s world famous summer strawberries!

Somewhere in the midst of all of this movement, I also found myself quietly accepting the completion of a chapter.

The methodologies and programs I have designed through Be More, along with the teachings in Breaking Bias, remain foundational to who I am. They changed my life. They gave me a path. They allowed me to serve more than 100,000 people across institutions, communities, and sectors.

But I am beginning to feel an undercurrent of expansion.

My work is no longer only about DEIB, racial equity, or prejudice reduction, though those remain deeply important to me. It is moving toward something wider and, in many ways, more fundamental to this moment: embodiment, interspiritual practice, ethical leadership, and moral imagination — practices that help us savor the present moment while building futures rooted in wisdom, wholeness, and possibility.

I will share more about this evolving professional journey. For now, I am trying not to rush the language, but listening to what is true and integrating all that is arising.

Acting Without Being Possessed by the Outcome

I have been thinking a lot about integration lately. Like you, there is so much entering and being stored in my consciousness and body on a daily basis.

News alerts. Emails. Music. Podcasts. Grief. Beauty. Friendships. Climate anxiety. Spiritual teachings. Family needs. Authoritarianism. Caring for elders and children. Wars. Needless death. Estrangement. The exhaustion from doing. The quiet voice that keeps asking for more authenticity.

All of this is a lot to hold.

Just as eating too much too quickly can lead to indigestion, taking in too much of the external world without giving our bodies time to digest it can leave us cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually overloaded.

I’ve come to realize that the forgetfulness, exhaustion, reactivity, and numbness that so many of us are feeling may not be signs that something is wrong with us. They are signs that we haven’t given enough space to integrate what we are living through.

This is where I keep returning to my meditation practice.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna stands in the middle of the battlefield, overwhelmed by the complexity of the moment before him. He is flooded by grief, duty, love, fear, and moral confusion. In response, Lord Krishna offers him a way to stand inside it with a steadier mind, a clearer heart, and a deeper relationship to action. He says:

“You have a right to perform actions, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.” — Bhagavad Gita 2.47

For me, this is a teaching on integration.

It does not mean that outcomes do not matter, or that we become passive or indifferent. Rather, we are being called to act without being consumed by the need to control everything that follows. We do what is ours to do, as sincerely and skillfully as we can, and then we release the rest. We are being guided to act with sincerity, and then surrender what we cannot control to the greater Intelligence moving through life.

When we practice meditation, we give ourselves the time and space to apply this teaching in the field of our own consciousness. We allow the body to feel, react, grieve, smile, cry, and release what it needs to, so it can begin again — refreshed, renewed, and open to new lessons life has yet to teach us.

The Buddha gave us a very easy to follow prescription for this profound teaching: to simply observe, acknowledge, and feel whatever arises in our bodies, hearts, and minds as an object.

The breath. The sensations of the body. The thoughts and stories in the mind. And numerous weather systems of our emotions. Treat them all as objects with compassionate awareness. They are merely asking us to be acknowledged and known.

The reason why this simple practice can feel so hard is because it is in direction opposition to the modernity’s dominant culture, which has conditioned us to suppress, repress, oppress, and ignore. And the practice for then becomes is to bring that conditioning into awareness, with compassion, observe it, acknowledge it, and feel it so it can pass just like clouds pass within our expansive skies.

With practice, we strengthen our inner muscles to stay present without being dragged around by every wave that moves through the field of our mind. This is why cultivating a daily meditation practice supports our long-term success.

In a world that constantly pulls us outward, meditation practice reminds us that freedom begins by learning to see clearly what is happening within.

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Mary and Jesus Modeling Integration

In the Christian tradition, Mary and Jesus exemplified the simple practice of mindfulness as a way to digest the external world, while staying true to the voice within.

After the shepherds arrived to tell Mary what they’d heard about the child she’d just given birth to, Luke tells us: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” A decade or so later, when Jesus is found in the temple speaking words his parents do not yet understand, Luke says again that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” She was simply observing, acknowledging, and feeling — without needed to react or make sense of it at that time.

Mary allowed the experience to live within her before she understood what it meant. She does not discard what is confusing. She does not force premature clarity. She keeps it, ponders it, and lets meaning ripen over time. That is integration.

I also often think of Jesus, whose ministry unfolds amid immense human suffering. Luke tells us that as word about him spread, “great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed.” What does Jesus do in response? “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed.”

I understand that Jesus withdrew not because people’s suffering does not matter, but because it matters so much. To respond to such suffering, he sought stillness so he can respond to it from a place of moral clarity. Stillness was the place where he returns to God, to Love, to Presence, to Buddha-Nature, or to the Source from which his and all of our actions flow.

Stillness was not avoidance. It was integration. It was how he allowed the weight of the world to pass through prayer rather than harden into burden, resentment, or exhaustion. It was how he remained available without becoming consumed.

Together, Mary and Jesus offer two dimensions of Christian practice that feel especially important now: the process of acknowledging and holding aspects of our experience even when we do not yet understand so we can metabolize them, and withdrawing into stillness or meditation to garner the strength to respond with love, i.e., without causing harm to ourselves or others.

To me, this is the soul force of integration. It urges us to pause, notice, and bring awareness to the effects of the external world on us internally. Over the past few weeks, I’ve engaged with this practice with a few simple inquiries:

What needs to be felt? What needs to be released? What needs to be blessed? What needs to become action? And what simply needs more time?

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What’s next

From July 23 - 26, I will join Justin, Nichol Chase and Dr. Elissa Epel at Kripalu for Deep Rest, Rejuvenation, and Resilience. We will be offering a special PAUSE experience that weaves together movement, meditation, music, reflection, and contemplative wisdom to support rest, nervous-system restoration, resilience, and embodied wellbeing.

It feels like the next right place to engage with this inquiry. If this resonates with you, I would love for you to join us at Kripalu.

In addition, on July 26, I’ll be joining Doubleblind for an exciting panel with , Shelby Hartman, and Bia Labate on Beyond Mental Health: Psychedelics for Collective Healing. We’ll discuss and share how plant medicines and psychedelics can be utilized as tools for healing communities, systems, and the planet. It will be a unique discussion at the intersection of interspirituality and our interdependence with the more-the-human worlds. Please register here.

Some Parting Musings

I have been sitting with a teaching from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth:

A New Earth is no utopia.

All utopias have one error: a mental projection of a future time when all will be well, where we will be saved and there will be peace, harmony, and the end of our problems. They’ve been many such visions, and many have ended in disappoints.

The problem at the core of this premise is that we are looking to the future for salvation. The only existence future actually has is as a though form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in from, i.e. your ego.

Nothing is going to to make us free other than the present moment.

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Thank you for reading, supporting, reflecting, and walking with me as this work continues to unfold. I do not take your presence for granted.

I’ll share more in the coming weeks as this next chapter becomes clearer. For now, I am grateful for this season of teaching, friendship, devotion, sweetness, and return.

And I am wishing you moments of stillness, integration, and deep rest in the days ahead.

In service,
Anu

PS: Here is a library of some practices to support your own moments of stillness, integration, and return.

Dear ones,

How is your heart today?

As we enter into June and the half-way point of 2026, I’d love to invite you to remember your intentions for this year.

Take a moment to breathe and to reflect on all that you’ve been through this year. Recall the people you’ve been with, the places you’ve visited, but most importantly, the weather systems you’ve experienced in your own heart and mind. As you enter this new arc of the future, perhaps in a few words or a phrase, identify what you want to invite in your future.

Just notice what arises. I invite you to write or jot down those words or phrases somewhere and then identify places in your body where those words most easily land. For example:

Peace lands in my chest.

Love in my heart.

Ease throughout my nervous system.

Hope in my jaw.

Notice that mind-body connection, as this is what I want to share with you today.

The Body is the Heart of the Matter

If you’re regular reader, you’ve probably been wondering what happened to me. I have been thinking quite a bit about writing, but May became a month of retreating, teaching, and visioning. The experiences brought me in closer relationship with my three modes of actions.

First, as a speaker and facilitator. I was honored to speak at two law firms and a LGBTQ development nonprofit about ethical leadership, leading with authenticity, and conserving energy in today’s times of fracture. Never before did it become more apparent that when I led by example and spoke from my own experience, even when my mind thought what I shared was not the most polished, it landed for my audiences because it touched a part of their nervous systems, i.e., an intention or an aspiration they held in their bodies.

Second, as an interspiritual teacher. Within the last two weeks, I found myself preaching and teaching at a Christian Church and a Buddhist Center. At all four instances, I relied on the felt sense experience of hope in my jaw when I spoke, love in my heart as I shared, and ease throughout my body as I stood. Despite being a mindfulness practitioner for over two decades, such a somatically informed intention setting was new for me — and it was powerfully supportive in overcoming the pull of distractions, self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and the mind-created desire to please and entertain. The body reminded me that I was not there to entertain or seek approval, but to plant seeds and to activate imaginations.

Third, as a contemplative. The reason I neglected writing to you these past few weeks is because I’ve spent the last couple of weekends on silent retreats in the SRF and Black Buddhist traditions. Unlike traditional Hindu, Buddhist or Christian silent retreats, these weekends were filled with periods of meditation, prayer, Black spirituals, chanting, protest songs, and being with the natural world. For the first time, I really appreciated the diversity of modalities, and especially chanting and singing.

For example, during a three-hour meditation, I was sitting in a room with over 100 practitioners at the Garrison Institute chanting a beautiful verse of an ancient Hindu song — Help me come back to my real home — and without any warning, I noticed my body weeping uncontrollably like a child. What was unique about this experience was that I was aware of the body weeping while being aware that my mind wanted to control that experience. In that moment, I had an important choice: to allow my body to release or succumb to my to control. I chose the former. And after the release, I accessed a profound peace and assuredness that I know only comes from the Source and Consciousness that powers us all.

I share a snippet of this experience to invite you to remember your own deepest intentions and lean into the powers that lay dormant within you.

