✨ Returning from the Sacred Pause (part 1)✨
New beginnings with Diwali 💫
Dear ones,
Happy happy Diwali! 🌟 After a four-month sacred pause, I am very happy to return to your inbox during this auspicious week. People around the world celebrate Diwali as a new beginning, particularly as one that symbolizes the victory of light over shadows.
From a collective perspective, that means over a billion people are turning their thoughts, words, and deeds towards light: they are releasing the past and they are setting intentions for a brighter and healthier future.
Each Diwali, I receive dozens of messages and prayers for my health, happiness, and prosperity, blessings I wholeheartedly reciprocate. There’s something so moving about being a part of this virtuous circle of giving and receiving, which makes this time feel like a profoundly powerful time to begin again.
During my sacred pause, I’ve been listening deeply, journaling my observations and insights, and re-visioning what’s next. And today, I want to share some of those reflections with you, and what they mean for my work, and by extension, for our work together. This will be a first of a series of reflections I will share with you for the remainder of this year.
Returning to my felt-sense motivation
Some highlights of how I spent the past few months included:
Leading a prayer for over 200 couples at Lincoln Center’s Annual Mass Wedding Event with clergy from various faith traditions.
Attending Roots & Refuge, a powerful retreat for Asian American Buddhist writers at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies;
Learning from Indigenous wisdom keepers in Hawaii with a heart-led community of Reworlders to learn to courageously hospice what is dying with radical tenderness;
Turning 40 (!) and welcoming this milestone with my fiancee and the spirits of our ancestors in Bali;
Spending an hour or more every day in deep meditation and prayer for myself, for you, and for our beloved planet; and
Instituting a regular practice of grieving and forgiveness.
Throughout this time, I was off of news media, social media, and even my email (outside of logistical necessities). This distance from technology and the closeness with humans and nature allowed me to remember the heart of what motivated me to found Be More in 2014.
In the summer of 2010, while interning in New Orleans, I watched a judge repeatedly give harsh prison sentences to dozens of young black teenage boys for petty offenses like possession of small amounts of marijuana, breaking cell phones, and trespass to property. I remembered feeling the despair in their bodies as if it was in my body. I recalled experiencing the hopelessness in the hearts and minds of their families who watched this spectacle with me. I witnessed in them generations of human beings who had been forcibly separated from their loved ones and tortured for no other reason than their being.
Instantly, I experienced the cries of millions of ancestors stolen from their cultures and communities, perishing on ships and sold as a “thing” not too far from where I sat. I felt in my jaw and my belly the anguish of centuries of injustice and the fear of being terrorized, humiliated, degraded, and mistreated for no other reason than one’s outer being. And lastly, I felt a sense of deep fatigue – of just having had it, which at that moment presented as powerlessness and submission to the judge’s orders.
If this upsets you, please take a few breaths and orient where you are, and gently place your hand on your heart and repeat “I am safe” to yourself before proceeding.
The anger I felt in my body was so palpable that it expressed itself as loud exhales which led the court’s “officer of the peace” to escort me out of the courtroom. As I walked out of that room, the cruelty of mass incarceration and disparities based on race intuitively made sense. There was a strong knowing that the cause of such cruelty and injustice is not in the design of the policies and practices, but in the hearts, minds, and the underlying mindset of the humans who wrote and executed these policies.
That day I realized that our laws and policies are not designed from a mindset that feels familiar to me and likely many of you: one that desires to repair, restore, or heal.
Rather, our systems were designed and executed from consciousness of separation, of cruelty, and of wanting to punish and taking pleasure in retribution. Within this system, even the most enlightened human actor is forced to succumb to these systems’ underlying logic and consciousness.
I have revisited this day numerous times in my courses and talks, but never with the level of somatic awareness I provide above. In the words of trauma expert Thomas Hubl, I was “psychically and emotionally attuned” with the people in that courtroom, and the moral disgust that I felt towards our criminal justice system as a direct response to such attunement transformed me.
