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There are no victims here and no place for pity. One man said that they don't spend their time thinking about what they don't have or what they have lost but rather focus on all they do have and on everything they are able to give. This just about sums it up. People here have taken their pain and suffering and transformed it. It reminds me of the words of those that have survived imprisonment like Victor Frankl and Nelson Mandela. They speak about one freedom nobody can take away from us - to choose the way we perceive life, to choose our attitude to each moment that is before us. When faced with challenge and difficulty do we choose to let it get us down, to feel victimised, to feel life has somehow treated us unfairly? Or do we choose to see the opportunity that lies within it, the lessons that are there for us to learn, the way that suffering can lead us to touch our beautiful humanity and feel the healing power of love? To feel like rather than questioning life, we see how life questions us in each moment. The people of Anandwan have made their choice and I feel extremely blessed to be here to feel, see, hear & sign language it!
I have been asking myself these last few days if maybe I have died and arrived in heaven – if this place really does exist on earth then paradise is within our reach.

The last week at Anandwan was particularly moving, not least as it meant saying goodbye or farewell to many wonderful souls.
We spent Christmas day in silence taking rest from our work duties and alternating sitting and walking meditation. These silent days have been necessary to allow all the experiences to settle, all the emotions, thoughts and feelings to be acknowledged and held in quiet attentive space. A time and place to connect with all that has been happening in the inner life. As I sat by the lake watching the sun descend, an old man came and sat down beside me. He began to talk and tell me he had been in Anandwan for over 30 years and that three years ago his wife had died, defeated by cancer. As I sat and listened he told me that a simple life was a good life, free from unnecessary worries, and that happiness is to be found inside and not outside. He repeated, "Happiness is inside". We shared some silence and watched the birds. The homes for the elderly in Anandwan are called "Wisdom Banks" – very appropriate!

Anandwan has an amazing gentle power of opening us up, of revealing vulnerability and tenderness, of coming face to face with those parts of ourselves we'd rather not see, and then teaching us how to approach these parts softly with kindness, to befriend and embrace them and listen. Ultimately, the hard edges of protection & pain around the heart are slowly dissolved and healed. As Zohar said, the love of Anandwan fills our lives.
I am blessed to have received such a gift at the end of a special year, and I know that my self, my heart and my life will never be the same again.

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And from the moment I arrived, I knew that this place, this time, with these people, was exactly where I was meant to be.
There is a Zen in picking olives; an in-the-moment presence where small, green fruits fall one-by-one through your fingers, while the sun blazes through the shade of the trees from the centre of its bright, blue sky. There is a sense of family in being welcomed by Palestinians who, compared to my life back home, have little to share, but share it all, without question. There is an intimacy of communication that only comes when you do not share a language, when you are required to share only your humanity. And there is a sense of community in sharing a home with over a dozen other people, sharing food, time, tears and laughter, as we did in our four days living in a Palestinian village of Dir Istya.
Olive picking brought us to the ever-inspiring presence of Rabbis for Human Rights an organisation that helps Palestinians in the West Bank to access their land and to harvest their olives, as well as launching countless legal battles on their behalf to check the illegal spread of settlements. We met Yehiel, my very first 'real-life' rabbi, who took us to harvest olives close to settlements, where without an international presence, Palestinian villagers would struggle to harvest their olives for fear of threat or harm from nearby settlers.
The gentleness of our days in the olive groves taught me that life in a conflict zone could contain more peace than I had ever known at home. Our harvesting olives did not bring peace to Palestine, but it brought moments of peace to us, or perhaps it brought us to peace - a peace that would prepare us for the conflict we would meet more closely in other parts of the retreat. The quiet strength of the families we met inspired a strength in us, and a commitment to bring peace, no matter how challenging we found it, to our experiences in Israel and the West Bank.
Let me be clear. A commitment to 'being peace' did not always mean we felt peaceful. Many of us struggled to be with moments of anger, fury, hopelessness or despair. I learnt that a commitment to peace is not about being 'beyond' these experiences, but about learning to be in them; to occupy the emotions without allowing them to occupy us, or to be all that we are.
