When I intentionally chose to stay close to what felt most alive in my lived experience, something began to shift in my qualitative inquiry into mindfulness and Buddhist psychology. Rather than following what I had originally imagined exploring at the beginning of the semester, a different research question slowly began to emerge, one shaped by the realities of my day-to-day life.
As an Iranian student, my country has been going through immense violence, terror, grief, destruction, and uncertainty in the last few months. I realized I had never been this concerned with reading the news every day. I found myself spending long hours trying to stay up to date with what was happening in my country and with the people in my community. Yet engaging with the news in this way often left me feeling drained, anxious, and mentally foggy, while also trying to live a parallel life as a busy graduate student here in the safety of Toronto.
It felt like a natural invitation to begin exploring the role of mindfulness in the ways we relate to daily news consumption. This became an opportunity to better understand Engaged Buddhism and what mindfulness looks like when practiced in the midst of real life. Rather than remaining abstract ideas, Buddhist psychology teachings slowly began to unfold within the laboratory of my own day-to-day lived experiences.
I found myself particularly curious about the following questions:
• In what ways does mindfulness support the capacity to hold multiple truths when engaging with global events?
• How does mindfulness cultivate non-self elements and a sense of interconnectedness between people and among communities?
Below is the gāthā that emerged through my explorations.
Clouds of Fear, Light of Peace
Drifting into headlines, fear clouds my mind
Letting go of certainty, many truths come to light
Embracing all of me, and all of you
Rays of peace begin to shine
The human brain longs for certainty. It helps us make sense of the world, of the news, and of what is happening around us. In many ways, certainty feels necessary to safely navigate the world.
But the news, especially recently, has been deeply uncertain.
Through mindfulness, I began noticing how uncertainty was showing up in my own day-to-day life. By shining the light of awareness, I started to recognize where and how the discomfort of uncertainty lived within my body. I became more aware of the sharp edges of not knowing in physical sensations, emotions, and thought patterns. Over time, I found myself becoming more attuned to the quality, texture, and frequency of uncertainty in my daily life. Sometimes it arrived as fear, sometimes restlessness, sometimes an urge to fix things or completely numb out, and sometimes it arrived quietly, blanketed in hope.
As I continued to sit with these experiences and deepen my inquiry, I found myself naturally gravitating towards Brother Phap Lin’s teachings on uncertainty. Slowly, I began to understand more deeply the risk of becoming attached to certainty and how it can shape, distort, and narrow our perception of reality.
And I began noticing this very clearly, both within myself and in the wider Iranian diaspora community, as well as among non-Iranians. I saw it especially on social media, where people often seemed caught in the need to defend a perspective or prove that another person was wrong. I began reflecting on how attachment to certainty can create separation. It reinforces mānā through “I am right, you are wrong.” In many ways, it mirrors what war itself does: deepening and spreading the illusion of a separate self.
When the need for certainty becomes strong, other possibilities and realities can struggle to find their way into our perception. Rigid assumptions can feel protective, shielding us from unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas. Yet I noticed that when there was even a small willingness to soften the need to be certain, something began to open. Suddenly there was more space. More possibility. Alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and relating to reality as it was being lived and experienced. This is where I began to understand the possibility of not pointing the second arrow towards myself.
This was also where I slowly started gaining a lived understanding of multiple truths, not merely as an idea, but as something I was personally living through.
I am living a student life here in Toronto, going to classes, working on (or at least trying to work on) assignments, and moving through daily life while being physically safe. And at the same time, I am mentally and emotionally living alongside the people of my country through the news, through uncertainty, through digital blackout, and through the heaviness of not knowing.
I feel hopeful that there may be a better future. I feel at ease knowing there is one less dictator present in my country. And at the same time, I feel anger, grief, and despair over the destruction and violence unfolding.
All of these are true at once.
Knowing and holding all of this, I found myself asking: How could I choose not to point the second arrow towards myself and live a more peaceful life? How could I cultivate wellbeing and mental health while holding so much?
And this is where applied mindfulness and Engaged Buddhism began to feel deeply meaningful and relatable in my own life, and perhaps in the lives of many others navigating uncertainty too.
Through regular meditation practice, mindfulness began to give rise to a sense of curiosity in how I was relating to my daily experiences. I found myself becoming more aware of the quality I was bringing into my news consumption and how that quality would inevitably spill into my daily life, relationships, and the ways I moved between these parallel realities.
I often found myself asking:
What seeds am I watering in my storehouse consciousness?
Over time, I came to realize that I cannot change the external world. I cannot stop war. That remains outside of my control. Yet I do have some power in the way I relate to my experiences. I can choose the quality of intention I bring into my actions, my words, and the ways I relate to myself and others. Through practice, I can become more mindful of my reactions and gently begin transforming them into responses rooted in compassion and care.
For a long time, I avoided the mindfulness of emotions meditation. Sitting with my emotions and intentionally bringing attention to them often felt overwhelming and uncomfortable. Yet something began to shift when I invited a more curious and investigative quality into my intention for sitting with the practice. Slowly, I noticed changes in my experience and in the way emotions moved through me.
When I gave space, care, and attention to the full range of my emotions, something softened. The intensity began to loosen and the experience of emotions felt more open, fluid, and less rigid than before.
I began to understand that by tending to emotions with kindness and compassion, we may slowly expand our capacity to hold their full range without becoming completely overwhelmed by them. In doing so, we may also become less reactive and more understanding of ourselves and others.
I noticed this shift in subtle but meaningful ways. When I intentionally practiced meeting my own experiences with kindness and non-judgment, something also changed in how I related to others. I could recognize this in moments when I would come across political discussions online and not immediately feel pulled into reactivity.
This was where interconnectedness began to feel less like an abstract concept and more like something unfolding in the contemporary context of my daily life. Through mindfulness, I found myself becoming more resilient in the face of uncertainty as I gradually opened to the full range of my experiences while living through this non-dualistic and parallel reality.
Through meditation, journaling, and engaging with Buddhist teachings in a way that felt meaningful and personally relevant, I began to see how seeds of awareness, compassion, and non-violence could be watered. Perhaps, over time, these same seeds might bloom into greater love, interconnectedness, and peace, both within ourselves and in the world around us.
So for me, this gāthā has become a small practice and a gentle reminder to return to whenever I engage with the news or begin to feel overwhelmed. As I breathe in and breathe out through each line, I am gently reminded of openness to multiple truths, of bringing a kind and compassionate quality towards myself and others, and of the possibility of meaningful action towards global peace by first tending to the quality of my own inner world.
In many ways, mindfulness has invited me to become a more intentional gardener, one who pays attention to the seeds being watered, both within myself and in the wider world.
Click here to see the poster for the Inlight Student Mental Health Symposium.