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What I Witnessed when the Buddhist Monks Walked through Charlotte
You may or may not have heard about the Buddhist monks walking a 2,300 mile trek from Texas to Washington, DC.
When I picked up on this, for some reason it just resonated with me and I started following their journey on Facebook. I saw they would be passing through Charlotte, North Caroline, where I live—and I knew I had to go see them.
I arrived at a place near where they were stopping for the night, a local school, and saw hundreds of people lining the sidewalk and a full parking lot. There were so many cars, I had to park in the very back.
I walked to the front of the school, where people were gathering on the sidewalk, and everyone was so friendly and welcoming. As we chatted, I realized I wasn’t the only one who had been following them for a while online.
When the monks approached, something happened: there were hundreds of people around me, but the crowd went silent.
There was a genuine reverence and respect for these monks, and the peaceful ambiance was palpable. It only took a few minutes for them to pass, but after they did, everyone walked back to their cars in a calm and orderly fashion, almost strolling—no rush.
As the crowd was leaving this packed parking lot, something even more striking happened. Cars were bumper-to-bumper, inching forward slowly, and yet, there wasn’t a single horn. No agitation. No frustration.
I’ve never seen that before.
What people were responding to wasn’t an idea about peace. It was the presence of peace right there, everywhere around me.
The monks didn’t need to speak. Their regulated, grounded presence communicated the safety that accompanies peace, and it emanated through the crowd.
From a neuroscience perspective, this isn’t surprising. Humans are wired for co-regulation. When we are near someone whose nervous system is settled and safe, our own nervous system receives that signal. Vigilance decreases. The stress response quiets.
Peace becomes felt, not imagined.
This is why the crowds have grown as the monks continue their walk. People aren’t coming to be inspired. They’re coming to experience something most of us rarely feel in daily life: embodied, felt peace.
Peace, in this context, is the absence of stress—not because stress is managed or overridden, but because safety has been restored.
What I witnessed in Charlotte wasn’t people escaping stress. It was people recognizing peace the moment it entered their field, and instinctively moving toward it.
In a culture saturated with urgency, the body knows and feels when safety presents itself, just as it knows when danger presents itself. However, we rarely get to experience the embodiment of safety and peace, as we live in a world where stress seems to be the norm.
And once felt, even briefly, peace is recognized, remembered, and allowed to come home.
~
author: Patricia Heitz
Image: Author's own
Editor: Nicole Cameron
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