Tag Archives: spirituality

by | September 28, 2026 · 9:42 am

The Wisdom of Silence

There is something I have been thinking about lately: how much of what we say actually needs to be said in a world that demands continuous expression and reaction.

We comment. We react. We post. We answer. We defend ourselves. We tell people what we think. We respond to something before we have even had time to understand why it has stirred something within.

More than at any other time in history, we have the technology to make our reactions instantly public. But ancient wisdom offers a very different possibility.

In Pirkei Avot, or Ethics of the Fathers, a collection of Jewish ethical teachings dating back almost two thousand years, there is a remarkable emphasis on the discipline of speech.

One teaching says:

“I have found nothing better for the body than silence.”

At first, that may sound strange. For why would silence be described as something so beneficial?

I don’t think the rabbis were simply talking about keeping quiet. They were pointing toward something deeper: the space between what you feel and what you express. And it is this space that can become enormously important.

Because not every thought needs to become a word, and not every emotion needs to become an immediate accusation or provocation that requires response. And not every disagreement needs to turn into a heated argument.

The pause before the word

Think about what happens when someone says something that wounds or angers you. Your first impulse may be to respond immediately and to defend yourself. You want to be right and want them to know that. You might even want to hurt them back. Yet, if you crate even a small pause between the impulse and the response, something shifts.

You can ask yourself:

Is this worth saying?

What is motivating me to say it?

Am I trying to clarify something—or simply trying to win an argument?

Will these words bring something into the world that I actually want to create?

That pause is not weakness but can turn into inner freedom.

Silence isn’t passivity

There is a danger, of course, in romanticizing silence and it can become avoidance.

There are moments when you need to speak out, to defend someone, to confront injustice, to establish a boundary, and to tell the truth.

The wisdom of silence isn’t that you should never speak. It is becoming aware of why you are speaking.

There is a profound difference between speaking because something needs to be said and speaking because you cannot tolerate the discomfort of remaining silent. And perhaps that is one of the great challenges of our time. We have become extraordinarily good at expressing ourselves.

But are we equally good at listening?

What happens when you don’t pause?

Words have consequences. A careless sentence can remain in another person’s memory for decades. A harsh word spoken in anger can change or destroy a relationship. Gossip can damage someone’s reputation who isn’t even present to defend themselves. Words now don’t simply disappear into the air. They remain a permanent record online.

The ancient rabbis obviously could not have imagined social media, smartphones or the speed with which words now travel across the world. Yet their concern was remarkably similar.

What happens when human beings fail to discipline their speech?

Silence creates a space for something deeper

For me, this connects with something much larger than communication. Silence creates space. And in that space we sometimes encounter something beneath the constant noise of the head mind. You actually start noticing what is happening within.

Perhaps there is fear beneath the anger. Beneath the need to be right might be insecurity. When you stop reacting, you might discover that there is not urgent need to respond at all. Silence then becomes a spiritual practise.

Before you speak

The next time you feel the impulse to respond immediately, wait. Take a deep breath. Inhale and exhale.

Notice what is happening inside you.

Then ask yourself:

Does this need to be said?

And if it does:

Can I say it without adding unnecessary harm?

Maybe that is what the ancient wisdom is pointing toward.

Not silence for its own sake.

But conscious speech.

Words chosen rather than words discharged.

Words that emerge from reflection rather than reaction.

Because ultimately, the quality of your life is shaped not only by what you believe or what you think. It is shaped by what you do with that which arises from within.

Sometimes the wisest thing you can do with a thought, an emotion or an angry impulse is simply to let it pass and to remain silent.

And in that space, perhaps, you discover a little more freedom, a little more compassion and a little more wisdom.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 21, 2026 · 2:36 pm

When Fear Turns Good People Dark

All my life I have grappled with a question that has never allowed me much peace: How can ordinary, seemingly good people turn almost overnight against their fellow human beings and participate in acts of terrible cruelty?

History gives us countless examples. Perhaps among the most shocking are the genocidal conflicts in Rwanda, where people who had lived alongside one another for generations suddenly turned on their neighbours, friends and even family members in a frenzy of violence.

In Nazi Germany, ordinary citizens looked away as Jewish neighbours were arrested and deported. Some went further, informing the authorities where those who were hiding could be found.

These events are difficult to comprehend because they challenge one of our most comforting assumptions: that good people and evil people are fundamentally different kinds of human beings.

During my years as a journalist, I came to question that assumption.

A few months into my first job as a junior reporter, an elderly colleague took me aside one day. He had been watching me, he said, and there was something I needed to understand about the profession.

“You really need to stop being so naïve.”

At the time, I thought he was talking about journalism. Over the years, I came to understand that he was talking about something much larger: human nature.

Each of us carries within us the capacity for both compassion and cruelty, courage and cowardice, generosity and selfishness. The fact that we may currently live peaceful, decent lives does not make us immune to the darker possibilities within ourselves.

Sometimes the greatest good and the greatest evil can even exist within the same person.

This is one of the most uncomfortable truths of being human.

The great thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart understood suffering not simply as punishment or divine cruelty, but as something that could chisel us into beings capable of carrying light.

St. Augustine, too, understood evil not as an independent force competing with God, but as a form of absence — a turning away from the source of being and love.

These ideas have stayed with me because they suggest that darkness is not something we overcome simply by declaring ourselves to be good. It has to be seen.

And this is where the idea of the shadow becomes important.

The shadow is everything within us that we would rather not acknowledge: our fear, envy, resentment, shame, aggression, insecurity, grief and woundedness. It contains the parts of ourselves that we have pushed out of conscious awareness because they do not fit the image we have constructed of who we are.

But what we refuse to see does not necessarily disappear.

It can operate from the darkness. You can project it onto others. You can turn unresolved fear into suspicion. Or humiliation into hatred. Pain into aggression and insecurity into the need to control. The sense of powerlessness turns into the desire to find someone weaker to blame.

This may help explain one of the great paradoxes of human history: why people who have themselves suffered persecution can sometimes become persecutors.

