War, Moral Injury, & Mindfulness

By Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR

I'm Iranian American. Born in Iran, came to the US when I was less than two years old. I've lived my whole life the child of these two countries, and this weekend they went to war with each other. A friend asked me how I was feeling in all this. I shared it’s like living with two divorced parents who fought my entire life and are now trying to kill each other. 

I have family in Tehran. My uncle, my aunt, my cousin, and his three-year-old son. Two weeks ago, I talked to my aunt. She spoke to me like it was the last time we'd ever talk. Not dramatic, not panicked. Hopeless. Despair in a way I'd never heard from her before, in a way I’d never heard from anyone before. It felt like something out of a World War II movie, except it was a Saturday and I was sitting in my mom's living room outside D.C. I didn't know what to say. I babbled some empty reassurance. 

Moral Injury

I'm an American citizen and taxpayer. My tax dollars funded the bombs that are killing people I care about. And that tension, being tied by citizenship and money to violence being done to people you love, has a name. It's called moral injury. Many of you have been carrying this feeling long before Saturday. Maybe you've been carrying it since the first attack on Gaza, watching tens of thousands of civilians killed, maybe since Vietnam. That same impossible gap between what you believe and what is being done in your name. If you've been holding that weight, you're not alone. More people feel this than are saying it out loud.

If these conflicts feel far away to you, I'd ask you to notice that distance. Not as a judgment. Just honestly. What allows some suffering to land in your body and other suffering to stay a headline?

The Body

These past few days, as we are at the start of a war, maybe you're constantly checking the news on your phone. Your patience is shorter with people who haven't done anything wrong. Sleep is off. There's tightness in your chest or your jaw. You're running worst-case scenarios on repeat. You might notice fear, anger. A helplessness that folds into something heavier. Despair, doom. That's not a malfunction. Your nervous system is responding to perceived threat exactly the way it's supposed to. Even when the explosions are thousands of miles away and arriving through your phone, the body feels like the bombs are dropping right next to you.

What I'm Actually Doing (not the image I'm projecting)

I’m feeling all this, too. You might ask, what is the enlightened leader of Mindful Leader doing? Am I floating in the non-duality of the oneness of love? Checking what quote my favorite celebrity guru, whose lineage I am part of, has to say on Instagram? 

No. I'm working out. I got a massage. I went for a walk. I called family and checked in with folks. As for mindfulness, right now it's more of a safety net. Daily mental hygiene. It's not elevating me anywhere. There's no easy peace, no comforting calm, no press play and instant relaxation. My mind is an unstable place right now, an internal battlefield with emotional mines ready to be tripped. But I know I have to go there and face it. In silence, and with all the strong, sometimes slightly insane thoughts that silence seems to amplify. That's the practice for me. Showing up when I don't want to and facing the madness of my mind with no filters. Raw. In silence. And I know it will be like flossing, not something I really want to do, something I might avoid, but it's good for me, and when I do it, I feel better after. 

I'm also writing this. That's doing something too. Journaling, processing, turning the noise in my head into words on a page. I don't know how this war will end, but I do know what I'm going to do today. I'm going to stabilize. Eat something. Move my body. Be present with my kids even though I'm carrying something they don't fully understand. Then I'm going to check on someone. A text, a call, nothing elaborate. Not as a guru with the answers, but as a fellow human struggling, just letting them know I see you and I care.

And at some point today, I'm going to sit in silence and let my mind do what it's going to do. Two minutes, maybe twenty. See how long I can sit in the warzone of my mind. 

That's the practice. I do it in times of peace. I do it in times of war.