If you spend any time on social media right now, you will likely encounter the word “resistance.”

So many people are resisting, or they want to resist. Observing all this energy, I began to wonder: what does it mean to resist today?

I am a professor who studies democracy and rhetoric, the power of language; I’m also a longtime yoga and mindfulness teacher. These two parts of my life fit together perfectly, for becoming more aware of our words is central to the practice of mindfulness. As a meditation teacher, I know that words are limited. The magnificent allness of reality can never be captured by the twirl of the tongue, the scratch of the pen, or clack of the keyboard. Nevertheless, as a professor of rhetoric, I know firsthand the power of language to shape and guide our experience of reality. There are many ways to practice mindfulness. To me, mindfulness is a practice of doing our best to get our words right.

In this article, I describe one concrete way that we might collectively put “resistance” into practice today: to resist in 2025 is to refuse to use the language of war. Language that dehumanizes and degrades. Language that negates the value of individuals or groups of people. Language that makes it seem like some people are unworthy of dignity and respect, simply because of who they are. Language that promotes enemyship instead of friendship. Language that calls on one group of people to unite in battle against another in an us-verses-them struggle for happiness and well-being. Language, in short, that turns our lives into a war, and legitimizes violence and hatred.

Resisting the language of war is a powerful form of mindfulness practice. Resistance is a practice of peace.

Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh

When it comes to resistance, we have much to learn from the Vietnamese Zen master, poet, and mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay, “beloved teacher,” as his students know him.

In 1965, as American warplanes rained bombs down upon his land, killing scores of people and reducing entire communities to homelessness and starvation, Thay wrote a letter that started a friendship that changed the world.

It was a letter of solidarity connecting two kindred causes—the antiwar efforts in Vietnam, and the movement to end racial discrimination in the United States—directed to the American Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thay observed in this letter that most people had a misguided sense of who, or what, was really the enemy in the Vietnam War (or as it is known in Vietnam, the “American War”). Most were quick to take a side. But Thay refused to do this, he explained, because the enemy was not the Americans, or the Communists, or the soldiers fighting the battle. The enemy was not a person or a people at all. The source of our collective pain was “intolerance, hatred and discrimination. These are real enemies of man—not man himself.” Thay explained that he reached out in solidarity to Dr. King because he recognized the same revolutionary insight in the great preacher’s books and speeches.

Thay’s message for Americans was simple: we must see things clearly so that we know the true cause of our suffering. It’s not people. It’s violence in its many forms, including intolerance, hatred, and discrimination, the very forces that promote and sustain war. Once we understand this, we can begin working to transform war into peace, first in our own minds and hearts, and then in the world we have built together.

Mindfulness is More than Stress Relief

After Dr. King received this letter, he and Thay became friends. Thay pressed King to speak out against the war, and Thay’s urging was one of the reasons that King did. In 1967, King nominated Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize, writing, “I know Thich Nhat Hanh, and am privileged to call him my friend.” Shortly before he was murdered, King invited Thay to continue his work building “the beloved community,” an international community of people committed to creating a society at peace with itself. Thay furthered King’s activism in his own way, by teaching people mindfulness. Today, mindfulness has become popular in the West due in large measure to Thay’s efforts. That’s what I mean when I say that Thay’s letter changed the world.

In the West, mindfulness is often presented as a form of stress relief. Workplaces have begun to teach mindfulness to employees to make them calmer, more focused, and more productive, leading one scholar to call mindfulness a new “capitalist spirituality.” But if we study the early Buddhist tradition from which mindfulness emerges—a tradition important to Thay—it becomes clear that mindfulness is not about workplace productivity. It’s not just about feeling less stress, either. It’s about learning to pause and pay attention, so we can look deeply at ourselves and our habits, especially those that cause us and other beings to suffer. Once we see these habits clearly, we can work to change them. And we can resist embracing anything that causes further suffering, for ourselves, for others, and for all living beings. Including, especially, violence.

Words of Peace

The ethical virtue at the heart of Buddhism—at the heart of most religions, in fact—is ahimsa (non-wounding or non-violence). Another way to think of ahimsa is as peacefulness. Buddhism centers ahimsa because violence is the force that causes the most suffering in the world. To walk the path toward enlightenment means resisting violence in all forms. That’s why Thay defines mindfulness as “the practice of peace” in his book Love in Action.

So how can we resist the language of war?

The first step is to recognize that war has a way of worming itself into our minds and hearts, into how we think, how we feel, and how we talk. This is true of all of us.

The second step is to notice the habit energies of war arising in how we speak, and then learning to resist these energies. It is Ares who speaks every time we call a fellow citizen, and a fellow being, an enemy. So let’s stop calling people enemies. The conch shell calling soldiers to battle sounds every time we talk about our conflicts with other people as wars. So let’s stop describing disagreements as wars. A bullet fires every time we describe the world in terms of an us verses a them. So let’s stop embracing enemyship in our words.

To recognize, and actively resist, the language of war creates space to see the world differently. People are not enemies, not really. We share a common world, and we are co-creators of a common life. All of us suffer, all of us want to be happy, and all of us would like to transform our suffering into happiness. To do that we need each other. We are all in this together.

What would happen if we stopped seeing life as a war, and saw it instead as a collaboration?

That would be a true act of resistance.

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