Love it or hate it, the personal is always political (and vice versa) – precisely no one on the planet escapes that inevitability. We may ignore active engagement in politics all our lives but that won’t spare us its mulitple effects on our everydays.

So All Hands On wants to know how that affects the idea of radically better politics for all.

This film – Love is Freedom – gets us started in that search. It suggests the personal is spiritual even before it gets political. In this case the spirituality comes courtesy of Plum Village, root temple of the late Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. called the Buddhist monk “an Apostle of peace and nonviolence” when nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. That was before Nhat Hanh’s decades of political change work from a base in his adopted home of France.

The film begins with sitting and walking meditations in the spirit of Nhat Hanh’s teachings – increasingly familiar to the world as the root of mindfulness practices. They featured during a week-long “Love is Freedom” – Earth Retreat held at Plum Village in June 2023.

Participants gathered from around the world, in person and online, for a week of reflection and practice. Together, they pondered the question:

“In the midst of global biodiversity, social and climate crises, how can love show us the way?”

The film also shows indigenous wisdom keepers from the Americas and Africa, who joined Plum Village in a Northern summer solstice celebration that included all their traditions.

Among them are Joshua Konkankoh and Mindahi Bastida from Cameroon and Mexico respectively. They discuss both the ceremony and the politics of love with Plum Village Dharma teacher Sister Chân Lực Nghiêm.

As Mindahi explains, talking about the solstice ceremony: “So those are the spiritual practices and why it’s important because politically, we are not alone, we live in community. This fallacy of the individual is killing mother earth. This egocentric, anthropocentric way of thinking is killing us and killing other species.”

The film begins at dawn, in the mist and rain, and ends in golden evening sunshine. It evokes the idea of awakening – from our sleepiness, our lack of awareness, to something more like understanding and clarity. It suggests we need to transform our personal and collective ignorance and suffering into better knowledge and awareness of both ourselves and of others. That work will help transform our relationships with the earth and indeed the whole cosmos.

“So how does this inform our political activism?” asks Joshua. “Actually, the word politics in our language is about governing and keeping harmony. If the spirits are not angry then every thing will flow in the community. So, we do everything to work with the spirits so that the spirits will not be angry with us.”

As a Scot and long-ago lapsed Presbyterian, All Hands On’s director Patrick Chalmers only recently made the elemental link between world wisdom traditions and politics. That lapse extended from indigenous traditions to root teachings in most major religions, including his own former one.

A readiness to explore that gap is what underpins our next project, a full-length documentary with the working title “Making Peace with Politics”. Its aim will be to look into how people’s personal spiritual practices serve as bedrock for their political practices.

This is familiar to us from the work of world political icons such as Mohandas Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King jr, Nelson Mandela and Thich Nhat Hanh. But what about for the rest of us? What of our respective personal practices, or lack of them, and how they might apply to our engagement in today’s political questions?

Our start point is back at Plum Village, which has walked its mindful talk from its outset four decades ago. Among its notable efforts has been hosting Israelis and Palestinians on two-week retreats in France as an attempt to build bridges between the two communities. We want to find out how they’ve fared since and how their work continues.

Linking the spiritual with politics is not as far-fetched as it might first seem to secular Western audiences. Take the best-selling Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, speaking in a two-part interview on the podcast The Rest Is Politics: Leading.  In the first, Harari lays out a clear-eyed analysis of the political battle pitching his nation’s government against much of its electorate.  In the second, he relates how his own meditation practice helps him sift through the mess of his mind.

"The key question in meditation, at least for me, is what is really happening? What is reality, in contrast to what are just stories created by your own mind? We think we see the world. Most of the time, we see only stories created by our own mind, even about ourselves. And, both on a personal level, but also on a professional or even political level, if I am constantly trapped within the stories generated by my own mind, I can't understand things like wars and revolutions and political developments and things like that."

We want to know just how more mindful politics – our own and others – might help our world. If you want to help us do that – please consider donating to our efforts.