Live Session Summary, Sunday, February 8, 2026: It was good to be with you for our live session today. The theme of the session was “Living with Beauty and Courage in Turbulent Times: The 3 Yes-ses.”
Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from the live session:
I began by recognizing that the time we are living in is a very difficult one—with deep divisions, actions coming from the highest levels that many of us see as causing great suffering and that fly in the face of our aspirations for peace, justice, and compassion. In the face of these challenges, how do we live with equanimity and peace? And can we engage with the suffering of the world in ways that support love, peace, and connection?
It is very easy to get caught up in one of more of three basic illusions or misperceptions that cause us suffering:
• Believing and acting as though the world should be different than it is.
• Believing that other people and their actions should be different than they are.
• Believing that our own experience—our feelings, emotions, thoughts, and mind states—should be different than it is.
Buddhist and other wisdom teachings point to an approach that is counter-intuitive and that leads to the deepest peace and freedom by:
• Accepting that life, the world, is as it is—and arises from causes and conditions.
• Accepting that other people are as they are—including when they act in ways that are harmful or that we do not agree with.
• And accepting that our own experience is as it is—even when it is not how we would like it to be.
The first ‘yes’ is to the world as it is. When we say yes to life, we are taking refuge in the truth, in how things are—and this is a path to freedom. When we resist experiences and situations that are not to our liking, we come into conflict with life and this is a recipe for unhappiness and suffering.
• In Zen Buddhism, they say ‘the obstacle is the path.’ That is, rather than getting in our way, the difficulty offers us a path to freedom by pointing us towards something that has not been examined or accepted.
• The poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us to “always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”
• The Jesuit philosopher and teacher Anthony de Mello defined enlightenment as “absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
When we accept life as it is, we are then in a position to try to change what can be changed and to accept what cannot be changed. This is the path of freedom.
The second ‘yes’ is to other people. I shared Jean-Paul Sartre’s saying that “Hell is other people”—and it’s easy for us to make other people into a hell. When people cause harm or act in ways that annoy or irritate us, we think they should be different and we make them into what Tara Brach calls ‘the unreal other’. We see their faults’ and fail to see their humanity.
When we see all beings as having the potential to wake up and experience freedom, when we see that we all have Buddha nature, then we see the other’s humanity, rather than just seeing their failings and shortcomings. If we are to build a peaceful and loving world we need to recognize that it has to include everyone. Everyone is part of the Beloved Community. If our world has winners and losers there will always be conflict. The path to peace and connection is to love everyone. This is the path of the bodhisattva—one who is committed to their own awakening and to helping heal the suffering of the world, committed to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ transformation.
Dr. Martin Luther King captured this love for all beings shortly before his assassination:
• “I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.... But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” (M.L. King, ’A Christmas Sermon for Peace on Dec 24, 1967)
The third ‘yes’ is to our own experience. When we experience difficult emotions—sadness, anger, fear, grief—our tendency is to want to avoid these feelings. We escape by numbing ourselves through distraction or through transient pleasures or by acting out our anger or suppressing our grief. This is not a pathway to true happiness and peace.
Peace and freedom come through saying ‘yes’ to our experience, ‘welcoming the guests’, saying yes to what is, radical acceptance. When we meet our experience with acceptance and kindness, all our feelings—pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral—can come and go without causing us suffering. They can, in Tibetan Buddhist terms, ‘self-liberate’, if we don’t cling or resist.
These three ‘yes-ses’ offer us a way of living in the world where we do not make enemies of other people, of difficult experiences, or of our own feelings, sensations, thoughts and emotions. We can meet life as it is, without resistance. We can change what is possible to change without bringing the energy of hostility and aggression into the world to perpetuate conflict and division. It’s not an easy path, but it is a path that we can cultivate and practice—meeting ‘failures’ with compassion—and leading to the deepest freedom.
I shared:
• ‘There was a time I would reject those…’ poem by Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi.
• Longfellow’s "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
• Extract from “Peace is this moment without judgment” , poem by Dorothy Hunt.
• Poem ‘Eternity’ by William Blake[
Wishing you all a good week ahead. I look forward to being together for our next session in two weeks, on Sunday, February 22 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