The Meaning of Stillness

One of the monastics at one of the retreats said something that really caught my ear. He said that what we are doing when we meditate, reflect, or introspect is not “retreat” but we are actually advancing ahead. Through the quiet, we advance toward the inner wisdom that is our inheritance and shift our consciousness away from the unwholesome and unskillful and towards the wholesome and skillful.

For me, 2026 has thus been about trust, goodwill, and the practice of daily meditation. And as we enter the mid-way point of this year, I know that returning to these three intentions can fuel us all in the direction of those aspirations we hold for ourselves, our families, our workplaces and communities as well as our nation and world.

In the words of Paramahansa Yogananda:

“Behold, through the gates of the New Year, the distant variegated decorations of future achievements glimmering at you and daringly luring you to give pursuit. Simply watching them with the hope of accomplishment will not count. You must start racing calmly at top speed, performing miracles of greater speed on the way, armed with divine determination against the robbers of mental and physical idleness, doubt, fear, despondency, and bad habits.”

With all my love,

Anu

PS: If you’re curious, please watch my sermon titled “Not Left Orphaned: Finding Divine Mother in Trouble Times. I am so grateful for and for mentoring me to

share this interspiritual message.

First, thank you for supporting this publication and for reading and sharing Breaking Bias. Your support has truly helped this work travel farther than I ever imagined, and I’m deeply grateful. Because of this community, these ideas are now entering conversations across education, law, technology, leadership, spirituality, and social change.

As…

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Dear ones,

Happy AANHPI Heritage Month. 🕊️

At a time of deep polarization, rising bigotry, ecological unraveling, and technological acceleration, I find myself returning again and again to the wisdom traditions that helped me remember our shared humanity.

For those unfamiliar, AANHPI stands for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander. While these identities encompass an extraordinary diversity of cultures, languages, religions, and histories, they also hold shared inheritances shaped by migration, resilience, colonization, exclusion, survival, and care.

My own family immigrated from India to the United States in 1996. Like many children of immigrants, I grew up navigating the tension between belonging and otherness, invisibility and hypervisibility, and pride and shame. And like many people living in America and the Western world, I also internalized the messages of a culture that taught me to live almost entirely from the neck up — disconnected from my body, spirit, ancestry, the Earth, and one another.

Yet the deeper I looked, the more I realized that many of the tools now celebrated in neuroscience, psychology, trauma healing, leadership development, and wellness culture have roots in ancient AANHPI traditions stewarded for millennia.

Breathwork. Meditation. Yoga. Compassion practices. Somatic healing. Interdependence. Mind-body awareness. Energy cultivation. Forgiveness rituals.
Devotion. Generosity.

For AANHPI communities, these practices are not trends. They are technologies of liberation. And in this moment — when fear, distraction, division, and disconnection are once again rising around us — I believe these traditions offer more than personal wellness. They offer a way to cultivate the soul force required to meet the challenges of our century without becoming consumed by hatred, numbness, or despair.

Diversity and History of AAPI People

AANHPI people worldwide make up more than half of humanity. We are an incredibly diverse group spanning vast spectrums of language, color, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, and culture.

“Asia and the Pacific Islands” encompass an enormous geography: as far north as Russia, as far south as Indonesia, as far east as Japan, and as far west as Turkey. Half of humanity. Within that vastness exists breathtaking diversity — and yet there are also threads that connect many of our stories.

One of those shared threads is the experience of exclusion, colonization, violence, scapegoating, and othering for no other reason than our beingness.

We see this throughout history and still unfolding today:

• Asiatic exclusion zones that excluded immigration from across Asia due to our alleged “racial inferiority”

• Chinese exclusion, the first significant act restricting immigration into the U.S. was aimed at Chinese people

• Japanese American concentration camps

• Overthrow of Hawaiian Kingdom

• Colonization of the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa

• Islamophobia, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant violence

• The rise in Anti-Asian hate spreading throughout our communities today

And, notably, nearly every major American war since World War II has taken place in Asia: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.

These histories matter. But this year, rather than focus only on the ways AANHPI communities have been harmed, I want to honor the gifts these cultures continue to offer the world: practices that help us heal, reconnect, and remember our belonging to one another.

Traditions of Healing

Many of you know that I began the work of breaking bias with my quest to overcome anxiety, depression, self-loathing, and internalized biases, much of it due to the stories I had inherited about my Asian identities.

As I began that journey, I encountered ancient traditions, techniques, and modalities — many preserved by AANHPI cultures for thousands of years — that helped realign my body, mind, heart, and spirit toward wholeness and peace.

These healing traditions continue to undergird my work through Be More with Anu, Breaking Bias, and the practices I teach today.

What follows are ten AANHPI traditions and lineages that profoundly shaped my own healing journey. I learned many of these practices here in America, from teachers and communities of many backgrounds — which itself reflects something beautiful: despite histories of violence and exclusion, these traditions continue to cross borders and plant seeds of compassion, liberation, and understanding.

1. Building intimacy with the body (India/South Asia)

Until my first yoga class in 2009 with Sarah Platt-Finger at ISHTA Yoga, I walked through the world largely disconnected from my body and breath.

The Indian tradition of yoga helped me experience what Buddhism calls the first foundation of mindfulness: embodiment.

The practices of asana (posture) and pranayama (breathwork) shifted my awareness from living almost entirely in my thoughts to inhabiting the fullness of my body. Over time, yoga became less about flexibility and more about relationship — with breath, sensation, emotion, and presence.

There is a reason hundreds of millions of people around the world now practice yoga. Beneath the commercialization lies something ancient and profound: a path toward integration.

Learn more about eight limbs of yoga and the first foundation of mindfulness.

2. Releasing trauma stored in the body (Korea)

Long before modern psychology popularized the phrase “the body keeps the score,” many AANHPI traditions understood that trauma lives not only in thought, but in the nervous system and body itself.

I was first introduced to the somatic dimensions of racialized trauma through AANHPI teachers and organizers at the Facing Race Conference in 2012. Later, Korean Taoist and Sundo practices — including forms of tapping and embodied movement — helped me understand healing not simply as analysis, but as release.

This work transformed my understanding of liberation. Sometimes healing requires more than insight; it requires helping the body remember safety again.

Learn more about tapping and Sundo.

3. Feeling the wonders of energy (Taiwan/China)

After my second year of law school, I spent a summer living in Buddhist monastic robes through the Woodenfish Program under the guidance of Ven. Yifa at Fo Guang Shan Monastery.

There, through Qi Gong and Tai Chi, I encountered something I had long overlooked: the subtle experience of life force moving through the body.

Practicing slowly, attentively, and communally for hours each day changed my relationship to stillness, attention, and energy. These traditions taught me that the body is not merely a machine to optimize, but a living ecosystem capable of deep restoration and intelligence.

Learn more about Tai Chi and the Woodenfish Program.

4. Transforming the heart with loving-kindness (Myanmar/Sri Lanka/Thailand/Cambodia/Laos)

Of all the practices I have encountered, loving-kindness meditation may be the one that most transformed my life. Rooted in Theravāda Buddhist traditions and brought to many Americans through my teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, loving-kindness helped soften the harsh inner critic that shaped much of my early life.

I have practiced it nearly every day for over 15 years.

Far from sentimental positivity, loving-kindness is a rigorous retraining of the heart. It asks us to cultivate goodwill not only toward those we love, but eventually toward strangers, difficult people, and even ourselves.

Today, compassion science and neuroscience increasingly affirm what contemplative traditions long understood: compassion changes the brain, the nervous system, and our relationships.

But beyond the science, loving-kindness helped me remember that tenderness is not weakness. It is strength. Practice loving-kindness with me.

5. Embracing Interbeing through Zen Mind (Vietnam/Korea/Japan)

After college, I spent time living in Korea and traveling throughout Japan and Vietnam. One of my favorite practices during that time was participating in temple stays and long hikes through the mountains.

There I encountered the spirit of Zen, or Seon in Korean: the understanding that beneath the constant chatter of the mind exists a spaciousness that is already whole, calm, and awake.

Beloved Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh gave language to this experience through the word “interbeing” — the truth that nothing exists independently, and that our lives arise through relationship with all things.

In a culture that often trains us toward hyper-individualism, Zen helped me rediscover belonging.

Learn more about Zen through Thich Nhat Hanh and D.T. Suzuki.

6. Purifying collective and ancestral trauma (Tibet)

Tonglen is an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice of breathing in suffering and breathing out compassion.

At first, the practice sounded impossible to me. Why would we willingly turn toward pain? But through the teachings of Pema Chödrön, I began to understand Tonglen not as absorbing harm, but as transforming our relationship to suffering itself.

This practice has helped me sit with grief around violence, ecological destruction, systemic injustice, and collective trauma without collapsing into despair or numbness.

Tonglen reminds us that love is not fragile, and that our hearts are capable of holding far more than we often believe. This sustains the fuel and passion we carry for peace, justice, equality, and harmony in our homes, communities, nations, and world.

Learn more about the Tonglen Practices.

7. Cleaning the insides with humility and forgiveness (Hawai’i)

Last summer, I had the privilege learning the Native Hawaiian practice of Ho‘oponopono from Kumu Ramsay, who truly embodies its spirit of generosity, gratitude, humility, and reconciliation.

At its core is are four simple but powerful orientations toward repair:
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

Repeated sincerely toward ourselves and others, these words slowly dissolve the walls we build around the heart.

In a culture increasingly shaped by defensiveness and performance, Ho‘oponopono reminds us that healing often begins with accountability, vulnerability, and the courage to reconnect.

Learn more about Ho’oponopono with Kumu Ramsay.

8. Feeling the love of poetry (West Asia / South Asia)

After dropping pre-med in college, I decided to major in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. That is where my love affair with the Sufi traditions, particularly through timeless and soul-enriching words of Sufi poets and mystics like Rumi, Shams, Ghalib, and Hafiz.

Love, of course, is truly the message of every ancient wisdom tradition, but for me, Sufism’s particular contribution to our understanding of love is its ability to crystallize it in words and language that ravishes the heart-mind.

For me, the easiest entry into the timeless essence of Sufi love has been the marvelous novel 40 Rules of Love by Turkish author Elif Shafaq, introduced to me by the Pakistani American artist Qinza Najm.

