Monthly Archive

Holding a Hand

Before I started my psychology degree, I worked for six months as a porter at the Maudsley Hospital in London.

Part of the job was accompanying patients to and from ECT. Electroconvulsive therapy. A machine, a treatment, a protocol. Very efficient. Very clinical.

What I remember most clearly is what happened after.

Patients would come round slowly, disoriented, identity temporarily loosened, trying to find their way back to themselves. The staff were usually busy — paperwork, schedules, routines. Perfectly understandable.

So I held a hand.

Not as a professional.
Not because it was my job.
Just because someone was there, and someone needed anchoring.

That moment taught me more about humanity than any lecture that followed.

The thin line

At the hospital Christmas party, something else struck me. With alcohol, laughter, loosened roles and dropped uniforms, I found it hard to tell the difference between patients and staff.

Not because anyone was “mad”, but because the line we draw between sane and insane is far thinner than we like to admit.

Context matters. Stress matters. Circumstance matters. Identity is fragile. Sanity is not a permanent state — it’s something negotiated, moment by moment.

That realisation never left me.

Systems get busy, humanity waits

Looking back, what stays with me is not the treatment itself, but how easily systems become occupied while humanity waits quietly.

That pattern hasn’t gone away. It’s everywhere now.

Politics. Institutions. Media. Organisations. All very busy. All very concerned. All talking about solutions.

And yet something essential keeps slipping through the cracks.

Personal responsibility. Presence. Self-awareness.

The simple act of recognising conscious life in oneself.

The same blindness, scaled up

These days I scan the news every morning. It takes me less than five minutes to read the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and SRF.

Same story. Different headline. Different villain. Somebody else is at fault. Somebody else must fix it.

What I see is not evil so much as avoidance. A diminishing willingness to look inward. A growing insistence that peace, sanity and responsibility are external problems.

They aren’t.

Why the Peace Education Programme matters to me

This is why I believe the Peace Education Programme matters.

Not because it fixes the world.
Not because it produces better citizens.
Not because it creates agreement.

But because it does something rare:

It invites people to look at themselves, without blame, ideology or instruction.

It doesn’t tell people what to think.
It doesn’t offer an enemy.
It doesn’t promise outcomes.

It simply points to experience.

Prem Rawat often says: the world doesn’t need peace — individuals do.

I have found that to be true.

The world is an abstraction. Institutions don’t feel. Systems don’t suffer. Only individuals do.

Peace doesn’t spread from slogans or structures. It arises — if it arises at all — inside a human being who begins to recognise what it means to be alive.

Know thyself — still the whole message

“Know thyself” has been repeated throughout history because nothing more complicated has ever been required.

Every teacher pointed to it.
Every religion began there.
And almost every religion lost it — replaced by rules, power and control once the teacher was gone.

What remains is the task itself.

A joyful one, even in sad times.

All I can do

I can’t make people see.
I can’t break down walls.
I can’t change the direction of the world.

But I can leave a marker.

I can hold a hand — sometimes literally, sometimes through words — and point quietly to the only place peace has ever been real.

Inside a human being, discovering themselves.

That’s all I can do.

And, I’ve come to see, it’s enough.

A practical invitation

Because this matters to me, I’m offering the Peace Education Programme here in Zofingen, starting 13 January, at the town library.

The course is not therapy, not religion, not politics, and not about fixing the world.

It’s a chance to pause, to look inward, and to explore what peace, clarity and self-understanding might mean personally — not as ideas, but as lived experience.

There’s no obligation to agree with anything.
No pressure to change.
No expectations.

Just an invitation to look at yourself — honestly, quietly, and at your own pace.

If that resonates, you’re welcome.

Details about the course dates and format can be found here: Website: friedenskurs.ch

Forgiveness: The Journey Back to Ourselves

Forgiveness is a word we use easily, yet it points to something profoundly difficult. People often say, “You must forgive,” as though forgiveness were a simple decision, something one can just do and then get on with life. But real forgiveness is nothing like that. It is not quick. It is not tidy. And it certainly cannot be forced.

Prem Rawat often speaks about forgiveness in a way that turns the usual meaning inside out. He says that forgiving someone else for a “wrong” doesn’t mean very much until we can forgive ourselves. At first, that may sound strange. What does forgiving yourself have to do with what someone else has done?

But when you sit with it, it opens a different door.

The harm done to us—sometimes unbearably deep harm—creates a wound. But over time, what hurts us the most is not only the original action. It is the years we spend carrying the weight of it. The guilt, the anger, the questions with no answers. The feeling that life was unjust, that something irreversible was taken from us. And beneath all of that sits another, quieter layer: the inner voice that blames ourselves for things we never had control over.

“If only I had…”
“I should have…”
“Why didn’t I…”
“Maybe I could have prevented it…”

Those sentences are like chains. They don’t heal the past; they imprison the present.

This is where the idea of forgiving oneself becomes so essential. It is not about blaming yourself. It is not about pretending nothing happened. It is not about diminishing the enormity of the loss. It is simply recognising that we, too, are human—fragile, limited, imperfect—and that we have suffered enough.

Self-forgiveness is not an excuse.
It is a release.

It is giving yourself permission to stop carrying the impossible burden of responsibility for things that were never in your hands. It is allowing the heart, which has been tight for decades, to breathe again—maybe for the first time in a very long time.

And once that inner door begins to open, something shifts. Forgiving others—if it ever becomes possible—no longer feels like a moral duty. It becomes something that arises naturally, slowly, like grass growing through cracked concrete. Not because “they deserve it,” but because you deserve peace.

Peace cannot come from the past.
It can only come from this moment, from the breath that is happening right now.

Prem Rawat often says that life is generous. It keeps offering us new moments, new breaths, regardless of how heavy the old ones were. We do not have to erase the past. We do not have to pretend the pain was smaller than it was. But we can allow a little space around it. We can allow tenderness toward ourselves. We can allow healing to begin where it is needed most—inside.

For some wounds, forgiveness is not a straight path. It isn’t linear, and it has no timetable. It may take a lifetime. That’s all right. What matters is not the pace but the direction: toward softness rather than hardness, toward compassion rather than blame, toward the possibility—just the possibility—of putting down what has been carried for far too long.

Forgiving yourself is not the final step of a tragic story.
It is the first step of a different one.