No one cries like a mother cries for peace on earth.
She never got to say goodbye to see the colour in his eyes.
Now he's in the day. Peace on earth.
Hello and welcome back to the Tiny Pod.
This week I want to talk about peace.
Today we are are sitting between Remembrance Sunday and
Remembrance Day, a sacred space of reflection days devoted to
honouring sacrifice, war, loss. A time to remember those fallen
and meditate on what peace actually means, personally and
collectively. The origin of the word peace
comes from the Latin word packs, meaning treaty agreement.
The word often implied a pact of peace imposed by power.
It is a state of order, of power, of who gets to define
calm. But true peace is not merely the
absence of war. Peace requires addressing the
root causes like injustice, inequality, and lack of good
governance. War is big business built into
the system and peace therefore requires the dismantling of
these systems of oppression that those in charge benefit from.
The UK in the last year has spent over 60 billion on war and
when you add in hidden extras like other overseas operations
and industry contracts, that raises the spend significantly
higher. And it is rising, with the
government planning increases in spending on war while public
services such as education, welfare, mental health are all
squeezed and only incrementally funded.
War centralises power, concentrating money, industry
and surveillance into the hands of the powerful few.
Every war becomes a funnel for profit for arms companies,
energy giants and data and tech firms.
Governments and big businesses use war to move money, erase
accountability and to expand state surveillance under the
guise of national security. Governments use war against us
to justify their machinery of control and to expand their
powers to survey and control us through digital IDs, mass data
collection, censorship and militarised policing.
Peace doesn't usually attract the same financial investment
because it doesn't promise the same power structures.
The structures of power and governance globally have been
historically built on violence, colonialism, oppression and
empire expansion. Fear politics feed war machines
and distract from building true safety and equity.
Security, peace, national identity have become weaponized.
If peace is well-being, why is it so ignored?
Why is the war machine louder than the human machine?
Because governments thrive on war.
The word peace literally meant a pact imposed by power.
Peace on the victors terms. The defeated obeyed, commerce
resumed, and the Empire profited.
The Romans would literally bring peace to conquered lands by
enforcing their rule. So peace was a management
strategy, not a moral state. And that legacy continues.
Peace has become an industry itself.
Peacekeeping, reconstruction and humanitarian aid have their own
economies after wars, as we are seeing now with Gaza.
Contracts flood in from arms manufacturers.
Private security firms construct companies, NGOs, consultants,
think tanks. Billions are spent on
stabilisation. The same corporations that made
money supplying weapons make money rebuilding the countries
that their weapons destroyed. Peace becomes monetized and a
cycle of destruction and repair keeps economies turning.
War never ends, it just changes shape, Eisenhower wrote.
Every gun that is made signifies in the final sense, a theft from
those who hunger and are not fed.
What if peace isn't about winning?
This war metaphor of winning and verses opposition and
competition is built into the matrix of everyday life.
But peace cannot be found in performance.
When you observe your own life, your own nervous system, your
body, what brings true peace? Not performing, not striving.
So why as a society are we tuned into the opposite?
This hustle culture of striving, proving, marketing, ring lights,
competition creates a war like energy and none of it produces
peace. The constant grind.
You fight for attention, you battle against algorithms, you
arm yourself with content, you win likes.
But what if peace isn't about being seen or winning wealth?
What if peace is about being, having rest, aligning with
purpose and letting life flow? Governments often declare peace
initiatives to signal moral authority while maintaining
control. It looks good diplomatically,
attracts investment and creates an illusion of progress.
But the root inequalities remain poverty, racial injustice,
exploitation. This so-called peace is just
managed calm. It is profitable calm because
markets like predictability. Investors need peaceful
additions to extract resources, build pipelines and stabilise
currencies. So peace again serves power.
Peace built on silence, denial, or inequality is counterfeit.
True peace starts with truth, seeing what harms, naming
injustice, acknowledging history.
And that is why activism, grief and peace often coexist
together. It is integration of truth, not
avoidance of it. Inner peace is not the absence
of emotion. It is the alignment of our
heart, mind, body, and soul. When our nervous system shifts
out of survival, when you feel safe enough to rest, that is
peace. And peace is relational.
It is choosing cooperation and compassion over comparison and
competition. Peace is presence instead of
performance. And at the deepest level, peace
is trust in God, in the universe, in the unfolding, in
the truth that you are held. It is the opposite of hustling
for worth or safety. Peace is the still quiet,
knowing that nothing real can be threatened.
Even the Wellness industry tries to sell peace back to us.
Meditation apps, mindful productivity.
It can keep us cycling in consumption rather than
transformation. You can't buy in a stillness,
you can only remember it. I have clients who are waiting
for peace. They'll say I've been waiting
for our session, or I'll feel better after yoga.
I can't wait for my holiday. Like peace only exists in those
moments. But peace isn't postponed.
It isn't external. It isn't found later, or in
time, or when. Real peace is not about perfect
conditions. It is about internal coherence.
It is now. It is in the stillness
underneath the noise. Peace for me came through
discomfort, change, and moments of real material scarcity.
I found clarity, freedom, and a deep knowing of what truly
matters, in aligning my life with my values, in choosing
integrity over ease, and in a commitment to witness the beauty
of life and all its contrasts fully and awake.
It was in the tension between cost and reward, material
scarcity, and spiritual richness that I found real peace.
When we stop outsourcing peace and we stop waiting for
permission to feel it, we remember that peace has never
left. And that is the remembrance that
truly changes the world. Not just remembering the wars
that ended, but remembering the peace that's been with us all
along. As we remember the fallen, we
remember peace itself. Not the peace government sell,
not the one bought through treaties or imposed by power.
The peace that lives with us. The peace that cannot be bought,
won or fought for. If war is loud, peace is
listening. If war is profit, peace is
presence. And if war is control, peace is
surrender. We do not create peace by
winning. We remember peace by being.
And so I love that we take time to remember.
As we are remembering those fallen, let us remember peace is
within us, not bought, not won and not fought for.
And that is why we keep 2 minutes silence.
Because in silence we find what we have been looking for all
along. That is where peace lives.
That's where remembrance becomes real.
As we remember the war and the price we paid, let us also
remember the peace we owe ourselves and each other.
Not the peace that is given to us by uniforms, but the one we
create through stillness, truth, rest and dignity.
As William Gladstone said, we look forward to the time when
the power of love will replace the love of power.
Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
I'll see you next week.