Explore the 40 Rules of Love yourself.

9. Love and joy of family (Philippines)

One thing you’ll notice across AANHPI cultures is the importance of family. We live in large joint families, we travel in packs, and, most importantly, we take care of our elders.

It is what the Hawaiians call the feeling of Ohana. After immigrating to America, I lost touch with that part of my Asian culture as I only had my immediate nuclear family around me for most of my life. However, that changed quickly after I met my Filipino American partner and got introduced to what is now our kabayan of hundreds of people spanning across US, Canada, Philippines, and most likely beyond.

What’s beautiful about the Filipino notion of family is that it isn’t contingent on genetics or biology – but on the simple principle of love. As my partner’s mother once said, “if I love you, you are family. It’s that simple.” Filipino American history is a testament to that love.

10. Selfless giving and generosity (Across AANHPI cultures)

I have written before about dana (daan-uh), or the act of giving as a practice because it feels good. I have often heard colleagues returning from Asia wonder and marvel at the generosity of Asian people: “People just opened their homes to us! They fed us, clothed us, shared with us, and did not expect anything in return.”

This practice of giving is common across borders, and – much like all of the techniques I have shared above — they were taught to their many practitioners without any financial remuneration, or even expectation of ever being “repaid.”

There are no expectations, no “strings attached.” And generosity isn’t only about money! It is about time, energy, presence, love, patience, words, and service – again for no other reason than it pleases the heart.

Giving in the dana spirit means that what we give is truly, unconditionally free, because deep down we know we ‘interare’ - we are interconnected. I sense that this tool in particular will be important for all of us to cultivate in this century, especially to combat the forces of consumerism that continue to push us apart. Here are some simple ways to practice generosity today.

Cultivating Soul Force Together

As we celebrate AANHPI Heritage Month, I hope we move beyond flattening these cultures into food, festivals, fashion, or wellness aesthetics, though those joys matter too.

The deeper invitation is to recognize that many AANHPI traditions carry profound insights into suffering, healing, consciousness, interdependence, and human flourishing.

At a moment when so many people feel exhausted, anxious, isolated, polarized, and spiritually untethered, these traditions remind us that another way of being is possible.

They remind us:

to slow down, to breathe, to soften, to grieve, to reconnect with the body, to cultivate compassion, to remember our interbeing, and to build beloved community without replicating the hatred we oppose.

This, to me, is the cultivation of soul force. The inner strength required to transform ourselves and our systems, rooted in truth and love, without becoming what we oppose in the process. That work feels especially important now.

So this month, I invite you not only to celebrate AANHPI cultures, but to engage them with reverence, humility, curiosity, and gratitude.

Learn the histories. Support our communities. Practice the teachings. Listen deeply. And perhaps most importantly: allow these traditions to help you access our shared humanity.

In that spirit, I’d also like to invite you into a few upcoming offerings I’ll be teaching in the spirit of dana — practices meant to help integrate the head with the heart, body, spirit, and hands.

Upcoming Programs

Sunday, May 10 (Mother’s Day)
I’ll be preaching at Middle Collegiate Church on Not Left Orphaned: Finding Divine Mother in Troubled Times. Here’s a glimpse of what I shared last year.

Thursdays, May 14 and 28
I’ll be offering Dharma talks and Buddhist practices through Insight Meditation Center Online called Practicing in Modern Life. Please register to join.

Monday, May 18

I’ll be leading a virtual antiracism training with Rev. Jacqui Lewis at 8 pm ET. Please register to join.

I hope this reflection on AANHPI Heritage Month has been meaningful for you. It has been a joy to share this journey and these traditions that have shaped my own life so profoundly.

While there is, of course, no monolith to Asian identities or experiences, I hope this month invites all of us to become better relatives to one another: to listen more deeply to stories of pain and resilience, and to become instruments of understanding, repair, and healing in a fractured world.

If this reflection resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Leave a comment

With love,
Anu

Dear ones,

I hope this finds message finds you with ease.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of returning to Columbia Law School to lead a session on ways we can turn the mind away from doubt, confusion, and chaos. Over the past few months, I have also been in conversation with various stakeholders across the field—from social entrepreneurs in the Echoing Green network and innovators imagining a world beyond anti-Black racism in my Atlantic Fellows cohort, to members of my church, meditation community, law firms, and nonprofits—as I prepare for a series of upcoming talks, workshops, and keynotes.

Throughout this time, I’ve been sitting with a question that keeps surfacing in my conversations with students, professors, and professionals across workplaces, classrooms, and communities: how do I manage the overwhelming anxiety I feel about:

• the ongoing madness in our nation? (acknowledging here that the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act this week)

• the uncertainty about the future of work, with the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence and whether all the time, energy, and effort we have put into becoming “professionals” will slowly become obsolete?

• why do I continue to feel this gaping hole in my soul?

These are big and important questions that don’t have singular or simple answers. And I know they must be addressed, because without any response, they will continue to cause us mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering.

While I don’t have the answer, today I want to share a practice that I often return to—one that has helped alleviate the existential angst many of us feel beneath these questions. This practice, time and time again, has helped my mind remember the big picture that my soul already knows.

It will take you 1–3 minutes, depending on how fast you read. Before beginning, I invite you to find a quiet place where you will not be interrupted. Take a few deep breaths. Now, read and sincerely receive—at the level of your consciousness—the following reflections.

The Practice

Right now, there is so much suffering happening in the world. Sentient beings are suffering due to war, hatred, famine, disease, chronic pain, anger, and grief from losing loved ones.

There is the suffering of not getting what one wants, and then, there is the suffering of getting what one wants and still not feeling happy after what one has attained.

There is the suffering of beings in different aspects of existence, such as suffering of animals on land, in the waters, and in the air. And there is also the suffering of beings in unseen realms, including the realms of angels, gods, and hell beings.

The Buddha said there is not a pinpoint of lasting happiness to be found in all of samsara. When I consider this deeply, I know from my own experience that I have not found anything external to me that has brought me permanent and lasting satisfaction.

As a result, I feel a great sadness for all beings lost in this world, looking for lasting satisfaction in samsara, where none can be found.

Yet, amazingly, I have the good fortune of having attained a precious human life, with all the advantages for practice. I have been born when the teachings of the Buddha and many other great ones are still taught and there are teachers to guide me.

I have the freedom to practice meditation and to purify my heart and mind of hatred, greed, and ignorance. I have the chance to awaken! But, like a flash of lightning, in the great schema of time, my life is brief and one day it will be over.

Like a river rushing down a mountain, each day I move closer to my inevitable death. My body is impermanent. My time with family, friends, and loved ones is fleeting. I am running out of time to practice the cultivation of love and the truths of oneness taught by the great ones. So I must not waste this precious opportunity.

All of the great ones have taught that virtuous deeds—like meditation, chanting, and prayer—create the causes for happiness, for both myself and others. Therefore, the benefits of even a small meditation cannot be measured.

Reflecting on this, I know I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing, and I begin practicing meditation and going inward with happiness and joy.

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The Explanation

The practice I’ve shared above has brought me much comfort over the years. It is something I return to when I am resisting going to my cushion or when my mind has succumbed to the doom and gloom narratives around me. It helps my mind remember the greater truth of our existence and what is being asked of us.

For me, it lifts the veil of scientific materialism and connects me to long lineages of ancestors who have emphasized this same message across geographies, cultures, and time.

For those of you unfamiliar with this simple yet profound practice, it is known as the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind, and it comes from the Tibetan Buddhism lineage. It offers four contemplations that function as a “wake-up call” to recognize the urgency of spiritual practice by redirecting our attention from external, worldly distractions toward what resides within us. The four contemplations are as follows:

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1. The Rarity and Value of a Precious Human Rebirth: Contemplating the unique opportunity and freedom a human life provides to study and practice the teachings, which is difficult to obtain.

2. Impermanence and Death: Reflecting that death is certain, but its timing is unknown, reminding us to practice immediately.

3. Karma — Nature’s Law Cause and Effect: Understanding that actions, whether positive or negative, inexorably lead to corresponding future consequences.

4. The Defects of Samsara or The Nature of Suffering: Realizing that continued existence in the cycle of samsara brings unavoidable dissatisfaction and suffering.

These four contemplations echo the Biblical teaching:

“Be still and know that I am.” (Psalm 46:10)

Like the four contemplations, this line reminds us to redirect our minds away from striving, to trust in times of turmoil, and to recognize a deeper presence and power.

How does this practice land for you? I’d love to read your reflections in the comments.

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The Inner Work of Peace and Justice

A.J. Muste (1885–1967), a prominent American pacifist and labor activist is often quoted to have said:

There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”

To me, this means that peace cannot—and has never been—achieved through violent means. Rather, it must be embodied in the very process by which we seek it, because means and ends are inseparable.

I hope this practice supports you in meeting the cynicism, overwhelm, and anxiety of the external world. And most importantly, I hope it inspires you to strengthen—or begin—a regular contemplative practice.

In service,
Anu

PS: Here is a library of my meditations, offered freely.

🌿 Want to build futures without bias? Join me at Dubai Future Forum’s Futures Book Club featuring Breaking Bias on May 14 at 10 am ET! 📍 Register here.

Dear one,

Today, I’d like to continue reflecting on transitional justice and its relevance to what is unfolding in the United States—especially in relation to DEI. Recently, I had the honor of speaking at New England Law School on Reimagining Repair: The Role of DEI in Racial Redress and Institutional Reform, a topic that has deeply shaped my professional journey. I’m sharing my remarks here, lightly edited for clarity, because I believe they speak directly to the moment we are living through.

You can also watch my remarks below and the full conversation with my esteemed panelists here.

My Journey into Transitional Justice and DEI

My entry into these fields began in law school, where I studied transitional justice, specifically examining how societies come out of periods of what scholars call “radical evil” or systemic and widespread injustice, like Europe after the Holocaust, Rwanda after the genocide, and South Africa after apartheid.

While I was deeply moved by these global examples, I couldn’t shake a persistent feeling: we need this in the United States.