The beauty of the retreat is that in order to learn how to do this, Nathan and Zohar took us to very difficult situations. And before you think they're complete masochists, to ensure that we would not be completely overwhelmed by the things we saw, they introduced us to people who were themselves working towards the same goal – how to negotiate peace, not only in the world, but inside themselves. Or perhaps there's really no difference between the two.
The 'Being Peace' Gurus
Although I'm calling them gurus, the people we met were so remarkable mostly because they weren't remarkable at all. They could be you or me, just 'ordinary people'. What had drawn many of them to the struggle for peace was often the worst kind of tragedy: the loss of brothers, sisters, or children.
We met Ali Abu Awwad and Alison Ramer, a Palestinian peace activist and a Jewish American woman, who work together with the men and women of a village called Nebi Saleh. In the face of violence from nearby settlers, the village is committed to maintaining a non-violent resistance to the occupation - to the violence of nearby settlers and the actions of an army more trained in conflict than in peace. Many of the villagers, including young people, have been arrested, many have experienced terrible violence. From their village, they watch the growth of an illegal settlement that claims their land, their olive trees and most recently, a spring of historical importance to their village.
Standing on a hillside with mother, wife and peace activist, Monall Timini, we looked over at the settlement. She told me that she wanted to bring peace to the village and to Palestine, because her children have nightmares about the soldiers, because she is afraid that more villagers will be hurt, or will die and because she does not want any more of the village houses to be demolished. I stared at her in amazement, feeling so much anger in my heart. Yet my anger was swiftly silenced by Monall, whose daily life and safety is affected by the conflict in ways I can barely imagine.
With all she experiences in her daily life, who am I to be angry? And where does this anger come from?
I've always told myself that the anger I feel in the face of injustice is a kind of righteous anger, a right response to suffering. Yet within my daily meditation, I found myself revisiting memories of my own past and a childhood that bore the marks of a different kind of violence and conflict. Was there really a difference between this 'righteous' anger and my own, old anger at a past long gone? When I reacted with anger at the injustices in Palestine, was I really just keeping alive old feelings of conflict that I struggle to resolve?
I didn't find easy answers to these questions, either in meditation or in our experiences of the conflict. Instead, I began to find a growing sense of faith in peace, not as a solution, but as a process – a journey that is always beginning, and that has no clear end. As I began to move away from the desire for solutions or resolutions, I began to engage with the complex reality around us. I began to confront my own desire to find a 'bad guy' in the conflict; my desire to blame the Israelis, or the settlers, or the soldiers.
Again, during my daily meditation practice, I began to wonder if my desire for a 'bad guy' outside myself was really to do with keeping at bay the 'bad guy' inside me: the inner dark self that Dr Kubler-Ross has referred to as the 'Hitler inside'.
This was a lesson that would come back to me many times, but most powerfully in our encounter with an organisation called Breaking the Silence, founded by former soldiers who seek to educate the Israeli public about the reality of the occupation and to challenge the constant flow of young men and women sent there for compulsory national service. Breaking the Silence took us to Hebron, known as the 'ghost town' and the only city in the West Bank to have a settlement at its very centre.
Our tour of Hebron found us surrounded by Israeli soldiers, who are prohibited from intervening in frequent violence from the settler community towards Palestinian residents, but who often feel a deep-seated unease and despair about their role in their West Bank. Breaking the Silence bears witness to the complex feelings of guilt, power and despair experienced by male and female soldiers, many of them aged between 18 and 21 years undertaking their compulsory national service. Their testimonies reveal the incomprehensible power granted to these men and women, and the danger of putting such power in the hands of any human beings, let alone ones so young and inexperienced. As one soldier revealed in his testimony, "This is the most revolting sentence that…has the most negative connotations in the world, and you'll hear almost every soldier speak: 'I'm a soldier and I'm just following orders.'"

We met another former Israeli soldier alongside former Palestinian resistance fighters, all now united in the group Combatants for Peace. CfP work together to educate people about the reality of the conflict and encourage both sides to work together to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. One of the Palestinian men told us about how his brother was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. He became a resistance fighter and ended up in prison. He spoke of his anger, and he spoke of the birth of his daughter, and how, with her came a realisation that violence could never bring peace. He joined CfP and discovered for himself the power of meeting 'the other side'; how quickly this brought all sides to an understanding of each other's humanity. From CfP I learned how hard it is to hate someone once you see their pain, their fear and their suffering and you see that it is a mirror to your own.
