Gaza on My Mind: Why Mental Health Needs Moral Health

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

There was a moment during a Meditate Together session a few years ago that has stayed with me.

A member was checking in from Ramallah and started talking about what was happening around her. As she spoke, I noticed something uncomfortable within myself. Part of me didn't want to hear it. It wasn't because I didn't care. I cared. That was the problem. Somewhere inside me, I knew that if I let her suffering in, it might ask something of me. It was easier to keep some distance.

I had a business to run, an audience with very different political beliefs, and relationships and programs I cared about protecting. I also had a principle I genuinely believed in: mindfulness should be apolitical. That principle went back years. After the 2016 election, I wanted a mindfulness organization whose board I served on to take a political stand. I was scared and angry. An older board member pushed back with five words:

People on all sides need healing.

I didn't like his answer at the time. Eventually, I came to see wisdom in it. I worried that mindfulness was becoming politically homogeneous while talking about openness, compassion, and nonjudgment. I wanted our practice spaces to be places where people with very different beliefs could sit together without being told what politics they were required to hold. I wrote about that tension in Is Mindfulness Bridging the Political Divide or Widening It?

I still believe in that aspiration. But Gaza exposed something I had missed. When the war began, I was horrified. Then I became numb. I told myself that Mindful Leader was apolitical. I drafted versions of an article about the mindfulness field's silence for more than a year and didn't publish them.

Confronting "Apolitical"

Some of that restraint was principle. Some of it was fear. I was afraid of getting it wrong, alienating people, damaging relationships, losing business, and being accused of taking a side. “Apolitical” gave me a respectable place to hide. Eventually I published The Mindfulness Field's Silence on War and wrote something I still believe: “Apolitical is a principle. Amoral is a failure.” But I am still working out what that means.

Today, I believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That conviction does not require me to minimize the horrific slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7 or the nightmare of the hostages taken by Hamas. But compassion for both Israeli and Palestinian suffering does not require pretending that power, harm, or responsibility are equal. Everyone may need healing. That does not mean everyone holds equal power or bears equal responsibility. 

Looking back at that moment with the woman from Ramallah, what troubles me isn't only that I wanted to turn away.

It is that I had become capable of regulating the discomfort while avoiding its meaning.

That realization has made me think differently about mindfulness. We have become very good at regulation. We learn to notice anger without being consumed by it, make room for fear, return to the breath, settle the nervous system, and create enough space to choose rather than react. These capacities matter. I teach them, practice them, and have benefited enormously from them. But regulation is not the same as responsiveness. Grief may tell us that something precious has been lost. Guilt may point toward something that needs repair. Anger may arise because something we value has been violated. Distress is not always evidence that something inside us needs to be fixed. It can also tell us something about our relationship with the world around us.

Finding Moral Health

If practice ends with making discomfort more manageable, we may become better at accommodating ourselves to things that should trouble us. This is why the idea of moral injury has stayed with me.

I first began wrestling with it years ago through the workplace-wellness debate. In Meditation Won't Fix Burnout, It's About Moral Injury, I wondered whether some of what we were calling burnout wasn't simply a problem of insufficient resilience. What if people were suffering because they were being asked to work and live in ways that violated deeply held values?

Moral injury describes what can happen when something we do, witness, fail to prevent, or participate in seriously violates those values. Earlier this year, during the war between the United States and Iran, the idea became intensely personal for me. In War, Moral Injury, & Mindfulness, I wrote about the painful gap between what we believe and what is being done, sometimes in our name and sometimes with our participation.

That has left me wondering about something I have started calling moral health.

By moral health, I mean our capacity to remain in an honest relationship with our deepest values, our own humanity, and the humanity of others. It includes noticing when a gap begins to open between who we understand ourselves to be and how we are actually living, and finding ways to repair that relationship when it has been injured.

Mental health is concerned, in part, with how we navigate life. Moral health concerns whether, as we navigate it, we remain connected to what we value and to one another. This question implicates me professionally as much as personally. I run Mindful Leader. We teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Reduction is literally in the name.

I believe deeply in that work. People need help with anxiety, stress, reactivity, and suffering. But I wonder whether the modern mindfulness field has become so focused on managing internal states that we sometimes fail to ask what those states might be telling us. Mindfulness did not emerge historically as an isolated technique for attention or nervous-system regulation. It existed within a broader ethical path concerned with intention, speech, action, livelihood, and how a person lives.

Secular mindfulness removed much of that religious framework for good reasons. It made the practice accessible to millions of people who would never have entered a Buddhist community. But perhaps we stripped away too much of the question. For those of us who teach and lead in the mindfulness field, that question deserves more attention. We teach people to turn toward difficulty. We talk about compassion, awareness, non-harming, courage, and truth. It is relatively easy to endorse those values when they cost us nothing. Living them can be harder.

The answer is not that mindfulness teachers need to issue statements about every conflict or turn practice spaces into political forums. I still believe there is enormous value in places where people with different political beliefs can practice together. What I no longer believe is that being apolitical relieves us of the responsibility to examine what our values require of us. Practice does not give us a predetermined answer. Nor should it. But I hope it keeps us from becoming so good at managing discomfort that we no longer hear the question:

What kind of person is this practice helping me become?

Practice: Mind the Gap

What am I asking of me?

This practice is not intended to produce the right answer. It is an opportunity to notice whether something you are experiencing is asking for more than regulation.

1. Arrive and notice. Bring to mind something in your life, your community, or the world that troubles you. Notice what happens in the body and mind without trying to calm it down or make it disappear.
2. Ask what matters. What is being touched here? A person, a relationship, fairness, safety, dignity, honesty, compassion? Notice what matters underneath your immediate reactions and opinions.
3. Notice where you turn away. Is there something you would rather not see because acknowledging it would be uncomfortable? Is there distance between what you value and how you are participating or responding? See if you can notice that without resolving it.
4. Ask what is yours to do. Not what everyone else should do. What, if anything, is actually yours? Stay with the question for a while before deciding.

Then return to the breath and the body.

You do not need to finish with an answer.

Further Reading

• Meditation Won't Fix Burnout, It's About Moral Injury (2019)
• Is Mindfulness Bridging the Political Divide or Widening It? (2022)
• War, Moral Injury, & Mindfulness (2026)
• The Mindfulness Field's Silence on War (2026)

This article is part of our Exercises & Practices Series where we offer unique practices designed to support personal growth and professional development for you to explore and share.