After law school, I worked as an attorney focused on racial disparities in the criminal legal system. But I quickly ran into a hard truth. Despite having perfectly crafted anti-discrimination policies on the books, across life outcomes—whether housing, healthcare, education, or criminal justice—Black and brown people fared the worst.

This is because policies are fragile—they can be rewritten or dismantled, as we are seeing now. But more importantly, policies do not account for how humans make decisions. Research on implicit bias has shown that racial disparities persist not because most people consciously intend harm, but because of unconscious biases or learned habits of stereotyping that impact the way people make day-to-day decisions.

Why Hearts and Minds Matter

To me, that realization made clear that we cannot create racial redress at the level of policy alone—we must also transform hearts and minds. That led me to found Be More, where over the past 12 years, we’ve trained more than 100,000 professionals—doctors, lawyers, students, teachers—in tools to recognize and transform unconscious bias in decision-making.

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At its core, my work has focused on three things:

• Bridging the information gap,

• Correcting misinformation, and

• Repairing the empathy gap.

For us, DEI was never about compliance or branding.

It is about truth-telling—and building a shared understanding of reality so organizations and individuals can address and repair the systemic ways Black and brown people are excluded and harmed. And this is where I’ve come to appreciate the limits of law.

As a lawyer, I was trained to believe that the right argument or the right policy would produce justice. But what we have witnessed—and what we are witnessing—is that beneath our systems are stories: stories about who belongs and who doesn’t, who is “really” American and who isn’t, who is valued and who isn’t. Those stories shape the decisions of policymakers, business leaders, and voters every single day.

The Story of Race

Let me offer one concrete example.

When I ask audiences, “How old is the concept of race?” I hear answers like 10,000 years, 5,000 years, maybe 500. Rarely have I seen a group of people agree. And that, to me, is striking—because race is something that shapes every one of our lives.

Yet many people—including doctors, judges, lawyers, and beyond—still believe racial categories are biologically real. They are not.

The modern concept of race as a hierarchy is less than 250 years old. It was constructed in the 18th century by European thinkers like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who attempted to classify and rank human beings based on color and geography by literally collecting and measuring human skulls.

What began as a set of flawed and biased ideas became embedded into law, media, education, and social interactions.

In many ways, we are still living inside that story today.

The Backlash Against DEI

So when we talk about DEI, we are not simply talking about workplace initiatives—we are asking whether we are willing to reexamine the stories that organize our society. This is what DEI has been for me, until the backlash against it started gaining momentum in 2024.

Tragically, the backlash has changed DEI from a forward-looking project of institutional repair into a defensive project of legal survival.

First, the field has contracted significantly. Since the surge in DEI roles following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, DEI job postings have dropped sharply from their peak, and many organizations have scaled back or eliminated initiatives altogether. What this means is that many practitioners have lost roles, had responsibilities narrowed, or been reassigned into less visible functions.

Second, the work has become more legally and politically constrained. Federal executive actions and state-level legislation have targeted DEI programs, particularly in higher education and among public institutions.

Third, the work has been deprioritized. Many institutions that have not abandoned DEI have renamed it to “culture,” “belonging,” or “engagement.” While some of that rebranding is strategic, it also reflects a deeper reality: the space for explicit truth-telling has narrowed.

Fourth, the backlash has disproportionately burdened practitioners of color, many of whom held these roles and are now navigating instability, heightened scrutiny, and lost opportunity.

Lastly, the backlash has reshaped how people understand the purpose of DEI. We have moved from asking, “How do we create fairness and belonging?” to asking, “Who is being unfairly advantaged?” That shift is being driven by misinformation, incomplete narratives, and a widening empathy gap.

A Contested Transition

When we look at the DEI backlash through the lens of transitional justice, what we are experiencing today is a contested transition. A transition in how we understand history, how we define belonging, and whether we are willing to repair.

If DEI continues to be reduced to compliance or branding, it will not survive this moment. But if we understand it as a practice of collective repair—closing the information gap, correcting misinformation, and healing the empathy gap—then it becomes something much more resilient.

Because ultimately, this work is not about us versus them. It is about fulfilling the promise at the heart of the American experiment: that every person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Watch the entire panel discussion and Q&A below.

Soul Force and the Work Ahead

As you reflect on these remarks, I invite you to return to soul force: the power of truth joined with love, courage, and moral clarity that seeks to transform hearts and systems alike without becoming what it opposes. Soul force reminds us that while lies dominate our social media algorithms and news feeds, truth will ultimately endure.

I am reminded of the words in Gospel of Luke 19:40:

“I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

Jesus spoke these words as he entered Jerusalem and his followers publicly praised him, while the Pharisees demanded that he silence them. His response was a declaration that truth cannot be permanently contained or censored; when something real and morally significant is happening, even creation in the form of stones in this case bears witness.

Share Soul Force: Interspiritual Wisdom for the 21st Century

In the context of transitional justice, the meaning feels especially relevant: societies like ours may suppress painful histories, silence the harmed, or deny wrongdoing for a time, but truth has a way of resurfacing through memory, testimony, archives, and the enduring consequences of injustice. What is buried will eventually seek to be named, and what is broken will eventually seek repair. This is true of our personal lives as well as our collective ones.

And it is ultimately the deeper invitation of both DEI and transitional justice—not simply to reform institutions, but to transform ourselves so that we can build institutions worthy of human dignity.

I’d love to hear from you: What does truth and repair look like in this moment? How do we practice soul force in a time of division? Please share your reflections in the comments.

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Meanwhile, I hope you stay grounded in the truth of our common humanity and interdependence, and inspired by what is possible.

With care,
Anu ✨

I hope you’re taking really good care of yourself.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you interspiritual tools to help counter the mindset of separation, hatred, and anger by cultivating compassion, equanimity, and forgiveness. These practices matter deeply in times like ours—times of rapid change, uncertainty, and polarization.

We are witnessing divides in the outer world, yes. But often the most consequential divides are the ones within us: between mind and body, productivity and presence, fear and love, exhaustion and hope, who we have been and who we are becoming.

This is why we need an inner steadiness that allows us to meet the moment without becoming consumed by it. We need spaces where we can integrate, restore, and remember the deeper truth of who we are.

Today, I’d like to extend a very special invitation to put these tools into practice with me—to return home to your own body, heart, and soul.

This invitation is especially meaningful because I’ll be co-leading this retreat with my beloved, Justin Senense, whose gift is helping people embody transformation in practical, grounded, and deeply caring ways.

Join Us at Omega Institute: Heal Divides, Restore Connection

This June 5–7, Justin and I will be leading Heal Divides, Restore Connection at the renowned Omega Institute in the Hudson Valley.

This immersive weekend is designed for anyone seeking greater acceptance, connection, and a renewed relationship with themselves and the world around them.

Each day will begin with a restorative movement practice designed to awaken the body and ground the mind. From there, morning and afternoon sessions explore stream-of-consciousness journaling that clears and settles the mind and somatic exercises that deepen your connection to the body and open you to your energetic resilience.

You’ll also be introduced to interspiritual practices such as:

• Compassion

• Loving-kindness

• Forgiveness

• Equanimity

• Ho’oponopono

• Tapping for emotional regulation and stress relief

Through these tools, you heal divides and restore connections to yourself, to others, and the world around you.

At the center of this weekend retreat is one profound invitation: come home to yourself.

Together, we create a circle of harmony and belonging to soften the patterns that keep us separate and reconnect with qualities of love, peace, hope, and imagination.

Why Omega

There are places that naturally support transformation, and Omega Institute is one of them.

Set on beautiful grounds in Rhinebeck, New York, Omega offers expansive green space, walking trails, quiet natural beauty, nourishing farm to fork meals, and access to wellness offerings such as massage and bodywork. It is a place where the pace softens, the breath deepens, and something essential inside us can finally speak again.

I brought Justin there in 2022, and one of our favorite memories was canoeing on the lake and dreaming that maybe one day we would teach there together.

Now that dream is becoming real.

Why I Hope You’ll Join Us

If you’ve been craving a meaningful reset…
If you’ve been carrying stress, grief, or emotional fatigue…
If you want practical tools for living with more clarity, compassion, and courage…
If you long to be in community with thoughtful, growth-oriented people…

This retreat is for you.

And because this community has meant so much to me, I especially wanted to extend this invitation to you.

Come take yourself on an adventure with me, Justin, and a group of really wonderful people. And give yourself the gift of a pause—not to escape your life, but to return to it more whole.

Join Our Free Information Session – April 29

If you’re curious to learn more, we’re hosting a free information session on April 29, where Justin and I will share more about the retreat and be joined by the Omega team to answer your questions.

RSVP for the free info session on Wed, April 29 at 6 - 6:45 pm ET: RSVP Here.

Reserve Your Spot

For two decades, I’ve been devoted to teaching professionals practices that help us meet overwhelm, loneliness, and division with greater steadiness, compassion, and inner freedom.

Through somatic and felt-sense tools, we can regulate our nervous systems, reconnect with our deepest wisdom, and reclaim a more grounded relationship with our lives.

This retreat is an invitation to move from insight into embodiment.

To heal divides within yourself.
To reconnect with your body’s wisdom.
To restore your heart.
To gather with others committed to living with courage and care.
To return home to yourself.

If something in you feels called, I hope you’ll trust that.

Spaces are limited, and I would truly love to gather with some of you in person this June.

Register for the retreat: Heal Divides, Restore Connection

With love,
Anu

Dear ones,

Is it just me, or has this week felt especially difficult to be human? To witness the President of the United States openly threaten the obliteration of a people feels like crossing yet another threshold, and I find myself returning to soul force—to hold the fire to bear witness without becoming what I am witnessing.

At a time when the many ways humans can cause harm feel ever-present—when war, polarization, and fear shape not only our headlines but the subtle climate of our inner lives—I want to invite you to watch or listen to a conversation I had with Chris Duffy at the TED Conference in Vancouver in 2025.

