The day my seventh silent meditation retreat ended was the day the US and Israel attacked Iran. After nine days without my phone, it felt strange to scroll through the news again. Not only because my mind had just spent more than 100 hours in silence and meditation, but also because it raises questions about the role of meditation in times of political conflict and injustice.
There is no doubt that a retreat like this is beneficial for mental health. A newscycle detox does wonders, even if it feels like a radical cold-turkey cut. The real magic of meditation, however, lies in the daily practice afterwards. But how do you continue that practice when the world around you feels like it’s on fire?
The Buddhist meditation method I follow—Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin—teaches that suffering ends when we stop reacting with craving or aversion. The practice is about observing bodily sensations, and recognizing ánd understanding that everything is impermanent. From that perspective, attachment becomes a central theme. In the retreat notes, I wrote down: “A monk dwells detached.”
But what does detachment mean in the context of struggles for justice?
What about Palestinians, Burmese people, Kurdish people, and many others fighting for their right to exist? What about attachment to land and “your” people? How can a practice that emphasizes non-attachment resonate with people whose lives are defined by dispossession, or with people who advocate for justice?
It also made me think about the relationship between Vipassana and decolonial thinking. There are interesting commonalities between the two—especially around awareness, conditioning, and the idea of liberation—but there are also tensions.
One of the main takeaways from a Vipassana retreat is that the most reliable truth is the one you discover through your own experience. This does not mean that books, teachers, studies, or other people’s knowledge and insights are irrelevant. They matter. But understanding becomes complete only when it is confirmed through direct observation.
That is why the meditation practice focuses on observing the breath and sensations in the body without reacting to them. Last week’s retreat was specifically focusing on the Maha Satipatthana Sutta, a discourse of the Buddha that describes awareness not simply as noticing what happens, but understanding its nature. And that nature is impermanence: the fact that everything that arises will eventually pass away.
In Vipassana, this is not a philosophical statement, but something you experience directly by observing how the breath comes in and goes out of your body, and how bodily sensations—both on the skin and deeper inside—appear, change, and disappear again.
The process is governed by what Goenka calls the Law of Nature, which is not a religious belief, but the natural order of how things arise and dissolve. We know this from physics classes at school as well: everything is in constant motion and transformation. Our bodies are not static objects but constantly changing systems of cells and subatomic particles. In meditation, you observe this process on a deep level. The liberation — in Buddhist terms — comes from not reacting blindly to that dynamic, and by withholding a response, you break the cycle of suffering.
But Vipassana is not science, and it is not a political philosophy either. It is best understood as a psychological and ethical method that trains the mind to see reality as it is, not as you like it to be. The focus is on the present moment and how it constantly changes.
Take, as a simple example, an itch on your arm. The immediate reaction often is to scratch it. But if you observe the sensation instead of reacting to it, you may notice that the itch changes and eventually disappears on its own. The idea of Vipassana is that if you would immediately react, on autopilot, without thinking about it, you reinforce a pattern of craving or aversion, in Buddhist terminology called sankharas.
The same mechanism can take place on a mental level. Imagine waking up on your birthday, craving a specific chocolate cake from the bakery around the corner. You walk there with expectations, probably mouth-watering, only to discover that your favorite cake is sold out. A Vipassana practitioner would still feel the craving arise, but instead of letting disappointment ruin the day, they shrug and accept the reality as it is. The cake, like everything else, is impermanent.
So how does this relate to struggles for justice?
From a Vipassana perspective, strong identification with something involves attachment. That attachment can concern many things: a person, an identity, an idea, or a piece of land. But acknowledging attachment does not automatically mean that injustice should be ignored.
The Buddhist framework makes an important distinction between two levels of suffering:
- The external reality of injustice and violence, and
- the internal reaction to it, through revenge, blind rage, or hatred.
You can act for justice, but if your act comes from a place of hatred, you likely create new suffering. Through the lens of meditation, suffering is rooted in craving and aversion. Through the lens of justice, suffering is rooted in oppression and dispossession. Both explanations can be true at the same time, but they work on different levels.
