The Monks, the Walk for Peace, and the Psychology of Non-Reactivity

Transcript

I’ve been watching videos of monks walking across the United States.

Not marching.
Not chanting.
Not preaching.

Just walking.

And everywhere they go, something happens.

People slow down.
People begin to cry.
Children run toward them.
Crowds form, not around an event, but around a presence.

No arguments.
No slogans.
No effort to persuade.

And it made me realize that what we’re witnessing isn’t spiritual spectacle.

It’s psychological exposure.

We’re watching what happens when regulated human nervous systems move through a deeply dysregulated culture.

What people are responding to

Let me start with what this is not.

People are not responding to doctrine.
They’re not responding to belief.
They’re not responding to moral argument.

They’re responding to non-reactivity.

To stand near someone who is not rushing, not scanning, not defending, not performing, not escalating is almost unheard of right now. And when people encounter that kind of steadiness, the nervous system reacts before the mind has a chance to interpret it.

That reaction often looks like tears.

Not because something sad is happening, but because something has finally stopped happening.

The constant internal bracing.
The need to manage oneself.
The background vigilance.

When that pressure drops, even briefly, the body releases.

That’s what you’re seeing.

Why the monks don’t react

One of the most striking things in these videos is that while people cry, hug them, thank them, or pour out emotion, the monks themselves remain the same.

They don’t mirror the intensity.
They don’t amplify it.
They don’t retreat from it.

This isn’t emotional distance.
It’s containment.

Containment means the ability to stay present with emotion without absorbing it and without trying to control it. It’s a capacity that develops when someone has learned, over time, that emotions are intense but not dangerous, meaningful but not commanding.

Thoughts arise.
Feelings arise.
Sensations arise.

But none of them are treated as instructions.

That’s non-reactivity.

And non-reactivity is not passivity. It’s a refusal to let every internal or external stimulus dictate behavior.

Why people cry in their presence

From a nervous system perspective, this makes perfect sense.

Humans regulate each other.
We entrain to pace, tone, posture, and presence.

When someone nearby is calm without being withdrawn, open without being porous, the nervous system reads safety. And when safety is felt, emotion that’s been held back often comes forward.

Many people have not had the experience of being emotional without being fixed, judged, hurried, or managed.

When they meet someone who is not asking them to be different, the system finally lets go.

Tears are often the result.

The contrast moments

There are also moments in these videos that are harder to watch.

People yelling at the monks.
Shouting about hell.
Claiming exclusive ownership of peace or truth.

And again, psychologically, this isn’t mysterious.

When someone’s identity depends on confrontation, quiet presence feels threatening. When moral certainty is used to regulate fear, non-reactivity feels like an affront. If your sense of meaning requires escalation, calm becomes intolerable.

The monks don’t argue back, not because they agree, but because reacting would collapse the very thing they’re embodying.

Non-reactivity is a boundary.

Why this feels so powerful right now

We’re living in a culture that confuses intensity with sincerity, volume with conviction, and outrage with moral seriousness.

Public life is loud.
Social life is performative.
Media is optimized for arousal.

Most people are operating with chronically activated nervous systems. Not because they are weak, but because the environment trains it.

Constant stimulation.
Constant evaluation.
Constant urgency.

So when something quiet appears, it doesn’t just feel different.

It feels necessary.

The monks aren’t offering answers. They’re offering relief.

Why media matters here

It’s also not accidental that many people notice these emotional responses more strongly when watching videos than when reading about them.

Music, visual pacing, and slow motion go straight to the body. They bypass analysis. They amplify affect.

Reading, by contrast, requires cognition to stay online. It naturally contains emotion.

This doesn’t mean people are being tricked or manipulated in a moral sense. It means the nervous system is responding honestly to the inputs it’s given.

Highly sensitive people feel this immediately.

And it’s why many people quietly curate their media toward gentler forms of storytelling, or toward reading, or toward silence.

Not because they can’t tolerate reality, but because they don’t need to rehearse threat in order to feel alive.

What this reveals about our culture

Here’s the deeper question underneath all of this.

What does it say about us that people cry when they encounter someone who isn’t reactive?

It suggests how much emotional compression has become normal.
How much containment has been replaced with endurance.
How rarely people are allowed to be present without being productive, impressive, or defended.

The monks likely could not function easily in most modern work environments without sacrificing what makes them stabilizing. And that’s not because they lack competence, but because those environments are not designed for nervous system coherence.

Their presence isn’t exceptional because they are extraordinary beings.

It’s exceptional because our structures are exhausting.

Lived peace versus performed morality

This brings me to the most important distinction.

Peace that is lived looks quiet.
Peace that is performed looks loud.

One reduces load.
The other demands attention.

Lived peace does not argue itself into existence.
It does not require enemies.
It does not need to win.

And it does not mean disengagement from reality.

It means refusing to let justified anger become one’s permanent posture.

What this invites us to consider

The monks are not models to imitate theatrically.

They are mirrors.

They’re showing us what non-reactivity looks like in motion. What happens when someone stops carrying unnecessary load. What kind of response presence alone can evoke.

The question isn’t whether we should all become monks.

The question is:

What are we carrying that we don’t need to be carrying?
What urgency are we borrowing that isn’t ours?
What would happen if we practiced staying instead of escalating?

Closing

We don’t need more shouting.
We don’t need more certainty.
We don’t need more performance.

What we seem to be starving for is steadiness.

Not the absence of feeling, but the capacity to hold it.
Not withdrawal from the world, but presence without agenda.

Watching these monks walk through crowds isn’t moving because they are doing something extraordinary.

It’s moving because they’re showing us something we’ve almost forgotten how to be.