I’m grateful that our conversation was selected for a YouTube release—something TED curates with great care—and it feels especially meaningful that the message of understanding and compassion is being amplified at a moment when so much of our public discourse pulls us in the opposite direction.

In this conversation, I share the science, history, sociology, psychology of bias, and my own journey—from growing up amid ethno-religious tensions in Delhi to navigating bias and belonging in the United States—and the realization that changed everything:

“I don’t want to live in a world where we live in ideas of one another. I want to live in a world where we live in the presence of one another, the real people.”

Through the lens of deep time, we explore how we can see this moment not only as crisis, but as part of the longer evolution of human consciousness.

We also name something less visible but deeply consequential: our disconnection from life itself—a type of bias known as biophobia—and how restoring our relationship with our bodies is essential to healing division at its root.

And perhaps most intimately, we turn toward the inner critic—the voice shaped by years of conditioning—and how learning to meet it with awareness rather than belief becomes a doorway to freedom.

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If we can imagine colonizing Mars, what is stopping us from imagining a world at peace? Let’s name it. Let’s work with it. Because this—expanding our moral imagination and rewiring how we relate to ourselves and one another—is the work of our century.

I hope you feel that this conversation is an invitation to gently expand what feels possible. Because if we are honest, the times we are living in are demanding us to not just ask the question whether a more peaceful, just world is possible—but whether we are willing to do the inner and collective work required to imagine and embody it.

In the words of Dr. King, “Our goal is to build a beloved community. This will require qualitative changes in souls and quantitative changes in our lives.”

I’d love to hear how this conversation landed for you. What resonates? What feels challenging? What feels needed—and what feels in the way?

Leave a comment

Meanwhile, I hope you stay grounded in the truth of our common humanity and interdependence, and inspired by what is possible.

With care,
Anu ✨

🌿 Join me virtually on April 7th (next week) for a lunch time panel on Transitional Justice in the US and imagining new possibilities. I’ll be exploring ways we move past polarization and create pathways for repair, restitution, and remedy. Register here.

Dear ones,

Happy Spring and April! As I write to you, I’m looking out my window at fresh cherry blossoms, quietly blooming, ushering in a sense of renewal, possibility, and beauty.

And I find myself holding that beauty alongside something much heavier: the sorrow of a country in peril, and a world that feels chaotic and uncertain being shaped by war and unspeakable violence, deepening greed, and so much unprocessed pain.

To hold both at once—the blooming and the breaking—feels like the truth of this moment. And in the midst of it, I want to invite you into a topic that has been deeply meaningful to me since law school and one that may offer us insight into how we find our way through this moment in our democracy’s history: Transitional Justice.

What Is Transitional Justice?

Transitional justice refers to the set of processes societies use when moving from periods of violence, repression, or systemic injustice toward a more just and inclusive future. It asks:

• How do we tell the truth about past harms?

• How do we repair what has been broken?

• How do we transform institutions so harm does not repeat?

• And how do we rebuild trust across deep divides?

We’ve seen transitional justice processes unfold in places like post-apartheid South Africa, post-genocide Rwanda, post-dictatorship Chile, and the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.

In the wake of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials sought to establish accountability for atrocities so vast they defied comprehension—introducing the world to the language of crimes against humanity. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created a national process of truth-telling after generations of apartheid—systematic anti-Black oppression enforced by a white minority—offering amnesty in exchange for full disclosure, and prioritizing collective reckoning over retribution.

In Rwanda, after the genocide that killed nearly a million people in a matter of months, community-based gacaca courts were established to process an unimaginable scale of participation in violence, seeking a form of justice that could coexist with the necessity of living side by side again. And in Chile, truth commissions documented the abuses of dictatorship—torture, disappearance, political repression—restoring dignity to victims through acknowledgment and memory, even when full legal accountability remained out of reach.

These efforts share a sobering recognition: when harm reaches the scale of what scholars call “radical evil,” justice in its purest form becomes impossible. There are too many victims, too many perpetrators, too much that cannot be undone. And yet, something must still be done.

Transitional justice emerges as a collective, imperfect, but essential attempt to respond—to exorcise the ghosts of the past, to create the conditions for psychic and societal healing, and to offer some measure of truth, acknowledgment, and repair to those who have suffered. At its heart, it is an expression of truth force—soul force at the level of society: the courage to face what has been, to name it without distortion, and to choose a path forward that does not depend on forgetting, but on remembering differently.

While each context is different, the underlying insight is the same:

Without truth, there can be no reconciliation. Without accountability, there can be no trust. Without repair, there can be no lasting peace.

How I Came to Transitional Justice

In my second year of law school, I took a two-semester course on transitional justice with Paul van Zyl. We studied societies navigating profound rupture—South Africa, Morocco, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile, and the aftermath of World War II.

What struck me most was not just their histories, but the frameworks they used to move forward. And for those two semesters, while I deeply appreciated the global case studies, I couldn’t shake a persistent feeling: We need this in the United States.

This was before Black Lives Matter, before Me Too movement, before Occupy Wall Street. And yet, even then, I could see the fault lines.

As someone attuned to injustice and exclusion, I saw how a person’s race, ethnicity, immigration status, and other identities created the amount of pain and ease they experienced in their life. These identities, which our out of our control, shape who has access, who is protected, who is believed, and who is disposable. These patterns weren’t abstract. They showed up in cycles of unrest and rupture—from the uprisings in Detroit and other cities in the 1960s and 70s, to the racialized narratives of “welfare queens” and the Willie Horton ad, to the police violence against Rodney King and Amadou Diallo—and the countless names in the decades since.

These are not isolated incidents. They are expressions of a deeper, unresolved story of race.

A story in which race—though biologically meaningless, with no genetic basis in science—was constructed, codified, and institutionalized. Early racial classifications were shaped by European thinkers attempting to hierarchize humanity—measuring skulls, categorizing bodies, and assigning value. These ideas did not stay in textbooks. They became law, policy, culture, and common sense. And that story has not yet been fully upended.

It lives on in our systems and structures: in voter suppression efforts that dilute political voice; in mass incarceration that disproportionately cages Black and Brown bodies; in persistent racial wealth and pay gaps; in the legacy of redlining that still shapes where people live, learn, and build wealth. It lives on in media narratives and political rhetoric—often through coded language, or “dog whistles,” that signal fear and division without naming race explicitly, yet still dehumanize all the same.

And it lives on in the daily indignities—subtle and overt—that people of color continue to navigate.

In many ways, the polarization and creeping authoritarian tendencies we are witnessing today are not separate from this history—they are extensions of it.

When a society fails to fully reckon with its past, the unresolved patterns do not disappear. They evolve, repackage, and reassert themselves in new forms.These experiences are not identical across communities. The histories and harms faced by Black and Indigenous peoples are distinct from those experienced by Latine, Middle Eastern, mixed-race, and AAPI communities. And yet, across difference, there is a shared thread: the experience of being rendered less than fully human in a system that has never fully reckoned with its foundations.

Given the times we are living in now—and as someone who thinks often about the future—I find myself returning to a deeper question:

What would it mean for the United States to undergo its own process of transition?

Not just politically—but morally, culturally, economically, and relationally.

A transition away from identity-based hierarchy—especially race, but also gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality—toward a society that can truly hold dignity and belonging for all.

An Invitation: Reimagining Repair

At a time when the United States is grappling with deep polarization, rising backlash against efforts toward equity, and a growing uncertainty about what truth itself means, the question of how we move forward is no longer theoretical—it is urgent.

On April 7 at 12 PM, I’ll be joining a panel hosted by New England Law to explore these questions more deeply.

Together with legal practitioners and experts in transitional justice and truth and reconciliation processes—including my friend and colleague, Dean Danielle Conway of Penn State Dickinson Law—we’ll examine what it means to pursue repair in a society that has yet to fully reckon with its past.

This is not just a conversation about policy.

It is a conversation about whether we, as a society, are willing to practice soul force—to face what has been, to tell the truth about it, and to build something new rather than recycle what has always been.

If you are thinking about the future of this country—if you are grappling with how we move from fracture toward repair—this conversation is for you.

Register here.

A Closing Reflection

We are living through disruption. But disruption is not the end of the story.

As I return, in my mind, to those cherry blossoms—quietly blooming even as so much feels uncertain—I am reminded that transformation often unfolds alongside fracture. The breaking open and the becoming are not separate.

In many traditions, this is where real change begins.

And in the language of transitional justice, this moment asks something of us: to tell the truth about what has been, to reckon with harm that has not yet been repaired, to reimagine the structures that shape our collective life, and to choose, consciously, what we carry forward.

This work requires courage. It requires humility. It requires what I have called soul force—the willingness to face reality without turning away, and to respond without losing our humanity.

The work of transitional justice reminds us that even in the aftermath of immense harm, societies can choose a different path—not by forgetting, but by remembering differently. Not by bypassing pain, but by transforming it into the conditions for something more just, more honest, and more whole.

Another future is possible. And it will be built through the choices we make in moments like this.

Throughout this month, I’ll be exploring this theme of transitional justice more deeply—what it means, what it asks of us, and how it might guide us through this time of fracture toward a more shared and liberated future.

With much courage and hope,

Anu

I have a treat for you today.

This month, I’ve been returning to a powerful and heart-filling conversation I had nearly two years ago with one of my favorite American poets, Naomi Shihab Nye.

Today, I’m sharing both the conversation and a few reflections that continue to stay with me: on poetry as a counterforce to war, soul force as a path beyond separation, the urgency of this moment, and what it means to remain human in times of war and division.

At a time when so much public speech has become emptied of moral imagination, this conversation offers tenderness and equanimity, a way to remain a witness to cruelty while still imagining pathways beyond our current perils. It is a reminder that language can still be used to mend what violence tries to tear apart.

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I hope you’re holding as well as one can in these times. ❤️

There is so much moving through our world right now — war, division, uncertainty, a constant pull on our attention. It has been a disorienting and exhausting few years. And if I am honest, I too have felt, at times, a quiet hardening of the heart.

Maybe you have, too.

In the midst of all of this, I want to invite you to a very special space to pause. 🌿

This June, I’ll be leading my first retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. And what makes this offering especially meaningful is that I’ll be teaching alongside my life partner, Justin Senense.

