I spent three days in silence recently at Dhamma Sukhakari, my third Vipassana retreat.
I write about Vipassana in Leadership Legacy. I keep returning to it because it does something specific: it removes every justification for not seeing clearly. No phone, no conversation, no movement toward anything. Just what is actually there.
What arrived this time, in the way things only arrive when you have stopped moving, was this: I had been repeating a diminishing narrative about my own work. Not because it was true. Because I had heard it often enough, in authoritative enough places, that it had become the water I was swimming in. The story had more authority than the evidence.
I came out of that silence and read my friend Kamin Mohammadi’s piece in Truthdig.
Kamin is Iranian, an award-winning journalist who has covered her country for over 30 years, and one of the people I trust most to read the world honestly. She has spent 47 years in exile. When she appeared on BBC radio last week, she was not permitted to discuss the factual reality of the illegal war on Iran. She was redirected, repeatedly, to her feelings.
I recognised the mechanism immediately.
Not because my experience is equivalent to what is happening in Iran. It is not, and I want to be precise about that. But because the structure is the same. A diminishing narrative, repeated in the most legitimate containers, accumulates authority over time. Not through argument. Through repetition. Through who gets to speak and what they are permitted to say when they do.
Kamin writes that mainstream English-language media calls this illegal war a “conflict in the Middle East.” I want to pause on that term, because it is doing more than one kind of work.
Middle East. Middle of what, exactly? East of where? East to whom?
The term is colonial cartography, invented by Western imperial powers to organise the world relative to themselves. Its continued use is not neutral. It re-inscribes a worldview in which London and Washington remain the implicit centre, and everywhere else is defined by its distance from that centre. This is the same logic circulating in development sectors where people still speak of “developed,” “underdeveloped,” and “developing” nations. Sanitised language that quietly maintains the speaker’s power while appearing merely descriptive. The myth of the ego, dressed as objectivity.
When the media using this term also removes the perpetrators from the sentence, calling an illegal war a “conflict” as if the region simply decided to set itself on fire, that is not an editorial error. It is a consistent logic.
Who controls the narrative controls the trajectory.
I wrote that in Leadership Legacy. I did not write it as a metaphor.
What I want to offer here, to anyone whose daily life is far removed from Tehran or from any place where this mechanism is running, is a way of reading I use in my own practice. Three questions, applied to any news story, any organisational communication, any conversation that feels somehow off:
Power: Who benefits from this framing? Who has been removed from the sentence?
Paradox: What two things are being held as if only one of them is true?
Presence: What would I see if I slowed down enough to look directly at what is actually here?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are perceptual ones. The practice is in applying them honestly, to the news, to the room you are in, to the story you have been telling about yourself.
Kamin’s piece is the most precise demonstration of why this matters that I have read this year. I am linking it because reading it is itself part of the practice.
truthdig.com/articles/as-hell-rains-down-on-iran-western-media-turns-its-head
