How much violence we've made normal, and the way home through the body.
The ground of everything, call it God, great spirit, the source, is peace. Not war. Peace.
Most of us have lost the thread of it. We swim in violence the way a fish swims in water.
First I have to name what we've made normal. Not to blame anyone. Not to point at a side. You name a wound out loud before you can clean it. We are one family, and this is happening to all of us.
You can't come home to peace until you feel how far you've wandered from it.
We buy tickets to watch two men hit each other until one can't stand up, and call it a Saturday night. The cage. The ring. Football, where we cheer the hit that ends a career. I've felt the pull myself: the crowd, the adrenaline, the wanting someone to win. What does it do to us to make a show out of pain, week after week?
Our movies teach a boy that the hero is the one with the most efficient way to kill. Every problem solved by force in the last ten minutes. Horror sells fear for fun. Much of the music we hand our kids is a loop of who I'll hurt and what I'll take. None of it is illegal. All of it is a teacher. This is the water we're raising children in.
In 2024 the world spent about 2.7 trillion dollars on its militaries. The steepest rise since the Cold War.1 Then we say we can't afford to feed people, or house them, or heal them.
We make heroes of our most efficient killers. We send our boys off to do things no soul was built to carry, then act surprised when they come home hollow. Many of the men I sit with are veterans, and I love them. I am not against the soldier. I grieve for the soldier. He's often the one most wounded by the machine that used him. I'm against the machine: the one that needs a permanent enemy, dresses killing up as glory, and spends the wealth of the world on ending life instead of tending it.
We can find trillions for war and pennies for peace, and we call that being realistic.
Long before anyone throws a punch, we do violence with words. The contempt behind a screen. The other side named stupid, vermin, less than human. The father who takes his son apart with a single sentence. We've made cruelty a kind of cleverness. Every one of those small acts of war lands in a body, the speaker's and the target's both, and teaches it the world is not safe.
We've built systems that answer suffering with force. Addiction gets a cage. Poverty gets contempt. A family arriving at a border, frightened, carrying their children, gets processed, separated, and disappeared into a machine. They came looking for what our great-grandparents came looking for.
I am not pointing at one party. Every administration has had its hands on this. It's about what we agreed to stop feeling: the moment a mother and her child became a case number. You don't need an immigration policy to have a heart. Those are the people we forgot were us.
We take tender little boys and harden them on purpose. Don't cry. Toughen up. Hit him back. We shame the softness out of them before they're ten, then wonder where the gentle men went. A boy learns violence the way he learns language: by being raised inside it. From a father raised inside it, back down a line none of them chose. An inheritance nobody wanted and everybody passes on.
It comes out sideways. The man who can't sit still. Who explodes at the people he loves and hates himself an hour later. Who drinks it down. Who can only feel big when someone near him feels small. Nearly every violent man I've met was a frightened boy who was never allowed to be frightened.
Our kids do drills now. They learn, in kindergarten, where to hide and how to keep quiet so a man with a gun can't find them. It has a name and a routine and a slot on the calendar, like checking the smoke alarms. I'm not arguing policy; that argument has eaten the grief alive. School became a place a child rehearses surviving their own murder. That is not normal. We tell ourselves it is because we can't bear to keep feeling how wrong it is.
It isn't only us. Right now children are being dug out of rubble. Wars we've half-stopped noticing because there are too many to hold at once. The Middle East. A dozen others that never reach the front page.
I won't tell you who's right over there. Every side in every war has a mother kneeling over a child who isn't breathing, and to her it never mattered whose flag was on the bomb. The moment we decide their children are worth less than ours, we've joined the violence. There is one human family. I know how naive that sounds. It's still true.
The fights we watch, the words we swallow, the fear we're fed by the hour, the wars in the background: none of it stays out there. It goes in. Into the nervous system. Into the body. We live marinated in threat, alarms jammed on, and we call it being an adult. We call it stress. The body knows better. It has been keeping the score the whole time.
The divine is peace. Whatever made the river, the mountain, the breath moving in you now, its nature is peace. Get quiet enough and that's what's there. Not a fight. A stillness. Call it God, great spirit, the ground of being. What matters is that you've felt it. You have, even if only for a second, and that second was more real than all the noise on top of it.
Peace isn't something we have to build. It's what's left when we stop making war on ourselves.
In the nervous system. Plain physiology. Your body has two settings. One gears you up to fight or run or freeze: heart pounding, jaw tight, eyes scanning for the threat. The other lets you rest, digest, heal, and turn toward the people you love. You were built to live in the second and visit the first when a bear walks into the clearing.
We've built a world that trips the alarm all day long. So many of us are stuck in the first setting: wired, clenched, short-fused, unable to rest. Not a character flaw. A body held on high alert too long. You cannot think your way out of it. Peace is not a belief you adopt in your head. It's a state you bring the body back down into.
The basic split, a threat state and a rest state, is settled physiology. The deeper frameworks about how safety works in the body are a useful lens, not the final word.
You do it through the body, because that's where it's stuck. Slow breath. Cold water. Sunlight in the eyes. Work with your hands. Rest. And the two I've organized my life around: music, and the sound of the river.
When researchers played people natural sounds, flowing water especially, the nervous system shifted toward its rest-and-repair state, and the markers of calm went up.2 Slow music, near the pace of a resting heartbeat, lifts the body's rest signals and can bring stress hormones like cortisol down.3 The river has been doing this since before we had a word for it.
This is why I make music, and why I moved to a valley with a river running through it. When the water is loud in the dark, something braced for years lets go. The body remembers it was built for peace.
We've had the story of the strong man backwards. We were sold the fighter: the one who dominates, never backs down, answers everything with force. That isn't strength. That's a frightened boy in a grown man's body, still swinging at the room.
The real man is the agent of peace. Steady when everyone around him is coming apart. He brings a room's temperature down by walking in regulated. He protects not by being the most dangerous man there but by being the safest: the one the kids feel calm next to. He feels the inherited violence rise hot in his chest and does not pass it on. That's where it stops.
That takes more strength than any fight. It's the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.
I sit with men ready to set it down: the grief, the rage, the war they've run inside their own bodies for thirty years. Not to make them soft. To bring the nervous system home, so a man can rest, think clearly, and become, for everyone downstream of him, an agent of peace instead of one more link in the chain.
We do it in the Sacred Valley, with the river running the whole time. Music, real food, work with our hands, a daily rhythm that walks a body back to itself. Not a clinic. Not a program. A place to remember what you already are.
If this landed, come see the work, or write and tell me where you are.
This page is testimony and belief. Where I lean on science, it's cited. None of this is medical advice. If you're carrying more than you can hold, reach for a real person you trust.
The Foundations · The Daily Rhythm · Medicine vs. Drugs · Given freely · Write to me
There is nothing to add. No new course, framework, medication, philosophy. The work is removing: the filth in the body, the filth in the mind, the distractions. When mind and body integrate with the spirit, we remember who we are in our divine perfection. It is time to come home to our hearts and do what is right, without permission or outside validation. This is the work I do on myself every day. My hope is to share the remembering with you, so we wake up together with the sun in our eyes and joy in our hearts.
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