For years, the two of us have been walking a shared path — seeking, studying, and practicing ancient healing modalities across traditions, guided by a simple question: what does it take to stay open, grounded, and connected in times like these?

This retreat is a culmination of that journey.

A space where we bring what we’ve learned — not just to teach, but to practice together.

We are calling this intimate weekend:

Healing Divides, Restoring Connection: Becoming Bridgebuilders in a Divided World, June 5–7, 2026

🧠➡️❤️ From the head to the heart

So much of modern life keeps us living from the neck up — thinking, planning, analyzing, reacting — that we forget we have an entire body below.

And yet, it is in the body where so much of our truth lives. Where tension is held. Where wisdom quietly waits. Where healing begins.

This weekend is an invitation to gently shift our center of attention — from the head to the heart, the body, and the deeper intelligence of the spirit.

Drawing on the practices and modalities woven throughout my book, Breaking Bias, and on Justin’s depth of embodied and relational work through his unique pause method, we’ll explore how ancient wisdom and modern science converge to help us transform the patterns that keep us stuck in separation.

Through somatic practices, meditation, dialogue, song, and shared reflection, we’ll create space to regulate the nervous system, metabolize what we’ve been carrying, and reconnect with our innate capacity for compassion and clarity.

More than anything, this is a space to remember a deeper truth of who we are beneath the labels. To practice being human again — together.

I hope you’ll consider joining us in person and in community as we create something meaningful and transformative together.

🌱 What you’ll walk away with

Over the course of the weekend, you’ll begin to experience a different way of relating — to yourself, to others, and to the world around you.

You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of your own mind and what keeps you — and all of us — caught in patterns of separation. We’ll approach these patterns not with shame, but with wisdom and compassion.

You’ll begin to cultivate a new relationship with identity, rooted in belonging rather than division, and a renewed connection with your body through grounded, accessible practices you can carry into daily life.

You’ll also learn practical tools from the PRISM framework to help restore connection in your relationships, your work, and your communities.

And perhaps most importantly, you’ll leave with a community of fellow bridgebuilders — people who are walking this path alongside you 🤍

🔥 A quiet but powerful choice

We cannot control the direction of the world. But we can choose how we meet it.

This experiential weekend is an invitation into that choice — to become a bridgebuilder, someone who can hold the tensions of our time with wisdom and compassion, and bring the practice of belonging into everyday life.

Through embodied practices, contemplative inquiry, and heartfelt dialogue, you’ll develop practical skills for bridging divides — within yourself and in the world around you.

If this speaks to something in you, I would love for you to join us.

June 5–7, 2026
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY

👉 Learn more and register here

Space is intentionally limited to keep this experience intimate.

If you have any questions — about the program, logistics, or whether it’s the right fit — feel free to reach out.

With soul force, ❤️
Anu

Last week I had the privilege of teaching at the Mindfulness Program at Columbia Law School on equanimity in times of uncertainty.

More than fifty members of the CLS community gathered to pause in the middle of a busy day and ask a question that feels increasingly urgent:

How do we stay centered amidst so much turmoil and instability?

We are ex…

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🌿 I’m joining a virtual discussion on Transitional Justice in the US on April 7th at New England School of Law to explore reconciliation and repair. Register here.

Dear ones,

Last week I wrote about soul force in a time of war—about how attention, compassion, and contemplative practice can help us stay centered when the world around us feels fractured by confusion, violence, and fear.

The more I sit with the realities of our time, the more I am reminded of something important:

Wars do not begin on battlefields. They begin in the human imagination. They begin with the stories we tell—or the stories we are told—about who is us and who is them.

When we look closely at the history of our world, we can see just how powerful some of these stories have been. They helped justify the colonization of the Global South, the extraction and destruction of the Earth, the dispossession of Indigenous lands, and the so-called “civilizing missions” imposed upon Indigenous and Earth-honoring cultures.

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They echo in the wars and geopolitical meddling that have shaped the modern era—from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and in horrific violence unfolding today from Gaza to Iran.

And we can see their imprint closer to home as well. In ICE raids that tear families apart. In mass incarceration and voter suppression. In gerrymandering and the absence of democratic self-determination for American citizens living in places like Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and other U.S. territories.

Indeed, one could argue that nearly every social, economic, political, and cultural inequity we face in this country has been shaped, in some way, by one particular story: The Story of Race.

For centuries, this story has organized power, justified domination, and structured the hierarchies that shape our institutions—and our imaginations. But the time has come for us to outgrow it. And in order to outgrow it, we must first understand what it is.

If you’ve read Chapter 5 of my book Breaking Bias, or taken one of my Breaking Racial Bias courses, parts of this story may already be familiar to you.

But if you haven’t, I want to revisit it today, beginning with a simple question:

Where does the concept of race actually come from?

And perhaps more importantly: What will it take for us to outgrow it?

How old is the concept of race?

For the past 15 years, I’ve led hundreds of workshops with a deceptively simple question: How old is the concept of race?

For something so central to how we organize society—and something that affects all of us, whether we identify as Black, brown, white, Indigenous, or something beyond these categories—you might assume there would be a shared understanding of where this idea comes from.

But that assumption turns out to be wrong.

In room after room, across professions and communities—doctors, nurses, bankers, engineers, teachers, students, and faith leaders—people offer wildly different answers. Some believe race is thousands of years old. Others place its origins in biblical times. Still others assume it emerged during colonialism. And rarely does anyone actually know how the concept of race emerged or originated.

A few weeks ago, when I posed this same question during a conversation with author Katie Salisbury at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), the result was the same. Once again, there was very little consensus.

And in moments like that, many of us instinctively blame ourselves for not knowing the answer—as if this were simply a gap in our education or attention.

But the truth is more complicated.

In many ways, this confusion is by design. We are rarely taught some of the most basic facts about our shared humanity. For example, the Human Genome Project revealed that human beings are 99.9% genetically identical. Even more striking, people categorized into different racial groups are often more genetically similar to one another than to people within their own racial category.

And perhaps most importantly, given the history of colonization, enslavement, and migration, the majority of Black, brown, and Indigenous people in the Americas are themselves mixed, whether those histories are openly acknowledged or not.

Yet much of this reality remains largely absent from the stories we are taught about race. Which means that when we lack a shared understanding of the origins of race, we ultimately lack a shared reality about it.

And that, I believe, is one of the reasons it has been so difficult for societies—particularly here in the United States—to make meaningful and sustained progress on racial justice since the Civil Rights era. We are trying to solve a problem whose origins many of us have never been fully invited to understand.

But this is not just an American challenge.

Similar dynamics exist in nearly every society shaped by European colonization and settlement—from Europe, Canada, and the Caribbean to Latin America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In each of these places, systems of hierarchy and power were built around racial categories that continue to shape social, economic, cultural, and political life today.

Which means this is not simply an American issue. It is a human challenge.

And if we are going to outgrow it, understanding must be where we begin.

I explored this question more deeply at MOCA, inspired by Kip Fulbeck’s powerful work on mixed-race identity and belonging.

Our discussion centered on a simple—but radical—question:

What happens when we begin to think beyond racial thinking itself?

What follows are a few reflections that grew out of that dialogue.

▶ You can watch the conversation:

And you can explore the slides from my presentation here:

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🌿 We are witnessing a transition in America. The question before us is how we reckon with our history and imagine pathways for repair, restitution, and remedy. I’m joining a virtual panel discussion on Transitional Justice in the US on April 7th at New England School of Law to explore what reconciliation could look like. All are welcome. Register here.

Dear ones,

I hope this finds you with peace. For the past few days, I’ve been sitting with grief while trying to internally make sense of how I feel about the U.S. and Israel escalating attacks on Iran, which have spiraled across the Gulf and West Asia.

The actions taken by the American and Israeli governments will reverberate through the world in ways none of us can fully predict. And, like so much that happens in this region, they unfold atop layers of history that remain unresolved in the collective memory of nations.

For many Iranians, the memory of the United States’ role in the 1953 removal of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq still lingers as a wound tied to questions of sovereignty and foreign interference. For Arab and Muslim nations of West Asia, the creation of the state of Israel came alongside displacement and dispossession that continues to shape political life and grief across generations. And across the wider region, the long and complicated rivalry between Sunni and Shia political powers—today most visible in tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran—adds yet another layer of historical competition for influence.

At the same time, it’s also true that the Iranian regime has, for nearly half a century, cultivated a politics of hostility toward the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, while funding militant groups and radical ideologies that have stolen the dreams and futures of millions of people. At home, it has violently oppressed its own citizens— women, minorities, and anyone who dared to dissent.

None of this is simple.

Perhaps that is the first thing to acknowledge: we are living through a time that refuses easy narratives.

Our human mind wants clarity. It wants to know why things are happening and how they will end. It wants to locate villains and heroes so it can feel oriented again.

Yet history rarely unfolds with such tidy explanations. The light and shadow exist in each one of us.

What we are witnessing, in many parts of the world at once, is the unraveling of an older paradigm that has shaped modernity— a paradigm rooted in extraction, domination, and separation. The Algonquian word for the consciousness beneath this chaos is wetiko, a psychopathic mind-virus that convinces us that our survival depends on consuming or dominating others.

We see its echoes everywhere. In geopolitics. In economics. In our technologies. In the narratives that tell us who belongs and who does not.

Transitions between paradigms are rarely gentle. Something old is dying, and something new has not yet learned how to breathe.

So the question that keeps returning to me is simple: what are we asked to do in a time like this?

Trust the unfolding of causes and conditions

As someone committed to ahimsa—nonviolence and non-harming—I cannot condone yet another war. It aches me to imagine the death of innocent civilians, the generational trauma that follows those who survive, and the destruction of homes, communities, and cultural institutions that may be lost forever.

And yet, alongside grief, there is another recognition: the world unfolds through causes and conditions.