Afrikaners who carried the historical memory of British colonial oppression later participated in a political system that subjected Black South Africans to systematic discrimination and humiliation.

I witnessed another contradiction in my own childhood.

Members of my church congregation could receive communion on a Sunday, be loving husbands and fathers, generous to their fellow parishioners and apparently sincere in their Christian faith — and yet treat their Black farmworkers with extraordinary cruelty. They could compartmentalize their lives so completely that compassion existed in one part of their world while dehumanization existed in another.

And history continues to remind us that liberation from one form of oppression does not automatically free us from the impulses that created it. Some people who once fought apartheid have themselves later been accused of corruption and abuse of power.

The lesson, for me, is not that one political group or another is inherently good or evil. It is that no human being, movement or community is automatically protected from the shadow.

We remain incomplete beings.

Nobody is immune to temptation. Nobody is entirely free from fear. And nobody can honestly claim that darkness belongs only to someone else.

This is why I have become increasingly convinced that one of the most important tasks of a human life is to transmute fear and integrate the shadow.

By transmutation, I don’t mean suppressing fear or pretending that it isn’t there. Nor do I mean excusing harmful behaviour because someone has been wounded.

You have to become conscious of what moves within you. You have to be willing to sit with your fear long enough to understand what lies beneath it. What are you protecting? What are you afraid of losing? Where did the fear begin? What old wound does it touch? What story about yourself or other people has grown around it?

When fear remains unconscious, it easily becomes a justification.

It tells us that they are the problem.

They are dangerous.

They are taking something from us.

They don’t belong.

They must be controlled.

And once another human being has been reduced to they, compassion becomes much easier to abandon. There is separation between them and us and the seeds of tribalism are sown.

It can become xenophobia. Racism. Religious hatred. Political extremism. Nationalism stripped of compassion. The search for scapegoats. Fear narrows the field of perception until the other person is no longer experienced as a human being with a story, a family, wounds and hopes of their own.

Love, by contrast, reconnects.

This does not mean that fear is always irrational. Fear has an important biological function. It protects us from genuine danger. The problem begins when old fear, inherited fear or unprocessed trauma becomes the lens through which the present is interpreted.

Trauma can travel through families and communities. Historical grievances can become part of collective identity. Stories of humiliation and victimhood can be passed from one generation to another until they become almost indistinguishable from truth itself.

Unless someone interrupts the pattern through consciousness.

It requires the courage to look inward and ask not only, What have they done to us? but also, What is happening inside me because of what has happened to us?

This, I believe, is where genuine transformation begins.

To transmute the shadow is to bring what has been unconscious into consciousness and, rather than acting it out, allow it to be understood.

Fear can become discernment.

Anger can become a recognition of injustice without becoming hatred.

Grief can become compassion.

Shame can become humility.

Pain can become wisdom.

The darkness does not necessarily have to be destroyed. It has to be brought into the light.

Perhaps this is what Eckhart meant by being chiselled into someone capable of carrying light. The work is not to become a person who has no darkness. It is to become a person who knows their darkness well enough not to be ruled by it.

This is also why I have become wary of the temptation to divide humanity into the good and the bad, the enlightened and the unenlightened, the victims and the perpetrators.

Those distinctions may sometimes be necessary when confronting injustice. Responsibility must never disappear into spiritual abstraction. People must be held accountable for what they do.

But accountability and shadow work are not opposites.

The more honestly we recognize our own capacity for darkness, the less easily we can project that darkness onto others.

Perhaps the real work of becoming human is not to prove that we are good.

It is to become conscious enough to choose goodness when fear gives us another option.

Because the shadow will always be there.

The question is whether we remain unconscious of it — allowing it to shape our thoughts, our relationships and our societies from beneath the surface — or whether we have the courage to turn towards it, understand it and gradually transform its energy into something life-giving.

That, for me, is the deeper meaning of inner work.

You cannot create a less divided world simply by changing other people. You can only begin by becoming conscious of what lies within that divides.

And perhaps the most important spiritual journey of all is the journey from fear back into connection — from separation back into wholeness, and from the unconscious shadow into the light.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 15, 2026 · 10:38 am

Where the Earth feels thin

There are places in the world where the boundary between the ordinary and something deeper feels remarkably thin.

Ancient peoples understood this instinctively. Long before maps, property boundaries and modern planning regulations, they paid careful attention to where they built their temples, sacred groves and places of worship. Certain springs, mountains, caves, rocks, forests and hilltops were regarded as places where the human world came closer to the divine. The location itself mattered. Sacredness was not simply something that could be brought into a building; sometimes it was already present in the landscape.

We might call this a thin place—a place where the distance between the visible and invisible worlds seems diminished.

I have often wondered whether we have lost something of this sensitivity.

There is, of course, another side to it. Some places seem to carry the opposite quality. Landscapes marked by violence, suffering or tragedy can retain an atmosphere that is difficult to explain rationally. A battlefield, an abandoned concentration camp, a house where terrible things happened, a village emptied by war—these places can seem to hold an echo of what occurred there.

Perhaps this is memory embedded in landscape. Perhaps it is our own imagination responding to what we know happened. Perhaps there is something more subtle.

I don’t pretend to know.

But I have noticed something while walking.

On my pilgrimage journeys, I have sometimes entered a village and experienced an almost immediate sense of lightness. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no revelation, no voice from heaven, no mystical apparition. Simply a feeling that the place was alive.

The streets were clean and cared for. Flowers appeared in window boxes. Doors were open. People greeted the pilgrim with a smile. There were small cafés, benches, churches and places where people could pause and meet one another. Children played. Someone was tending a garden. Life seemed to flow naturally.

And then, sometimes, I would enter another place and feel quite different.

The shutters were closed. Houses appeared empty even when they were occupied. There were few places where people could gather. Gardens were neglected. Buildings were deteriorating. The streets seemed strangely silent. It was as though life had withdrawn.