Vipassana focuses on the internal dynamics of your mind: how emotions like hatred, anger, and craving create suffering within you. Justice movements focus on external systems of power: colonization, occupation, discrimination, and exploitation.
One analyzes the psychology of suffering and the other analyzes the structure of suffering. They are not mutually exclusive.
In this context, Vipassana says that one aversion cannot eradicate another aversion. Hatred cannot eliminate hatred. Reacting to anger with more anger only perpetuates the cycle. In Buddhist language, harmful reactions create new sankharas that reinforce suffering.
So, if you fight injustice while cultivating hatred, you risk reproducing the very suffering you are trying to end. This does not mean injustice should be accepted. Vipassana does not teach passivity. On the contrary, from my experience, the practice energizes towards more action and gives clarity about what exactly to do.
The question is not whether to act in the context of injustice, but how and from what mental state your action emerges.
How to confront injustice without hatred?
This is where some people criticize meditation practices like Vipassana as spiritual practices that individualize suffering and depoliticize systemic violence. The truth in the critique is that if suffering is framed solely as a psychological phenomenon, structural injustice disappears from the analysis.
But, as I said before, Vipassana does not analyze systems of power; it analyzes mental conditioning. And the two perspectives can complement each other. Inner clarity does not replace political struggle, but it can prevent political struggle from becoming cyclical revenge.
Decolonial thinking, for example, often focuses on understanding the historical origins of injustice. Colonial history explains how present inequalities came into existence. Vipassana takes a different entry point. Instead of asking how suffering began, it asks how suffering continues in the present moment. This also relates to the colonial matrix of power, the ongoing influence of systems set in place during colonial times. Think of certain laws, borders between nations, and racism.
That difference in perspective can create tension, but it can also open a conversation about how history explains the conditions that produced injustice and how liberation depends on how we respond to those conditions now.
If we apply this to Palestine, for example, the present reality is unmistakable: Israel is making people suffer in Gaza and the West Bank. Historical analysis matters in understanding how the Palestinian struggle for dignity and safety emerged, but the immediate suffering exists regardless of theoretical frameworks.
Vipassana would say that understanding history can be useful, but liberation from suffering ultimately depends on how the mind relates to what is happening. That does not invalidate struggles for justice; it simply adds another dimension.
Some experts in the Palestine-Israel conflict clearly emphasize that the occupation must end first, before anything else. I can see how that first clear action fits in the theory of Vipassana, and how from there a next step towards justice will be developed.
The most difficult part of the meditation theory is that you can resist oppression, tell the truth, and fight for justice without allowing hatred to define you, even though anger can be mobilizing.
Many activists rightly argue that anger can generate energy for resistance. But anger can also cloud judgment and reduce complex realities to simplified enemies. It’s a fine line. During last week’s retreat, I learned that you always need some tension or pressure to make an effort. Otherwise, you’ll easily go towards the extreme end of not caring at all.
The idea is that Vipassana not only brings clarity but also compassion, and they both produce a different kind of strength. I wrote in my retreat notes: “You should be the first object of compassion.” In other words, taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It is a condition for acting wisely in the world.
This idea resonates with movements like The Nap Ministry, which frame rest as a form of resistance and a foundation for liberation work. Rest is not withdrawal from the world but a way to restore the energy needed to engage with it.
It leads to a politically uncomfortable conclusion, though, because Buddhist ethics also asks you to extend compassion not only to the oppressed, but also to the oppressor, since both are trapped in conditioning.
It doesn’t mean excusing injustice or abandoning accountability; it means recognizing and understanding that cycles of violence often reproduce themselves through unresolved hatred. Read the news, and you understand how that works.
The real challenge lies in confronting injustice without becoming consumed by the same patterns of aversion. Meditation won’t solve the war that the US and Israel started in West Asia, or dismantle the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But it may help cultivate the clarity needed to act without perpetuating the very suffering you hope to end.
And that might be where inner transformation and social justice intersect.
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