A few weeks after that experience, I undertook a very different journey within my own heart-mind by temporarily ordaining as a Buddhist monk in Taiwan. These two experiences could not have been any more difference. And I have come to trust that they were orchestrated as such because my time in Taiwan was the medicine I needed to appreciate the profound power of an expertly guided regular meditation practice in expanding our awareness and softening even the most hardened hearts and minds. After that month, I could hold the human who was the sentencing judge with the eyes of understanding and compassion because I could look at the decisions he was making from his perspective – and not what I wished his perspective “should be.”
The work of building a beloved community
We are living through a confusing and chaotic time. We are witnessing a world where wars, mass murders, and disinformation are normalized. The AI technology race is upending the post-war structure of our lives including employment, education, and relations with ourselves and one another, while politicians, influencers, and other opportunists are openly sowing hatred, fear, and division within our human family. Misperceptions and misapprehensions are spreading like contagions, infecting human minds with little regulation or resistance to stop them.
For the past year, I’ve gone into the rabbit hole of the many shadows that are rising in our world and I have felt three emotions – fear, worry, and despair. As I shared with you in my last post, I chose to take this sacred pause to be with these emotions fully and I discovered that these emotions are merely the symptoms.
I have now come to remember that these emotions, like all emotions, are produced by the mind. And we humans have the power to stall their production and supplant them with any emotions we like, including more wholesome ones like compassion, wisdom, generosity, and gratitude.
This brings me to what you’ve likely been wondering…what’s Anu going to do moving forward?
Revisiting my time in New Orleans and Taiwan helped crystallize my work ahead: to bridge the head with the heart; to support people overcome and heal from the lure of separation; to remember in an embodied way that we are a part of an interdependent “network of mutuality”; and to be able to skillfully bridge this gap without diluting, denying, or neglecting the relative reality of injustice and cruelty in our world.
To be continued in my next post!
Please join me at these upcoming events
I am speaking at Lion’s Roar’s How to Live a Good Human Life Summit with leading psychologists, trauma therapists, and Buddhist teachers. My talk “Wise Leadership and Self-Care for Times of Change” is an invitation to cultivate wisdom and compassion in times of change. This free online summit runs between October 23 - 27 and I hope you will sign up. Participating in such events helps us extract our attention from the unwholesome and consciously place it on what is life-giving and wholesome.
I will be giving a talk at Middle Church’s Freedom Rising Conference on Sunday, November 2nd! This is a jam-packed conference with inspirational scholars, theologians, and activists speaking about the “Fierce Urgency of Now.” If you’re attending, I can’t wait to hug you in-person. You can get discounted digital tickets for $99 through October 29, 2025 here.
Breaking Bias is going to Dubai! I’ll be discussing my book at the Dubai Future Forum from November 18 - 19. I’d love your input on what are some themes and topics I should address during my time there, especially since I will be in the Middle East/West Asia. Also, please message me if you or someone you know will be attending. I would love to connect in person!
Also, yours truly was on the Telepathy Tapes. I can’t wait for you to listen to my episode on Eastern Wisdom Traditions and Telepathy. Check it out here.
🔹 Some Gratitudes
In the spirit of Diwali, I want to acknowledge the folks who allowed me to take a sacred pause and made it possible for me to find renewal so I can show up as I am today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. ❤️
Pop Culture Collaborative for their financial support and mentorship to navigate through the rough waters of this transition.
Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity: I am so grateful to be a part of the 2025 cohort and to infuse the work of racial equity in this next iteration of our work.
My team and advisors: Asa, Josh, Christine, Susan, Priya, Steve, James, and Caroline – Thank you!!
Most importantly, YOU! I am so looking forward to bringing you into my world of possibilities. Thank you for sticking around. I love you.
Please comment below or send me a DM on how this post landed for you and any ideas it has percolated for you. I look forward to being in conversation.
May this post-Diwali season be filled with health, happiness, and success for you! More soon!
With all my love,
Anu
I truely resonate with what you wrote about new beginnings. Your ability to take a sacred pause is so insightful. I recall your previous reflection on intentional living; this feels like a powerful continuation. My 'pauses' usually involve grading papers, so I appreciate the widsom of a proper reset.