I cannot prove that these impressions have anything to do with a measurable “energy frequency.” Nor do I think we need to turn every intuitive response into a supernatural explanation.

But I have learned to pay attention to such feelings.

Walking slows you down sufficiently to notice things that you would normally rush past. You see the quality of a village not simply through its architecture but through the way people inhabit it. You notice whether people sit outside their houses, whether they greet strangers, whether children have somewhere to play, whether churches are open, whether gardens are cultivated, whether there is a sense of care.

Perhaps what youvexperience as the “energy” of a place is sometimes the accumulated expression of the people who live there.

And perhaps the relationship works in both directions: you shape a place, and a place shapes you.

This has also made me think about why certain landscapes seem to have inspired some of humanity’s greatest thinkers, painters, poets and writers.

We tend to imagine inspiration as something that happens inside the individual mind. The genius sits at a desk, picks up a brush or opens a notebook, and creates something extraordinary.

But perhaps creativity is also a conversation with place.

Recently, walking through the countryside around Chawton, I found myself thinking about Jane Austen.

There is something about that landscape that makes her books feel less abstract. The lanes, hedgerows, fields, wooded paths and gently rolling countryside provide a physical world in which her characters seem entirely at home. Walking through what is called Jane Austen country, one begins to understand why this particular landscape could have nourished such a precise observer of human nature.

Austen did not simply write about people. She wrote about people in relationship to place—houses, estates, gardens, villages, drawing rooms, roads and landscapes. Social life and landscape were inseparable.

And perhaps that is true of creativity generally.

Think of the painters who were transformed by particular landscapes, the poets who returned again and again to the same hills or rivers, composers like Bach who found inspiration in the countryside, or the writers like Dickens who needed to walk before they could write.

Maybe the landscape doesn’t simply provide a backdrop but participates.

There is an old idea that certain places are “charged” with something greater. We might describe that in religious language, psychological language, ecological language or simply as a heightened sensitivity to beauty and history.

I am increasingly comfortable leaving the question open.

For me, pilgrimage is partly about learning to enter that openness.

When you walk, you surrender some of your usual control. You move at the speed of your feet. You become attentive to weather, trees, birdsong, stone walls, ancient paths and the changing light. You begin to sense that the landscape is not merely scenery through which you are passing.

It becomes a participant in the journey.

And occasionally, without quite knowing why, you enter a place and feel something shift within you.

The world seems a little more spacious. The mind becomes quieter and the heart feels lighter.

Nothing has necessarily changed, except the capacity to be more present.

Perhaps that is what a thin place really is.

Not necessarily a place where heaven breaks through into earth, but a place where you become thin enough to notice what has always been there.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 7, 2026 · 2:08 pm

Walking into Silence: What pilgrimage taught me about uncertainty, and trust

There are moments on a long walk when you stop thinking about where you are going and simply walk.You simply hear the rhythm of your feet. The landscape changes slowly. Your breathing settles. The noise in your head begins to diminish.I experienced something of that on a recent walk on the Pilgrims’ Way, from Winchester.

But before I took my first steps, I went into Winchester Cathedral. I sat down and was silent during a morning prayer ceremony with only a handful of people. For a few minutes I sat in that extraordinary building, surrounded by centuries of history, and thought about all the people who had come here before me.

Wonchester Cathedral

People who had stood exactly where I was standing and wondered what life meant.I set out on this walk with contemplations from the great Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich.

Julian lived in fourteenth-century England, during one of the darkest periods of European history – the Black Death.She knew all about illness, death and uncertainty. During a serious illness in 1373, when she believed she was dying, she experienced a series of visions that became the basis of her Revelations of Divine Love. And from Julian came those extraordinary words:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian said this living in a world in which almost everything was not well, and at the same time offering hope. She was saying that we may not understand what is happening in the world but we can still trust that love is deeper than suffering.

That is a very different kind of hope. We cannot plan and control the journey. Life happens in unpredictable ways while we try to protect ourselves against uncertainty.When we’re young, we often imagine that if we make the right choices, life will eventually become predictable.

People and pets we love become ill and die. Relationships change and fail. Homes and jobs change. Your body begins to remind you that you are not going to be here forever.

You begin to realize that you cannot control the journey. You can only walk and adapt to circumstances beyond your control.That thought stayed with me during the first hours of my walk during the unspoilt Itchen valley. 

The first kilometres are always slightly deceptive. You are still thinking about the destination. You look at the map. You calculate how far you have to go.

But gradually, something changes.

You stop thinking about the end.

You begin to pay attention to the next step.

And then the step after that.

That is one of the great gifts of walking.

It brings you back into the present moment. You hear the birds. You stand in awe before ancient trees. The Pilgrims’ Way takes you through landscapes that seem to exist outside ordinary time. There are stretches where ancient trees form tunnels over the path.You walk beneath them and suddenly feel very small.

The trees don’t know your worries. They simply stand there and some of them have been standing there for hundreds of years.And I found myself wondering how many people had walked beneath those same branches.

Medieval pilgrims walked these same old paths, possibly with the same questions as pulgrims today. And now they are gone.

The trees remain and there is something humbling and comforting about that. 

In the bigger order of things one lifespan is fleetingly small. The gravestones around the chapels, some dating back to the 12th century, are a stark reminder of that. You walk into a chapel after several hours on the trail and the experience can be almost startling. Outside, the modern world continues.

Inside, time seems to have stopped. The stones are old and the light is different.

And these are the moments when the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred really does feel a little thinner.A thin place isn’t necessarily a destination to an ancient sacred site but something that happens within.

St Augustine wrote about discovering God not by endlessly looking outward but by turning inward.Meister Eckhart later spoke about becoming empty — letting go of the endless accumulation of thoughts, desires and attachments that fill the mind.

And Julian of Norwich arrives at another extraordinary insight:beneath everything is love. Three different voices pointing towards the same thing. Turn inward. Become quiet and listen.

The longer you walk, the less important the things that seemed so urgent that morning can become.

