Regret Was the Soil

What ripened peace revealed beneath my restlessness

I try to give myself a few weeks of concentrated practice each year—a returning, a remembering, and I’ve just come back from a self-retreat at Insight Meditation Society, where I devoted myself to Shamatha and Mahamudra practice. Days of silence. Days of simplicity. Days of listening beneath the obvious.

And what arose with surprising regularity was restlessness. Specifically, regret. An unsettledness that kept moving through my body and across my mind like an intense storm.

At first, I met it in the familiar way—as something to work with, something to steady, perhaps even something to overcome. Restlessness, after all, is one of five hindrances the Buddha teaches us to recognize.

But as the days deepened, something quieter began to reveal itself. What I discovered is that restlessness was never really the whole story.

Restlessness was the surface. Regret was the soil.

That surprised me.

There were moments when regret didn’t simply visit me—I become it. The mind tightened around an old story, an old choice, an unfinished moment, and suddenly I was no longer witnessing regret… I was wearing it. Breathing it. Identifying with it.

Perhaps you know something of this terrain.

But what became clear in the silence is that regret was not arising because something was wrong. It was arising because something in me had become spacious enough for it to finally speak.

And what allowed me to see this was not sharper concentration. Not more effort. Not some extraordinary spiritual breakthrough.

It was peace.

When I zoomed out of the intense experiences of regret, I realized peace was not absent. Peace was abundant – Steady. Seasoned. Available. It had been growing all along, quietly beneath the noise of my more familiar and habitual conversations with regret and concern.

And it was this ripened peace—not effort, not analysis, not fixing—that loosened the grip of regret.

Peace didn’t remove regret; peace gave regret somewhere to release.

Peace gave regret room—Room to speak. Room to tremble. Room to tell its story again and again until it no longer needed to hold my body and mind hostage.

And as regret told its story—in the warmth of awareness, in the spaciousness of stillness—it began to lose its charge. Not because it disappeared. But because it no longer needed to fight for space.

This is what I am learning:

Sometimes what feels like restlessness is a portal, not agitation at all. Sometimes it is old regret, finally trusting the peace you have cultivated enough to come out of hiding.

Perhaps this is why practice matters so deeply in times like these.

In a world saturated with racial distress, political injustice, collective exhaustion, the ache of poor choices, and witnessing harm repeated in old and new forms, it is easy to become fused with what we see. Easy to mistake what we witness for who we - or they - are. But when peace is being ripened within us, something else becomes possible.

We are less likely to be captured by what moves through us. Less likely to become the fear, the outrage, the grief, or the regret. More able to stay. More able to see clearly. More able to let what is unfinished rise into the light of awareness and complete its course.

And from that steadiness, we keep our wits about us.

Our hearts open.

Our minds clear.

Our courage available.

So that the long work of healing and justice is not fueled only by distress, but also by peace.