You Must Change Your Life: A Journey Toward Love and Kindness

This essay offers a reflection on the author's personal experience with the global pandemic, which was experienced as an unrooting of self from a US-borne identity to one committed to the "Be Kind" politics of Aotearoa New Zealand. The author discusses how Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's call to kindness triggered the author's desire to center love as a personal-political project through the contemplative practices encouraged by the spiritual discipline of sadhana. The ensuing "pandemic story" is thus a journey of what the author thinks a politics of love requires: self-contemplation, reflection and transformation, and the recognition that liberation hinges on our obligations to others. The process revealed how separation normalizes inequality and abuse and ultimately reaffirms the need for a "new normal" that prioritizes a politics of love and collective compassion.