This is the first thing I would offer. In both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, this understanding is described through the principle of karma. Karma does not mean reward or punishment handed down by an indifferent, distant divine judge. Rather, it describes a simple truth about reality: actions set consequences into motion. Intentions shape behavior, behavior shapes conditions, and those conditions ripple outward, influencing the future.

The Bible speaks to this same insight in a different language:

“Whatsoever a person soweth, that shall they also reap.” (Galatians 6:7)

Krishna echoes this teaching in the Bhagavad Gita when he reminds Arjuna that while we have the right to act, we do not control the fruits of those actions:

“You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of those actions. Do not let the fruits of action be your motive, and do not give way to inaction.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:47)

In other words, we are asked to participate in the world with integrity, clarity, and courage, while relinquishing our attachment to how events ultimately unfold.

This principle is sometimes described as karma phala tyaga—releasing our desire to grasp the results of our actions.

We remain responsible for the quality of our participation in the world, but we are not responsible for controlling the entire arc of history. That recognition does not remove the pain of witnessing injustice or violence. But it can soften the desperate grip of the mind that believes it must solve everything at once.

Trust does not mean passivity.

It means remembering that the unfolding of history is larger than any single moment, larger than any single leader, and larger than our capacity to calculate every consequence.

Reclaim Your Attention

The second thing I would offer is this: take your attention back.

One of the most precious things we possess in this era is our attention. Today, entire industries compete for it. News cycles accelerate it. Algorithms are designed to hold it.

The mind begins to believe that if it just reads one more analysis, one more update, one more thread explaining the geopolitical chessboard, then perhaps the world will feel manageable again.

But often, the nervous system becomes saturated instead.

A therapist once said something to me that I initially resisted but later found surprisingly liberating: “Not my monkeys, not my circus.”

The phrase was not an invitation to apathy. It was a reminder that the mind often tries to assume responsibility for events far beyond its reach.

Of course, we still protest when conscience calls us to. We write to our elected officials. We speak truth when silence would betray our values. We donate to political candidates and charitable causes with our dollars.

But we can take those actions from a place of steadiness rather than agitation. This is where attention becomes a form of sovereignty. Every moment that we redirect our awareness toward the world we wish to cultivate rather than the chaos we cannot control becomes an act of quiet resistance.

The Zoroastrian tradition expresses this beautifully through a simple teaching:

Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.

That is the work.

When you turn off the television and step outside for a walk under the sky. When you call your mother or a dear friend, instead of falling into another hour of doom-scrolling.
When you cook something nourishing for your body or move your limbs after a long day. You are not avoiding the world. You are reclaiming your participation in it.

This is how we cultivate soul force — through the small but steady, conscious choices that shape the atmosphere of our inner life.

Meditate daily. Cultivate goodwill.

The third thing I would offer is simple, though not always easy in times like these: meditate daily and cultivate goodwill.

When the world feels unsettled, the mind often becomes restless. Many people tell me that when they sit down to meditate lately, their thoughts scatter in every direction, jumping from headline to headline, from fear to speculation.

If that is your experience, please know that you are not alone.

Sometimes the mind needs an anchor that is gentler than silence. This is where the ancient technologies of song, dance, and music come in handy.

One of my favorite pieces of music to support my meditation practice and feel the energy of goodwill from the Sufi tradition: Man Kunto Maula. I want to share with you its particularly beautiful rendition by the Orchestral Qawwali Project, which brings together devotional Qawwali singing with a Western orchestral arrangement.

The Qawwali chant itself has traveled across centuries of spiritual practice in what is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, and northern India. Its echoes carry the languages and cultures of Pashto, Punjabi, Persian, Arabic, Sindhi, and many others. While it emerges from Islamic devotion, the cultural world in which it was born was shared by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, and countless communities whose lives braided together across trade routes, cities, and rivers.

At its heart are words attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh):

“Man Kunto Maula Fa-haaza Ali-yun Maula.”
Whoever accepts me as their guide, Ali is also their guide.

Within Sufi interpretation, the phrase points beyond personality toward a deeper recognition of spiritual companionship and devotion to truth.

What I love about this orchestral rendition is how it reflects the fullness of our human inheritance. Ancient devotional voices rise alongside violins, cellos, and Western orchestral instrumentation. The singers themselves come from backgrounds the world might not immediately label as Muslim, yet they honor the spirit of the song with complete surrender to its beauty and meaning—a reminder that the word Muslim itself simply means one who submits to the Divine. Musical traditions that once grew in different soils come together in a single sound. In that way, the music itself becomes a metaphor for the world many of us long for.

For the next few days, I invite you to try something simple.

Find a quiet moment.

Play this song.

Allow the beauty of this music to settle into your body.

And let what arises be your 10-minute meditation.

You may not understand every word, but music has a way of traveling beneath language. If emotions arise, welcome them. In this way, you gently reclaim your attention and surrender to trust, reconnecting with an ancestral intelligence that stretches back centuries—a lineage of people who, like you, turned to the technologies of rhythm, song, and devotion even in the face of war, destruction, greed, and hatred.

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As I wrote in Breaking Bias, many of the identities and boundaries we defend so fiercely are thinner than we imagine. The great Persian poet Rumi expressed this truth beautifully:

“The differences we defend so fiercely are often illusion and vanity. Sunlight falls differently on each wall, yet it is still the same light. These identities we cling to are garments borrowed from that light. When we truly praise, we return them to their source.”

In times like these, remembering that shared light is not naïve. It may be one of the deepest forms of courage available to us—and it begins, quietly, by reclaiming our attention from the forces that profit from our fear and division.

A closing reminder

These are complex times.

We are living through war, deep political polarization, economic uncertainty, and a technological transformation that is reshaping nearly every dimension of life. It is only natural if the mind feels overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all.

And yet, within each of us there remains a quiet source of steadiness that no headline can fully reach.

In moments like this, we can return to a few simple commitments. Trust the unfolding of causes and conditions. Reclaim your attention from the forces that seek to scatter it. And return, again and again, to the small daily practices that cultivate goodwill in your heart.

The world will continue to turn in ways none of us can fully predict. Our task is to meet it with as much clarity, compassion, and soul force as we can muster.

I would also love to hear from you.

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In times like these, this small community can become a refuge for one another. If you feel moved to share, I would love to know what has been helping you stay steady lately. Your reflections may be exactly what someone else needs to read today.

Until next week,
Anu

As we come to the close of this month-long inquiry into anger, I want to end not with conclusions, but with a living conversation, one that continues to work on me even now.

In my dialogue with Lama Rod Owens, we spoke less about anger as an emotion to be managed and more about the inner conditioning that shapes how anger arises, hardens, and so often becomes the boundary of what we believe is possible.

You can watch a short clip from our conversation here 👉

What stayed with me most was our shared recognition that many of us are not only angry, we are conditioned. Conditioned by histories of harm, by systems of domination, by narratives that train us to expect exclusion, betrayal, and scarcity. Over time, these conditions narrow our imagination. They make it difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to dream beyond bias, beyond reactivity, beyond the roles we’ve been assigned or have learned to play.

Anger often emerges right at this edge.

Throughout this month, I’ve shared that anger itself is not the enemy. It is a signal. A form of heat that arises when something we care about feels threatened or denied. But what Lama Rod and I explored together is how easily anger becomes fused with identity when our inner conditioning goes unexamined. When that happens, anger doesn’t just respond to harm, it begins to define what we believe is realistic, what we believe others are capable of, and what we believe we ourselves can become.

This is one of the quiet victories of bias.

Bias doesn’t only distort how we see others; it limits how far we can imagine freedom for ourselves and for the world. It whispers that certain people will never change, that systems can only be fought through force, that love is naïve, and that liberation must always be earned through exhaustion or rage.

In our conversation, Lama Rod named something essential: that part of the work is learning to stay with the discomfort of not knowing yet, of resisting the urge to collapse complexity into certainty. This is profoundly challenging when anger feels justified, even necessary. And yet, without this inner work, we risk reproducing the very structures of domination we are longing to dismantle.

This is where the teachings on anger, wetiko, and inner practice converge.

What Lama Rod embodies—and what this month has been inviting us toward—is something far more demanding than outrage: the courage to remain human when our conditioning urges us to close.

• To stay curious when certainty feels safer.

• To stay open when withdrawal feels protective.

• To keep imagining freedom even when history tells us not to.

This does not mean abandoning boundaries, justice, or truth. It means refusing to let anger become the outer edge of our moral and spiritual imagination.

As we close this series, I invite you into a few gentle reflections:

• Where do you notice your own inner conditioning shaping what feels possible—or impossible—right now?

• In what ways might anger be protecting you, but also limiting your capacity to dream beyond bias?

• And what would it mean to relate to anger not as an endpoint, but as a threshold—an invitation to deeper freedom?

I’m deeply grateful to Lama Rod for this conversation, and to you for walking this path with me over the past month. This inquiry into anger has never been about becoming calmer people for our own sake. It has been about reclaiming the inner spaciousness required to imagine, and build a world where all belong.

Until then, may we continue to tend the inner conditions of freedom, so that the futures we long for remain imaginable.

With gratitude,
Anu 🤍

🌿 If you’re in NYC today - Thursday Feb 26, 2026 - come join me at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) for a conversation on imagining worlds beyond race and racism. Use MOCAGUEST to register.

🌿 I’m honored to invite you to join me for an intimate weekend at the Omega Institute. Together, we’ll explore how ancient spiritual wisdom and modern neuroscience converge to help us understand and transform the mind virus of separation. Through guided somatic practices, reflection, community dialogue, and joyful laughter, you’ll discover your primary identity not as the labels that divide us, but as human beings worthy of belonging. June 5 - 7. Please sign up here to receive the registration link.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting with you on anger, what it is, where it comes from, and why, when left unnoticed and unexamined, it so often becomes one of the primary ways wetiko (that consciousness of separation and domination) moves through us.

Anger, as we’ve seen, is not the problem. It is an energy. A signal. A form of heat that arises when something we care about — like fairness, safety, democracy — feels threatened, violated, or unseen. And yet, as the Buddha and so many wisdom traditions remind us, when anger hardens into identity or becomes our primary strategy for change, it can quietly begin to consume us from the inside, reproducing the very harm we long to end.