You begin to notice the magic of life. The small things. The movement of leaves, the creaking of tree branches, the smell of moist earth in the forest, the taste of juicy wild blackberries and thoughts.

Not the thoughts you are trying to manufacture, but the ones that rise naturally when the noise becomes quiet.

That, too, is pilgrimage.

  • How do you deal with uncertainty?
  • How do you live when you don’t know what happens next?
  • How do you cope with the things you cannot control?

Julian’s answer is surprisingly simple. 

Certainty says:

I know how this is going to turn out.

Trust says:

I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but I can take the next step anyway.

That may be one of the most important lessons of a pilgrimage walk.

You don’t need to see the entire road.

You only need to see enough of it to take the next step and keep walking, leaving everything behind you but they remain as memories.

Perhaps that is what happens on all journeys.

And perhaps the same is true of the people we meet, the experiences we endure and the questions we never will answer.

So I keep coming back to Julian.

“All shall be well.”

I don’t hear those words anymore as a promise that everything will work out exactly as I want it to.

I hear them as an invitation to trust.

To accept that some things will remain unresolved and that life contains suffering as well as joy.

Beneath all the noise, all the uncertainty and all the attempts to control life, there may be something much more subtle.

Not travelling towards a place where you hope to find the sacred. But discovering that the sacred has been travelling with you all along and that all shall be well just by taking the next step.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | August 25, 2026 · 4:28 pm

Living As If You Will Never Die

The Dalai Lama once said that what surprised him most about the human condition was that “Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

The German mystic Meister Eckhart, writing seven centuries earlier, arrived at something similar from the opposite direction. For Eckhart, death was not an event waiting for us at the end of life but a practice for the whole of it: “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell.” He meant that the self we cling to — our roles, our possessions, our five-year plans — is the shell. Only by letting it crack, again and again, do we get near the kernel, which he called the ground of the soul. A person who has never rehearsed that letting-go meets death, when it finally comes, as a stranger.

Confronting our mortality is anathema in Western culture. We don’t talk about it, and when a loved one dies, we’re expected to “get over it” and function again as soon as possible. Cultural icons are expected to stay forever young. The dying are outsourced to hospitals and hospices, and the dead are buried in well-manicured cemeteries far off the beaten track.

I had an intense conversation with Catherine Duncan, author and hospice chaplain, on the LivingToBe podcast this week. She has guided hundreds of people during the last moments of their journey on earth. What stands out is the same pattern that repeats itself over and over again. What was deemed as important in life such as money, status and possessions falls away. What remains is only peace, love and forgiveness. Death can teach us what is important in life such as those magical moments that we often do not recognize in the business of life.

Confronting mortality head-on

One of the reasons behind our mental health crisis and addiction epidemic is that we don’t confront our mortality head-on. Instead we compare ourselves to the Joneses next door and wait for the “happy” life to arrive — when we retire, when we get rich, when we find the perfect partner, when we have that luxury car or that beautiful home.

Eckhart had a word for this waiting: he called it living for the sake of a reward rather than living itself. He preached that people who work only “in order to get” something — heaven, wealth, peace of mind — never actually arrive, because their attention stays fixed on the getting. The people of Bhutan seem to have found the alternative he was pointing to.

There’s a reason the people of the small southeast Asian country of Bhutan are regarded as among the happiest and most contented in the world. As in the world of our ancestors, death is part of everyday reality there.

The Buddhist country encourages its people to think about death for a few minutes each day. Paintings, artwork, and house decorations often feature death. Funerals are elaborate three-week events, with the body kept in the home before being slowly cremated over fragrant juniper wood in front of hundreds of friends and relatives.

In Bhutan, death is seen simply as a transition to another dimension. The spiritual disconnect in Western culture has left no place for death, or for the rituals that once surrounded it. I’ve lost a good share of family and friends over the past five years — each loss has jolted me back to the age-old question: what am I doing with the days I have left?

Because death is the elephant in the room, we lurch into collective grief when a well-known figure suddenly dies. The University of Oxford Centre for Suicide Research found that the overall suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17 percent in the four weeks after Princess Diana’s funeral in September 1997, compared with the average for that period over the four previous years.

A review of these cases suggested that Diana’s death worked largely through “amplification of personal losses and exacerbation of existing distress” — grief for a stranger unlocking grief that was already there, unaddressed.

History shows that when catastrophe strikes, faith tends to move in one of three directions. Some people become more rigid and fearful, reaching for certainty in the middle of chaos. Others lose faith entirely, unable to reconcile suffering with belief in a loving God. And some find a deeper faith — one rooted not in easy answers, but in compassion, humility, and solidarity with others. Which direction we take often depends on whether we’ve already done the work of facing mortality, or whether death arrives as an ambush.

Talking about the human condition

We need to talk about the human condition — about death, our mortality, and the fact that life as we know it ends. My work is helping people reclaim enough vitality and energy to live the life they’re meant to live, rather than the one they’ve settled for.

Eckhart’s shell-and-kernel image is useful here, because he wasn’t just talking about the moment of dying. He meant it as daily practice: letting go of the version of yourself built from job title, bank balance, and other people’s opinions, so that something truer underneath has room to breathe. “The eye with which I see God,” he wrote, “is the same eye with which God sees me.” Strip away enough of the shell, he’s saying, and the distance between the seer and the seen collapses. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, but it’s also a way of saying: stop postponing yourself.

Are you living the life you’re destined to live?

Are you merely existing, or living the life you’re destined to live? Are you stuck in a job or relationship that drains most of your energy? Are you waiting for the day you can finally start living?

Procrastination and fear are the biggest obstacles to raising consciousness and growing spiritually. When you’re doing what’s in alignment with your soul’s purpose, you will — to quote Rumi — feel a river moving in you with joy.

