The silence was supposed to bring peace. For over a year, I had joined the same virtual sangha each week—lighting my candle, settling onto my cushion, watching familiar faces fill my screen from across Europe and the United States. We would smile, bow, and enter meditation together. But that night, as the bell rang and we closed our eyes, the silence became a torrent.
Images from that day’s news rushed into my mind: the gaunt faces of Palestinian parents desperately searching for food, begging for scraps to feed their children; infants whimpering from starvation; generations wiped out in an instant.
Then came the memories, flung across my mind like shards of history. My grandmother was expelled from her home multiple times as a child and forced to survive alone after her family was killed, displaced, or exiled. My grandfather was imprisoned, tortured, silenced, and nearly executed for witnessing events of the Nakba, the violent displacement of Palestinians in 1948. And my mother was born into a military rule that controlled every aspect of Palestinian life through permits, curfews, and the constant threat of violence. Even today, decades later, she anxiously reminds us not to be late, her body still governed by memories of nighttime raids. The past and present collapse into an unending cycle of loss.
My stomach clenched. I tried to stay with every sensation in my body—the ache in my chest, the tightening of my throat, the tears on my eyelashes. I’d been practicing mindfulness for five years, but sitting there on the cushion, I felt myself teetering into a kind of despair that frightened me.
I’d previously spoken of Gaza to the sangha, but no one else ever did—a silence that felt like denial. In Western spaces, I find myself constantly having to remind others that my people’s suffering is real. Our pain is not individual, optional, or only internal. It’s collective, generational, external, imposed, a wound that bleeds across families, across decades. I felt that within the sangha—a sacred community rooted in compassion and dedicated to liberation from suffering—my pain would be seen, understood, eased. But that evening, the silence around me felt heavier than usual.
When the time for discussion arrived, I shared how witnessing Gaza had become a meditation on generational trauma—each bombed hospital, each starving child, each demolished home carrying the weight of my family’s history into my present moment.
The response was swift and cutting: Someone unmuted themselves to snap, “This is too political for this sacred space. We are here to focus on our inner work.”
These words stung. My shoulders tightened, my breathing became shallow, and I felt my throat constrict. I thought: This is it. This is what generations of Palestinians have experienced.
For me, witnessing the genocide in Gaza isn’t distant suffering but a continuation of my family’s trauma. This isn’t politics—it’s my personal life, the lived reality of being Palestinian. When they call it “too political,” they’re calling my existence, my ancestry, my people’s survival too political for compassion. They’re asking me to separate my spiritual practice from the trauma that lives in my cells, passed down through generations like a wound that hasn’t had a chance to heal.
Buddhism teaches the origin of suffering and its cessation. I sought these teachings not as philosophical exploration but as necessity, as a Palestinian carrying generational trauma. But when Western spiritual teachers speak of “being with pain and discomfort,” there’s often an implicit assumption that discomfort is primarily internal and temporary, something we choose to explore in controlled environments for defined periods.
This framework fails when applied to Palestinian reality. The issue isn’t Palestinians’ relationship to pain; it’s the external source that must change, and healing must be collective rather than solely individual. Our suffering is deliberately inflicted through human actions—abuse, racism, exploitation. We do not choose to meet pain. Pain meets us at checkpoints, in demolished homes, in the absence of loved ones, and today, most brutally, in Gaza, where our people face deliberate starvation and mass destruction.
When mindfulness practices frame all suffering as internal and manageable through personal work, they risk removing the social context that reveals systemic issues requiring structural change, not just inner transformation. The four noble truths begin with the recognition that life contains suffering (dukkha). But what happens when that suffering is not the universal human condition of aging, sickness, and death, but the specific suffering of colonization, displacement, and genocide? What happens when the origin of suffering is not personal attachment but systematic oppression?
When I was told my pain was “too political” for the spiritual space, I realized that true healing requires both personal practices and the courage to name the systems that perpetuate suffering. It also requires Western practitioners to acknowledge their inherent privilege of choosing when to engage with suffering and when to retreat from it.
Framing all suffering as personal and internal makes invisible the political forces that inflict suffering on entire peoples, and silences those who carry that pain. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh observed: “When bombs begin to fall on people, you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time. Meditation is about the awareness of what is going on—not only in your body and in your feelings, but all around you.”
The Arabic word sumud means “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance,” but its meaning runs deeper than any translation can capture. Sumud is the art of remaining rooted while everything around you is designed to uproot you. It is the quiet defiance of continuing to exist, to love, to hope, to create culture and meaning in the face of systems designed to erase you. Sumud describes Palestinian nonviolent resistance—not just the organized political kind, but the everyday acts of survival that become resistance: planting olive trees knowing they may be uprooted tomorrow, teaching children the name of their grandfather’s village even when maps have been redrawn, cooking traditional meals that carry the taste of home, preserving memory like a sacred flame in a world that profits from your forgetting.
Sumud is what I practice when I refuse to let my pain and that of my community be silenced, when I insist on my right to name our suffering even in spaces that would prefer our silence. It is the mindful work of staying human when dehumanization presses against me from every side.
Perhaps this is what the Buddha meant when he taught that right speech includes not only speaking truthfully, but speaking what is useful and timely. In a world where Palestinian existence is denied, speaking our truth becomes a spiritual practice. In a world where our suffering is made invisible, bearing witness becomes a form of resistance.
The sangha I seek is one where my Palestinian heart can rest alongside my meditation practice, where my family’s trauma can be held with the same tenderness as any other form of suffering, where my people’s struggle for justice is recognized as inseparable from all beings’ struggle for liberation. We need to create such spaces, and until then I practice sumud—the art of staying rooted in truth, love, and resistance while the world tries to uproot everything I hold sacred.
This is my teaching, born from the intersection of meditation cushion and checkpoint, of dharma and displacement: Liberation cannot be complete while any people suffer under systematic oppression. Enlightenment that ignores injustice is merely another form of sleep, and the most profound spiritual practice may be the simple, radical act of insisting that all beings—Palestinian beings included—deserve to be seen, to be heard, to be free.