Last week, using Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance as an illustration, I introduced you to the five Buddhist antidotes to anger so we can channel this powerful energy into wholesome and skillful action. Today, I’d like to turn to something more intimate and practical: how we meet anger when it arises in our own bodies and hearts.

The guided meditation is an invitation into that practice.

Rather than suppressing anger or indulging it, this meditation draws on Buddhist wisdom, particularly three of the four Brahma Viharas, or divine abodes, to help us relate to anger wisely. We explore how loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity can be brought directly into the places of tension and contraction within us, so that anger is held in awareness rather than acted out unconsciously.

The Buddha once offered a vivid image for why this matters. He said that acting from anger is like picking up a burning coal with the intention of throwing it at another, but it is our own hand that burns first. This teaching is not meant as a warning or a moral injunction, but as care. It reminds us that we always have a choice about what we carry, what we feed, and what we release.

Over time, this kind of practice supports healthier boundaries, steadier relationships, and a deeper sense of inner freedom, even in a world that gives us many reasons to feel outraged.

If you feel called, I invite you to set aside some time to practice with me. You might listen seated, lying down, or even during a quiet walk. There’s no need to do it “perfectly.” Simply bring your willingness, your breath, and your kind attention to your interior world.

As you move through your day, or week, you might gently notice:

• Where does anger show up most reliably for you?

• How does it feel in your body?

• What happens when you meet it with kindness rather than force?

My hope is that this practice helps you remember that anger need not be suppressed, nor does it need to rule. It can be held, listened to, and transformed, into courage, clarity, and constructive action in service of life.

May we learn to hold the fire of anger wisely, so that it warms rather than wounds.

Until next week,
Anu 🤍

Share Soul Force for the 21st Century

✨ Tashi Delek! Happy Lunar New Year! For my New York based beloved community, please join me at the Museum of Chinese in America on Thursday, Feb 26 at 6:30 pm for MOCA Talks: Race and Belonging in Asian America. I’ll be in conversation with author Katie Salisbury, exploring the social and historical origins of racial thinking and the subtle ways bias is learned, reinforced, and carried through our bodies and institutions. Learn more and register here. See you there!

🌿 In a time of heartbreaking division, polarization, and violence, I’m honored to invite you to join me for an intimate weekend at the Omega Institute that offers a unique path to healing. Together, we'll explore how ancient spiritual wisdom and modern neuroscience converge to help us understand and transform the mind virus of separation. Through guided somatic practices, reflection, community dialogue, and joyful laughter, you'll discover your primary identity not as the labels that divide us, but as human beings worthy of belonging. June 5 - 7. Please sign up here to receive the registration link.

Last week, I shared why anger, when unnoticed and unexamined, cannot, by itself, carry us toward liberation. I wrote about how anger, when it hardens into identity or becomes our primary strategy, often ends up reproducing the very harm we are longing to end. And in the weeks prior, I explored wetiko, that cannibalistic consciousness that feeds on fear, separation, and domination, and how unexamined anger is one of its most reliable entry points into the human heart.

This week, I want to turn toward something deeply practical: how we work with anger when it arises, not in theory, but in the ordinary moments of our lives.

More than 2,500 years ago, the Buddha taught that anger is like picking up a burning coal with the intention of throwing it at another, only to discover that it is our own hand that burns first. He acknowledged the arising of anger as natural, and offered five remedies to meet it skillfully.

Interestingly, this past weekend, I was struck by how Bad Bunny — Benito — stood on one of the largest stages in the world and embodied these very remedies. There was most definitely protest, acknowledgement of history, and even a bit of heat, but the fire did not consume him. It was shaped, disciplined, and rooted in love.

In doing so, he showed us something ancient and urgently needed: how to hold the fire without becoming the fire.

Many wisdom traditions describe anger as fire. Fire can burn a house down, leaving devastation in its wake. And yet, the very same fire can cook food, warm a home, and illuminate a path forward in the dark. As I shared last week, the question is not whether or why anger arises. It will. The more awake we are to injustice, suffering, and betrayal, the more likely it is to appear.

The real question is whether we have cultivated the inner capacity to relate to this fire skillfully so that it becomes a source of clarity rather than destruction.

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama reminds us:

“Anger cannot be overcome by anger. If someone is angry with you, and you show anger in return, the result is a disaster. On the other hand, if you control your anger and show its opposite, love, compassion, tolerance, and patience, not only will you remain peaceful, but the other person’s anger will also diminish.”

This teaching shows how the energy of anger moves, multiplies, or dissolves, both within us and between us, and how we can transform it.

☸️ The Buddha’s Five Remedies for Anger

In a discourse attributed to Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s foremost disciples, we are offered five practical ways of meeting anger. These are not lofty ideals meant only for monasteries or retreat centers. They are trainings of the heart-mind, meant to be practiced again and again, precisely because anger arises again and again.

💛 1. Cultivate Loving-Kindness (Metta)

When anger arises toward someone, the Buddha invites us to intentionally cultivate goodwill toward them, known as loving-kindness or metta. This does not mean approving of their harmful behavior, denying accountability, or collapsing healthy boundaries.

It means making a quiet but consequential decision: I will not allow hatred to take root in my own heart.

Loving-kindness begins inwardly. It may start as a simple inner phrase: May I be free from hatred. May my heart remain open. May I be free from suffering. From there, we gently extend it outward, even toward someone who has caused us harm.

For example, if a coworker speaks dismissively to you in a meeting, loving-kindness does not require you to stay silent or pretend nothing happened. It might simply mean choosing not to rehearse the insult for the rest of the day, or silently wishing that both of you find clarity before responding.

If anger arises toward a public figure whose words feel dehumanizing, loving-kindness may take the form of refusing to let their rhetoric turn you into someone you don’t recognize or you don’t respect.

Benito’s performance embodied this beautifully as it did not demean or dehumanize anyone. Instead, he highlighted the love and kindness that is the fabric of his Puerto Rican and Latine heritage. From the love story of a real life couple getting married to acts of kindness of giving his recently won grammy to a younger version of himself (self-love!) to incorporating Toñita Cay, the owner of one of the last Puerto Rican Social Clubs in Brooklyn. The energy was not “against” so much as it was fiercely “for” love and kindness.

Loving-kindness is an act of inner sovereignty. It says: Your behavior will not determine the quality of my consciousness. In a world shaped by wetiko, where dehumanization is normalized and rewarded, metta becomes a quiet but radical form of resistance. It is how we protect our own humanity, even when others forget theirs.

🤍 2. Cultivate Compassion (Karuna)

Compassion or karuna asks us to look beneath the surface of behavior and remember that most harm does not arise from wholeness, but from fragmentation, fear, and unhealed wounds. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.

When we pause long enough to sense that a person acting harmfully is themselves caught in confusion or pain, something in us softens. The grip of anger loosens just enough for wisdom to enter.

This might look like recognizing that a family member who lashes out is carrying unresolved grief, or that a manager who controls excessively may be acting from deep insecurity or fear of failure. In the public sphere, it may involve acknowledging that leaders who govern through domination and cruelty are often profoundly disconnected from their own vulnerability and humanity.

In his performance, Bad Bunny invited us to hold both the pain and the beauty of Puerto Rico at the same time. He referenced the island’s history of exploitation and extraction—symbolized through sugarcane fields—highlighted the differing political fates of Puerto Rico and Hawaii under U.S. colonization, and evoked the collective trauma of the 2017 blackout, when Puerto Ricans were left to survive in the absence of adequate federal response.

And yet, the tone was not anger. It was grief braided with dignity. There was collective memory with reverence that held the experiences of the land and her people with tenderness. In this way, it embodied what compassion is meant to do: to acknowledge harm clearly and truthfully, while remaining rooted in care and a desire for collective healing. What could have been expressed as accusation was instead offered as testimony. The psychic wounds of colonization were not denied or dramatized—they were named, honored, and brought into the public forum with integrity.

This is what compassion looks like in practice. Compassion does not excuse harm. It does not erase history, nor does it negate the need for accountability, boundaries, or justice. Rather, it interrupts the reflex to turn pain into punishment.

What we witnessed was not the denial of injustice, but the refusal to let injustice dictate the moral tone of the response. The performance did not add another layer of violence—internal or external—to an already wounded story. Instead, it transformed grief into witness and anger into art.

In this way, compassion becomes a bridge. It keeps the heart from hardening while still allowing truth to be spoken. It makes strength possible without cruelty, and clarity possible without collapse.

⚖️ 3. Cultivate Equanimity (Upekkha)

Equanimity or upekkha steadies the mind by reminding us of a simple, often-forgotten truth: all beings are owners of their thoughts, words, and actions, what the Eastern traditions call karma.

The Bible names this same ethical law woven into the fabric of existence:

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” —Galatians 6:7

Equanimity helps us remember that we are not required to carry what does not belong to us. For example, when someone speaks to us harshly, equanimity allows us to recognize and trust: this is their action, and its consequences will unfold according to its own law. We can choose our response, but we do not need to internalize their behavior as a verdict on our worth.

In this sense, equanimity is not indifference. It is grounded sovereignty.

We saw this quality embodied in Bad Bunny’s performance. After naming historical harm and collective grief, he did not end in accusation or hostility. Instead, he closed with two powerful truths:

1. “God Bless America” not as a patriotic slogan, but as a reframing of “America” to include all of the nations and by extension, peoples, that make up North America, South America, and the Caribbean; and

2. The affirmation that “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

That ending revealed something essential. He did not surrender the truth of colonization or exploitation. But neither did he allow those truths to narrow our vision for liberation and the work ahead of us to get there. That is equanimity.

When institutions or systems behave unjustly, equanimity helps us remain engaged without becoming consumed. It supports sustained commitment without succumbing to despair. It allows us to care deeply without collapsing, to act firmly without hatred, and to stay present without being swept away by the storm.

In equanimity, anger does not harden into identity. Instead of being angry, we can experience anger—and channel it in way that aligns with our deeper aspirations and values.

🌬️ 4. Withdraw Attention

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