If these questions stay with you, you might find their sharpest form in my novel Sages, Saints and Sinners, set during the Black Death — a time when an entire society was forced to confront mortality on a mass scale, with no hospitals or hospices to look away to. It follows what happens to people, faith, and community when death can no longer be outsourced or postponed.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

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by | August 18, 2026 · 9:23 am

How Language Shapes  Mind, Body and Soul

The other day, I came across a wonderful initiative that gives children something far more valuable than a toy: books and the opportunity to discover the power of words from an early age.

Through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, registered children receive a free, age-appropriate book every month from birth until their fifth birthday. It is a simple but powerful idea—helping children develop a love of reading while giving them access to a richer world of language, imagination, and ideas.

It also made me reflect on something we often underestimate: The words we hear, read, speak and repeat influence how we think, how we feel, how we relate to others, and, increasingly, research suggests, how our bodies respond to stress and emotion.

From the first stories we hear as children to the language that surrounds us as adults, the words we live with help shape our lives.

When leaders normalise belittling, insulting, humiliating or threatening language, they give their followers permission to do the same. We can see the consequences particularly clearly on social media, where emotionally charged discussions can deteriorate rapidly into personal attacks, contempt and hostility. A disagreement about an idea becomes an attack on the person.

This matters because language is not psychologically neutral. The words we repeatedly encounter and use influence attention, interpretation, and emotional responses. 

Stress, anger, and hostility can activate physiological systems involved in the body’s stress response, while positive emotions, social connection, and a sense of meaning can support psychological resilience.

Repetition of negative language

Repeated exposure to words and messages associated with anger, fear and hostility can reinforce particular patterns of attention and interpretation. Over time, this may contribute to a more threatening or pessimistic perception of the world.

There is an important distinction, however: words do not automatically cause disease, and the science is more nuanced than the popular claim that simply hearing a negative word raises cortisol or damages the body. What matters is the broader psychological response—particularly when threatening or hostile language becomes persistent, personally meaningful and part of a chronic environment of stress.

A landmark 2015 study published in Psychological Science analysed millions of Twitter messages from 1,347 U.S. counties. Researchers found that county-level use of language expressing anger, anxiety, negative relationships and disengagement was associated with higher rates of atherosclerotic heart-disease mortality, while positive-emotion and engagement language showed protective associations. The researchers reported that their language-based model predicted cardiovascular mortality better than a model combining ten conventional demographic, socioeconomic and health variables.

These findings were striking—but they should not be interpreted as proof that negative words themselves cause heart disease. The study was observational and conducted at the community level, and subsequent methodological criticism has questioned how robust and generalisable the associations are. What the research does support is a fascinating possibility: the emotional language circulating within a community may act as a window into its collective psychological climate.

Other research provides a more direct connection between stress and language. Experimental studies have found that people experiencing greater physiological stress—including higher cortisol and heart-rate responses—tend to produce less cognitively complex speech. More recent research is also exploring whether characteristics of speech can themselves be used as indicators of stress.

The potential of positive language

The opposite is also worth cultivating. Kindness, gratitude, appreciation, compassion and encouragement can change the quality of our interactions and strengthen social bonds. And strong social relationships are among the most important resources we have for psychological resilience and wellbeing.

Research on self-affirmation offers an interesting insight into how constructive language can work. In laboratory studies, reflecting on personally important values activated brain regions involved in self-related processing and positive valuation. In one study, these neural responses were subsequently associated with changes in sedentary behaviour.

This does not mean that repeating positive words is a magical cure. Nor does it mean that we should suppress difficult emotions or pretend that everything is wonderful. Healthy language can acknowledge suffering while still leaving room for possibility:

I am struggling—but I can seek help.

I disagree with you—but I can still respect you.

This is difficult—but it is not necessarily hopeless.

Such language does something important: it creates psychological space. Instead of narrowing our attention around threat, blame and fear, it can help us recognise choices, relationships and possibilities.

Words, mantras and prayer

This may help explain why human beings across cultures have used mantras, prayers, chants and contemplative phrases for thousands of years.

The benefit may not lie simply in the meaning of the words. Repetition slows attention, reduces distraction and can be accompanied by rhythmic breathing. Studies of contemplative practices have found associations with changes in autonomic regulation, including heart-rate variability, although the evidence varies considerably according to the practice and study design.

Research into music and prayer has also suggested that slow rhythmic structures can influence cardiovascular rhythms. Work examining musical tempo and autonomic responses has highlighted the role of slow breathing and rhythm in producing calming physiological effects.

This offers a more scientifically cautious way of understanding the experience many people report when listening to or singing something such as Ave Maria, whether in the settings of Schubert, Gounod or other classical arrangements. The combination of familiar words, melody, repetition, breath, memory and spiritual meaning can create a profound sense of calm and emotional safety.

For a person of faith, there is an additional dimension that science cannot easily measure: prayer can provide a sense of relationship, trust, meaning and transcendence. These subjective experiences may themselves be important sources of psychological resilience.

Read good words

There is another simple way of nourishing our inner vocabulary: read books.

In an age dominated by short posts, headlines, notifications and rapidly changing fragments of information, sustained reading offers something very different. A book asks you to remain with an idea, follow an argument, inhabit another person’s experience and encounter words in context.

Reading also exercises language itself. It exposes you to a richer vocabulary, more complex sentence structures, metaphors, stories and unfamiliar perspectives. This matters not only intellectually but potentially for healthy ageing.

A 14-year longitudinal study found that older adults who reported reading at least weekly were less likely to experience cognitive decline over six, ten and fourteen years than those who read less frequently. The association remained after adjustment for relevant covariates.

A separate 2024 study of older Japanese adults found an association between childhood availability of books and cognitive function later in life, particularly among participants with lower educational attainment. The researchers also identified an association involving the volume of the left superior temporal cortex, an area important for language and related cognitive functions. Because this was an observational study, it cannot establish that books themselves caused the difference—but it adds to the growing evidence that a life rich in reading and language may be beneficial for cognitive ageing.

Perhaps, then, we should think of vocabulary as a kind of mental landscape.

If your daily diet consists largely of words such as threat, enemy, stupid, hate, crisis, failure and fear, you are repeatedly exposing your attention to a narrow emotional vocabulary.

