Hi Peter 😊

Thank you for letting me know that you’ll ne away from the 🖥 for a while.

I would very much like to read more about the grass metaphor, what it looks like/ feels like for you 🤔, and about the wonder of children still there ✨️, uncovered perhaps, or recovered, or something else.

✨️✨️✨️ Anita

Hey Confused:

She asked: “When you got it (continuous, stable, reliable love), u didn’t know what to do with it?”-

It’s a question that makes sense to me, it feeling foreign. Being programmed for what you grew up (aggression followed by affection, rinse and repeat).

How did you answer her question?

🤔 Anita

Hi Peter:

Strange how differently I 👀 you now. Not abstract or unfeeling, but someone who speaks a language I didn’t understand, a language worth understanding.

And you kept speaking the same language through times when you were challenged (for a period of time, quite aggressively, I thought)- not because you were inflexible, indifferent, or out of touch, or passive, or weak, but because you refused (gently, kindly) to tether your inner peace to a moving target.

Maintaining presence to oneself and to others is an active, deliberate practice that looks passive on the outside, you say.

It’s active, but not reactive, I say. I want to practice just that.

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. Yes, I did lose my footing many times. I think it will happen less often now, moving forward, because of our communication right here. Thank you 😊

Peace= The quiet capacity to stay awake to the world’s pain without letting it extinguish our own light ✨️ (your words)

Beautifully said. Couldn’t have said it better, and yet, you chose to end your post with my words: peace moving from inside out.

To me, this feels like emotional generosity: Peter running 🏃‍♂️ alongside me 🏃‍♀️ in open, endless fields of green grass.

I am hearing The News Hour right now, war news, good thing writing you this message makes me feel good nonetheless 🙏

✌️🤍 Anita

* I wrote: “So, the ‘solution’… is promoting peace from within outward”- “Solution” implies a problem to fix, a plan, a strategy, an outcome and control, while you’re speaking from a place of acceptance, presence, inner steadiness, humility, and non‑control.

The word (solution) chose me, didn’t it?

What word do you think, Peter, would fit in the place of “solution”: path/ posture/ practice, orientation.. ?

Good morning, Confused:

These kinds of things, early childhood experiences such as a pattern of aggression by a mother, interrupted by times of affection, then back to aggression and suspicion (her thinking you’re manipulative when you were affectionate), these things cannot be solved by logic alone.

It takes real, competent professional help. There are many therapists out there who invested years and years in education and practice because so many, many people need this kind of help.

I just wish you came across a competent, experienced therapist.

🙏🤍✌️👀🤔 Anita

Good morning, Peter:

* I just noticed that you submitted a post 25 minutes ago, while I was preparing this one. I didn’t read it yet (beyond the first line) and will send this reply first. Afterwards, I’ll read and reply to the recent).

In the message I sent you last night, I focused on just one thing you wrote yesterday (“wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what, helpless…”) and took it out of context.

In the context of your whole message (the one addressed to me, and the one addressed to Alessa- which I read for the first time this morning), you were describing the emotional impact of witnessing suffering, the human impulse to help, the frustration of not being able to change global events, and the helplessness that comes from caring deeply.

It’s about the limits of being one small person in a huge world and witnessing suffering you cannot stop.
This is existential helplessness, not political helplessness.

You weren’t saying: “I want to join a movement.”, “I want to take political action.”, “I want to fix the world.” You were saying: “It hurts to see suffering and not be able to stop it.”, “I wish I could ease the pain I see.”, “I don’t know what to do with these feelings.”

It’s not about plans, action steps, solving a problem, changing the world; it’s not about political or practical solutions. It’s emotional, not strategic.

Everything in your message to me and in the message to Alessa points to inner grounding, not outer activism. So, you “wanting to do something” meant wanting to stay emotionally present to suffering without being overwhelmed — not wanting to take political action.

In my last message to you, I again lost sight of you (the person I’m responding to) and saw myself in you. Your line: “wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what, helpless…” jumped out of the computer screen, and I interpreted (last night) it through my own emotional lens, not yours.

I was feeling urgency, fear, a desire to act, a wish to make a difference, a sense of responsibility and a need to not be passive. So, when I read “wanting to do something,” in isolation, my mind filled in: “He must mean what I mean — wanting to take action, to help, to change something.” I was seeing myself in your words, projecting my own meaning onto your words, reading my own urgency into your helplessness, and interpreting your longing through my own.

You were speaking about something much more human and internal — the wish to stay present, to not shut down, to hold sadness without being overwhelmed, and I’m with you in that quieter meaning.

I want to grow this capacity in myself too — to stay present, to not shut down, to hold sadness without being overwhelmed. I’d like to hear more about how this feels for you, or how you stay close to that quieter place.

🤍🌿🌾 Anita

Dear Alessa:

Thank you for your empathy and good wishes!

I called my sister a minute after I read this morning that the town where she lives was hit by a missile (from Iran), or a rocket (from Lebanon), and she said she heard nothing, she was in the “safe room” and heard nothing.

I then sent her photos 📸 of Bogart and she loved them.

About my communication with Norit, it was mostly about my 2016 communication with her in her first thread, mostly, not her last 2023 thread where you were a part ⁶

I understand my .. unskillful responses, and want to do better, that’s all. Not to punish myself, but to learn and improve.

🤍🌙🤍🙏 Anita

Dear Tom:

As fit 💪 and as young as possible, I like that! That’s just what I do. Actually, I am more fit now than I was at 40.

At 40, I was overweight and sluggish. Now, I’m slender and agile.

Did you ever attend a tai-chi class? That’s one practice that combines physical fitness and mental fitness.

💪🤍🕺 Anita