For many years, I have had the privilege of accompanying people across the Arab world as they explore the inner patterns that shape their lives. From Dubai to Beirut, Cairo to Jeddah, I have witnessed a growing sincerity in what people are bringing forward.
Why do I respond the way I do?
What lives in me from my family, my culture, my history?
How have love, loss, responsibility, silence, survival, and belonging shaped the person I have become?
Kantsmith
These questions feel especially alive in our region today. The weight of war, uncertainty, grief, and loss is very present, whether spoken or unspoken.
I speak to this as the Arab Country Coordinator for Compassionate Inquiry®, as a practitioner and educator in this work, and as someone whose own life is deeply woven through the region. My Palestinian lineage is rooted in a history of belonging, displacement, and loss, both personal and collective. My roots in Lebanon have shaped much of how I understand this part of the world. Dubai has been my home for 26 years: the place where I have raised my children, built my work, gathered communities, and witnessed people from the Arab world and the wider region come together in search of healing, understanding, and meaningful connection.
In times of war, compassion can feel almost impossible. It may come more naturally toward those we love, those we relate to and identify with, and those whose pain feels similar to our own. In the presence of violence, the human system naturally moves toward protection. When people are living with bombs, displacement, or constant uncertainty, the heart guards itself, the body moves into hypervigilance, and the mind searches for safety.
This is why compassion has to begin with the truth of what people are actually living. For someone grieving family, fearing for loved ones, witnessing destruction, or shaped by generations of upheaval, compassion begins by acknowledging the depth of what has been endured. It makes space for the anger, fear, and exhaustion already present. From there, compassion becomes less of an ideal and more of a human practice: a way of remaining in contact with ourselves, our people, and our shared humanity.
This is also where Compassionate Inquiry® has something important to offer. Since 2018, I have worked with this approach in private practice, group settings, teaching spaces, and community gatherings. Again and again, I have seen what opens when people begin to listen beneath the immediate reaction and understand the fear, grief, protection, and longing that may be moving through them.
Here, pain often moves across generations: through family stories, migration, inherited responsibilities, and the pressure to keep going. Many have learned to be strong, to care for others, and to make life work under difficult circumstances. Compassionate Inquiry® invites us to meet these adaptations with curiosity, understanding how they once helped us survive and how they may continue to shape the way we live, relate, and respond today.
As Arab Country Coordinator, I feel a deep responsibility to hold this work in a way that honours the complexity of the Arab world. Compassion in this context includes grief, anger, protection, truth, and accountability. It asks us to stay connected to the heart while also seeing clearly what is happening around us.
Dubai continues to be a powerful meeting point for this work, bringing together people from across the Arab world and the wider region. In this city, I have seen how meaningful it can be to create spaces where people can explore themselves with dignity. There is a real need for approaches that are grounded, skillful, culturally sensitive, and able to meet the human being within the larger story they are part of.
This is the spirit behind the upcoming launch of The Compassionate Inquiry® Online Short Course in Arabic, as well as the ongoing Compassionate Inquiry® activities and regional rollout taking shape across the Arab world. These offerings are part of a wider invitation to make this work more accessible and more connected to the realities of our communities.
In this sense, meeting ourselves in times of war is an act of compassion, clarity, and responsibility. The time feels ripe for a deeper conversation about how we relate to one another and how we bring consciousness to the inherited pain that continues to shape our lives.
Compassionate Inquiry® offers a meaningful way to begin: with honesty, depth, and reverence for the personal and collective stories we carry.