But if you also make room for words such as curiosity, courage, gratitude, wonder, forgiveness, possibility, beauty, compassion, stillness, love and hope, you give the mind more possibilities with which to interpret experience.

The goal is not to eliminate negative words. Anger can alert to injustice. Fear can protect from danger. Grief gives expression to loss. Difficult words have their rightful place.

The deeper question is:

What kind of language do you want to live with within?

And perhaps an equally important for everyone is:

What kind of emotional climate are your words creating for the people around you?

Words are small things. But repeated millions of times, they can become attitudes, attitudes can become behaviours, and behaviours can become culture.

Choose them carefully.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | August 10, 2026 · 11:28 am

When Faith Stops Working: Are You Listening?

This summer, as Europe swelters under yet another wave of extraordinary heat, I find myself thinking about an old story I heard many years ago. It is a simple story, almost a joke. But sometimes the simplest stories contain truths we would rather avoid.

There was an old man named Angelo who lived in a small Italian village. One day, his neighbour came running to his door.

“There is a flood warning,” he told him. “The river is rising. Everyone has been told to leave the village within 24 hours.”

Angelo listened calmly.

“I will be fine,” he replied. “I trust in the Lord.”

His neighbour pleaded with him, but Angelo refused to leave.

A little later, a fire engine came through the village, its loudspeaker warning everyone to evacuate immediately.

Angelo heard it.

But he stayed.

Then the river began to rise. Water flooded the houses closest to the river, and people started fleeing for higher ground. A rescue worker came to Angelo’s door.

“You have to leave now!”

But Angelo shook his head.

“I trust in the Lord.”

Eventually, the water reached the upper floor of his house. Angelo climbed onto the roof.

Then a helicopter appeared.

A rescue worker lowered a ladder.

“Come on, Angelo! We can get you out!”

But once again Angelo refused.

“I trust in the Lord.”

The helicopter eventually disappeared.

Angelo drowned.

When he arrived at the gates of heaven, he was furious.

“I trusted you,” he said to God. “I believed you would save me. And you didn’t.”

God looked at him with sadness.

“Angelo, I sent you your neighbour. I sent you the fire engine. I sent you the rescue worker. And finally, I sent you a helicopter. What more did you expect me to do?”

Perhaps the warnings are the message

I thought about Angelo recently while walking through Wandsworth Common. Walking has become a way for me to make sense of the world. When I walk, I notice things I might otherwise miss.

This time, I noticed the grass. I noticed the bumblebee dying and the pigeon spreading its wings, trying to stay cool.

The grass should have been green. Instead, it was dry and yellow, brittle beneath my feet. Trees and shrubs were showing the strain of weeks without sufficient rain. Nature seemed tired. There was something strangely unsettling about it. Perhaps because I have lived long enough to remember summers when rain in central Europe was something we complained about rather than something we worried about.

I know that one hot summer does not prove climate change. Nor does a dry lawn. But when an isolated event becomes part of a pattern, perhaps the wise response is not to explain it away, but to ask questions, pay attention, and to listen.

And that is what keeps returning to me from the story of Angelo.

I attended one of the early United Nations climate conferences as a journalist many years ago. The scientists were warning us about the consequences of pumping ever greater quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At the time, the future seemed comfortably distant. Climate change belonged to another generation. It would have to deal with it

What if the warnings are already the message?

But perhaps that is one of the great illusions of human beings: our tendency to imagine that the consequences of what we do will always arrive somewhere else, sometime later, and affect somebody else. Now the future has become the present. The heat, the droughts, the record-breaking summer temperatures, the fires, and the floods simply cannot be denied anymore. And yet, like Angelo, we seem strangely reluctant to leave the comfort zone of our house.

When faith becomes a way of not seeing

This is where the story touches something much deeper for me than climate change. It touches the question of faith itself. For much of my life, I have wrestled with what it means to believe.

I have become suspicious of a faith that gives us easy answers to difficult questions. A faith that tells us everything will be all right if only we trust enough. Because sometimes everything tells us that something is just not right. The river really is rising. The diagnosis is serious. A relationship is really over. The world is changing rapidly beneath our feet. The certainties we have built our lives around simply have stopped working.

Perhaps that is one of the most frightening experiences in life: discovering that the beliefs that once gave us security no longer help us make sense of what is happening. But perhaps it is also an invitation. When faith stops working, something else may be asking to emerge. It is perhaps a deeper faith that does not require you to know how everything will turn out. It is a faith that allows you to say:

I don’t know.

I am afraid.

I may have been wrong.

But I am willing to look.

Listening to what is in front of you

I am increasingly convinced that wisdom has less to do with having answers than with learning how to listen. It is listening to your body, to other people, your intuition, and to that voice that you perceive only in silence, above all in nature.

Nature does not speak to you in words. It speaks through patterns, seasons, heat, drought, rain, abundance and scarcity. Our ancestors knew very well how to interpret these signs. Their survival depended on it. But in the disconnect from the natural world, we seem to have lost that ability.

We can choose to ignore these whispers from the universe. But ignoring them does not make them disappear. That is what Angelo misunderstood. He believed that faith meant waiting for God to intervene. Perhaps the deeper truth is that God had already intervened. The neighbour was the intervention. The fire engine was the intervention. The rescue worker was the intervention. The helicopter was the intervention. Angelo simply didn’t recognise them as such.

And I wonder how often we do the same.

How many times in your life has something tried to get your attention?

A relationship that no longer feels right. A body telling you to slow down. A restlessness that cannot be explained. A recurring dream and a difficult conversation that you keep avoiding.

A landscape that no longer looks the way it once did. A world that is changing before our eyes. Perhaps these are not interruptions to our lives. Perhaps they are our lives speaking to us.

The helicopter is still there

I don’t know what the world will look like ten or fifteen years from now. I don’t know whether we will succeed in changing course quickly enough. And I certainly don’t believe that fear and denial is going to save us.