We met Issa Suf, a man who was shot and paralysed in his village by an Israeli soldier in 2001, while peacefully demonstrating against the occupation. Issa talked to us about his despair not only at the conflict within Israel and Palestine, but at the conflicts all over the world, the inequalities in power and resources that lead so many of us to live in privilege at the expense of others whose faces we never see and whose names we will never know.
Because of the conflict, Issa will never walk again, yet he wrote a letter to the soldier who shot him, in which he said, "Even though I have reason to hate you, I do not feel that way."
Issa's life has been changed forever by the conflict, but he has found enough peace in his heart to spend his days still striving for peace as a journalist, by welcoming internationals and Israelis into his home and by sharing his unique perspective on the importance of peace and of justice in a world where both often seem to be in short supply.
And on the last full day, we met settlers.
In the days before our meeting, the very word 'settler' had come to cast a long, dark shadow over my experience of the retreat. The word had taken on a sense of fear and repugnance. When I learnt that we were to meet with settlers, I both dreaded the meeting and gravitated toward it with the fascination one might feel at staring at a corpse. I sensed it would be horrible and shocking, but I had to see. The more I concentrated on this feeling, the more I realised that I was still looking for a perfect 'bad guy'. I wanted the settlers to be monsters.
The settlers we met were from an organisation called Eretz Shalom, a group of settlers from various settlements within the West Bank who meet with Palestinian villagers. Their leader, Nahum, spoke to us about their rejection of the prevailing politics of left and right, and their desire, instead to live as neighbours with the Palestinians.
Within seconds of their arrival, I knew that Eretz Shalom were not monsters. They wanted the same things our friends in Palestine wanted: safety for their children, a peaceful life, the freedom to make choices about their jobs, their families and their futures without needing to consider if those choices would turn out to be life-threatening. I did not always agree with their perspective, but I had learned enough from my time on the retreat to know how important it was to sit in a spirit of understanding, despite my misgivings, and to recognise the humanity of these people, their desire for a life lived in peace.
So what exactly did I learn from the retreat?
I learned that peace is just a word, but that connecting with a sense of peace is not an end result – and not one that could ever be fought for – it is a process. Overcoming anger, vengeance, hopelessness and despair in order to find peace is not a goal you can decide to achieve in a conventional sense. It is a moment that comes at the end of many long moments in which you have struggled to hold on to your sense of self, to your sense of sanity, to your sense of hope. Peace cannot be achieved alone because none of us live in this world alone and each one of our actions can disturb the peace others, even when we think we are acting in the spirit of the divine. Peace is what happens when you can open your heart to others - as often and as far as you possibly can – and peace is what happens when someone else opens their heart to you and you see it is a mirror of your own.
Like the Palestinians we met, I grew up with violence, fear and conflict, but of a very different kind. I left the violence in my life and moved on, but for the people of Palestine and of Israel, this is only possible if they leave their whole lives, their homes, their countries. Instead they stay, and they dream of peace and a number of them – more, I think, than we can possibly know – reach out, across the wall, not just the towering and terrifying wall that has become a symbol of the occupation, but across the walls inside their own hearts. It is not easy, it is often terrifying, it requires a faith and a hope that I can barely begin to grasp. But I learnt, most of all, that it is this moment, this act of reaching out, which is the true beginning of peace.
For me, I reached out when I saw that poster. I didn't know why, I didn't know what it would bring and I could think of so many perfectly justifiable reasons not to go. But I did. And now my life will never be the same. Because, since I came home, when I feel the spark of anger that comes for reasons large and small, I find myself back on a hillside in the West Bank, listening to a woman who is afraid for her children, whose home is being threatened, who has watched people she loves being beaten, imprisoned or killed, and I remember that being peace is not about 'solving' the 'problem' of anger, or despair. It is about feeling suffering and then choosing to open your heart, against all odds, to reach out. And it can take endless forms – you can reach out when you sign a petition, you can reach out with a kind word, or you can stop reading this and press that button and book your place on Being Peace.
And then you can find out for yourself.