But I do believe we still have choices. That may be the most hopeful part of the story. Angelo was not a victim until the very end.

He had choices. And so do you. We are not powerless in the face of a changing world. We can change how we live. We can demand that those who govern us take reality seriously. We can consume less, waste less, protect what remains and support those working to restore what has been damaged.

But perhaps the first step is simpler.

We need to listen. To put down our certainties for a moment. To look out of the window.

To walk through a park. To notice the colour of the grass. To feel the heat and rescue the bumblebee looking for water.

To see the trees struggling.

And then to ask yourself honestly:

What is life trying to tell me?

Faith does not mean believing that someone will come and save you.

Perhaps faith means trusting yourself enough to recognise the helicopter when it arrives. And having the courage to climb aboard.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | July 28, 2026 · 5:29 am

The Trinity and Love

Over the years, I have walked thousands of kilometres on pilgrimage routes across Europe, often finding myself stepping off the trail into small churches and ancient chapels. Sometimes I entered simply to escape the midday heat. Sometimes to rest tired legs. Often there was no one else inside. The silence itself became a companion.

I would sit for a while and let my eyes wander over faded frescoes, carved crucifixes, stained-glass windows, and centuries-old icons. I rarely tried to analyse what I was seeing. Instead, I simply allowed the artwork to speak. Those precious moments became as much a part of the pilgrimage as the walking itself.

Walking a pilgrimage is not only about moving through landscapes; it is about allowing the landscape of the soul to change. The art in those ancient sanctuaries invited me to slow down, to become present, and to notice the subtle movements of the heart that are easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life. There are paintings we admire for their beauty. There are others we appreciate for their historical importance. And then there are a rare few that seem to look back at us, inviting us into a conversation that transcends words.

For more than six centuries, pilgrims, monks, artists, and seekers have returned again and again to Andrei Rublev’s The Trinity. Many consider it the greatest icon ever painted—not because of its artistic perfection, but because of the quiet mystery it reveals.

Most religious art portrays God as distant, enthroned, or judging from above. Rublev offers an altogether different vision. Three figures sit around a simple table beneath the shade of an oak tree. Their bodies incline gently towards one another. Their gaze moves in an endless circle of mutual love. There is no struggle for dominance, no assertion of rank, no hint of rivalry.

Everything about the icon whispers that the deepest reality of existence is relationship.

Rublev’s The Trinity embodies that same invitation.

At the front of the table there is an empty place.

It is impossible to ignore once you see it.

That space has been left open intentionally.

It is your place.

Icons were never intended simply to decorate churches or illustrate theology. In the Eastern Christian tradition, they are often called windows into heaven. Their purpose is not merely to tell us something about God but to draw us into an encounter with the Divine.

This is the difference between knowing about the sacred and experiencing it.

Modern culture encourages you to gather information, formulate opinions, and seek certainty. Yet the deepest spiritual experiences often arise when you stop trying to master the mystery and allow the mystery to embrace you instead.

That, for me, is the gift of pilgrimage.

Walking hour after hour strips away the unnecessary. There comes a point when the questions become more important than the answers, when silence speaks more eloquently than words, and when simply sitting in an ancient chapel can become a profound act of prayer. The journey teaches that God is encountered less through explanation than through attention—through learning to be fully present to the present moment.

When you sit quietly before Rublev’s icon, something subtle begins to happen. The image ceases to be an object we observe. Instead, it becomes a mirror. It reveals where lives have become fragmented, where fear has replaced trust, where ambition has overshadowed compassion, where you have forgotten that you belong to something infinitely larger than yourself.

The invitation is not to acquire another belief.

It is to enter the circle.

The early Christian mystics spoke of the Trinity as an eternal movement of self-giving love—a divine dance in which each person exists for the other. Creation itself flows from that love. Humanity is not called merely to admire it but to participate in it. It reminds me of the African philosophy of Ubuntu – that you become who you are through interaction with others.

Seen in this light, spirituality is no longer about escaping the world or accumulating religious knowledge. It becomes a way of seeing. A way of listening. A way of walking through ordinary life with an awakened awareness that every encounter can become sacred.

The empty place at the table reminds you that you are already included.

You do not earn your seat through achievement, moral perfection, or religious certainty but in simply accepting the invitation.

Perhaps this explains why The Trinity continues to move people after more than six hundred years. In a world marked by polarisation, tribalism, and the relentless pursuit of status and power, Rublev reminds us that the deepest reality of the universe is not domination but communion. Not fear, but love. Not exclusion, but belonging.

Every time I leave a quiet church or chapel on pilgrimage, shoulder my backpack, and return to the path, I carry something invisible with me. Not a new doctrine or a fresh certainty, but a deeper awareness that the sacred is never confined to the sanctuary. It walks with us along dusty paths, through forests and villages, in conversations with strangers, and in the silence between footsteps.

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson Rublev’s icon has to teach. The spiritual journey is not about climbing towards God.

It is about awakening to the astonishing possibility that God has been making room for us all along.

And perhaps, having taken our place at the table, our calling is to leave an empty chair in our own lives—for the stranger, the wounded, the forgotten, and those with whom we disagree.

For love always makes room.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | July 21, 2026 · 7:58 am

How We Stopped Reading and Started Believing Slogans

With each passing year, fewer people finish reading a book, with public discourse getting s a little dumber. This is not a coincidence. The two trends are moving in lockstep because they’re the same trend. Thinking in complexities comes from sustained reading. What’s replacing it is faster, louder, and easier to produce than to challenge. The decline of reading appears to be ushering in a less rational, less analytical, less sophisticated mode of thought, and it’s threatening democracy.

Reading long-form prose trains the mind to hold several ideas in tension at once, to follow an argument through its qualifications and counterpoints, to sit with ambiguity rather than resolve it prematurely. A dense paragraph forces you to track a claim across several clauses, weigh a caveat against the point it qualifies, and keep revising your understanding as new information arrives.

Take that engagement away, and the muscle in the brain doesn’t just go unused. It starts working against you. Attention spans shorten. Patience for a slow-building argument gives way to a need for the payoff up front. Ambiguity starts to register as failure rather than as a feature of anything worth understanding properly. And because nuanced thinking is effortful, its absence leaves a preference for whatever requires the least effort. It is the argument that confirms what you already believed, the explanation that fits in a headline. The mind doesn’t stay idle in the space reading used to occupy. It fills that space with something more crude.

Simplicity and emotional charge are rewarded

Algorithms accelerate the drift, rewarding simplicity, outrage, and emotional charge over complexity, nuance, and rigour. Ideas that fit folk theories of politics — all leaders are equally corrupt, immigrants steal jobs, every policy problem has an easy, commonsense fix — spread further than the findings of subject-matter experts ever will.

Joshua Meyrowitz explored this territory in No Sense of Place, predicting that the decline of print and the rise of electronic media would eventually push people toward populist leaders. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a power struggle.”

That power struggle is where the erosion stops being an abstract concern about attention spans and becomes a question about how democracy functions. Elections depend on voters weighing trade-offs. A policy might help one group while burdening another, that a leader’s strengths come bundled with real weaknesses, and that most hard problems don’t have a clean fix.

Surrendering the mind to sloganeering

Slogans work by stripping all of that away. “Drain the swamp” or “take back control” asks nothing of the listener except agreement. A white paper on institutional reform asks for time, patience, and tolerance for uncertainty, which most people no longer have. When the electorate’s capacity for the second kind of thinking shrinks, the first kind isn’t just more appealing — it becomes the only kind that can win.

The result is a selection pressure on political leadership itself. Candidates who traffic in complexity and qualification lose ground to those who traffic in certainty and enemies, not because voters are unintelligent, but because the cognitive infrastructure of nuance has been allowed to run down. Over enough election cycles, that pressure doesn’t just change who wins. It changes what kind of person even attempts to run, and what kind of promises get made. A politics built on slogans breeds politicians who speak only in them.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | July 14, 2026 · 2:51 pm

What We Lose When We Stop Reading

I recently came across a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic that stopped me in my tracks. It reported that, in 2022, fewer than half of all adults in the United States read a single book of any kind. Even more striking, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen dramatically—from 28 per cent in 2004 to just 16 per cent in 2023.

These figures tell a story that extends far beyond changing reading habits. It invites the question: What happens to a society when it loses the habit of sustained attention, deep reflection, and the companionship of books?

The decline in reading cuts across every age group, gender, and education level. The result: basic reading skills are eroding. In an era of information overload, short text messages and textual fragments, our capacity for sustained attention — the kind longer, complex works demand — is shrinking.

The article quotes Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, who argues that people aren’t forgetting how to decode words. What they’re losing are the higher-order skills of comprehension and synthesis — the ability to hold a complicated argument in mind long enough to weigh it.

Why reading matters

This isn’t just about nostalgia. Deep reading trains a particular kind of mind. Following an argument across three hundred pages — tracking its turns, holding contradictions in tension, revising your judgement as new evidence appears — is a rehearsal for democratic life itself. It’s the same muscle you need to weigh competing claims in an election, or sit with a problem that has no easy answer. Skimming a headline or a ten-second video trains the opposite reflex: snap judgement, then move on. A society that reads less doesn’t just know less. It loses practice in the patient, the uncomfortable work of changing its mind.

Reading also builds something harder to measure: the habit of inhabiting another consciousness. A good novel forces you to live inside a character’s way of thinking for hours at a stretch — to feel why they act as they do, even when you’d choose differently. That’s a rehearsal for empathy that no summary or excerpt can substitute for. Lose the habit, and you don’t just lose stories. You lose the practice in imagining anyone unlike yourself.

Are we, then, entering a post-literate society — one growing less able to grasp complex issues, and, in plain language, more susceptible to loud, brash voices peddling simple answers to complicated problems?

Is a free, democratic society itself at risk when a growing number of people become functionally illiterate, or simply hand the work of thinking in complexity over to someone else?

Photo by Nitin Arya on Pexels.com

Literacy forms the foundation of a free society

For most of human history, literacy belonged to a small educated elite that ruled over the masses. The ability to read and write opened up a whole world to millions and became the foundation of a free society. It changed consciousness. It changed the political order.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” wrote Walter J. Ong, the historian and Jesuit priest. Neil Postman went further, arguing that reading and writing were the preconditions for philosophy, modern science, history, and academic life as we know them.

I’ve been fascinated by books since childhood. I grew up in South Africa in the early 1960s, in a country without television, where a trip to the cinema was a rare event. In that rigid, joyless world inhabited by Calvinist doctrine, I found refuge in books.

They became my escape, carrying me far beyond the streets of my hometown in rural KwaZulu-Natal. I must have read King Solomon’s Mines half a dozen times, wandering in imagination through the vast African interior.

Later, it was the classics that held me — thanks to our English teacher, Andy Towert. He had a gift for breathing life into prescribed texts and for setting essay questions that were anything but safe. His entrance into the classroom was a performance in itself: he’d toss his bag into the air, sending it into a perfect somersault before it landed square on the desk. From that moment, he had our full attention.

Towert didn’t just teach literature — he ignited it. He made us believe that books weren’t relics of the past but living voices, speaking directly into our own lives. Those hours were never mere diversions. They were seeds of a lifelong calling, planted quietly within the narrow conformities of a small-town childhood.

Some books have changed my life outright. Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage sent me on my first walk to Santiago and more than a dozen pilgrimages since. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara reshaped how I think about lived, experiential spirituality.

Early reading and teachers like Andy Towert planted the seeds of my own writing life. Having just finished the manuscript of my fifth book, I can’t imagine stopping. While writing my novel Sages, Saints and Sinners, I became so immersed in the two central characters and their love story that I fell for them myself — and was almost sorry to have to bring their story to an end.

So pick up a book. I did, once, in a small town with nothing else to offer — and it changed everything.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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