Somewhere on the long road from Texas to Washington DC, a group of Buddhist monks is walking. It is February 2026, and in New Jersey a spiritual director named Maria Gullo is looking out at mounds of snow and thinking about them. She cannot say exactly where they are that morning. She only knows they are moving through cold and snow, step after step, on a pilgrimage of roughly 2,300 miles meant to promote peace and unity in a country that feels more divided than it has in a long while. The walk had already been underway for several months when she sat down to record a short video, and it had lodged in her imagination. Her reflection does not try to explain Buddhism or to claim the monks as her own. Instead it asks a quieter question: what does the peace of Christ look like when it is not forced, not argued for, and not dependent on how the world happens to be going? Her answer rests on three ideas. Peace is a gift that is received. It is also a choice you make, again and again. And it arrives in small units, one step, one breath, one thought, the same way the monks are covering their distance.
Gullo opens the way a good guest opens a conversation, with gratitude. She asks viewers to join her in thanking the monks, whom she describes as "really making a statement with their lives." That phrase is worth dwelling on. A protest sign makes a statement in a single moment, and a speech makes one in an hour. A walk of thousands of miles makes its statement through repetition, through the body, and through endurance in weather nobody chose. The monks are not simply saying that peace matters. They are spending their days on it.
She returns to that image of cold and snow more than once, and it does important work in the reflection. Her own location, in the middle of a New Jersey winter, becomes a small mirror of the pilgrims' conditions. She is not walking, but she is sitting inside a season she did not choose, with a question she has to answer anyway. That connection between the physical discomfort of the walk and the inner discipline of peace is where her reflection begins to gain its traction.
Gullo is open about where she stands. She speaks "as a follower of Jesus Christ, as a Christian," and she frames her response to the walk as a challenge to her own community. She asks all Christians to have "a renewed sense of the peace of Christ in our lives," and to let that peace be "stirred up." Being inspired by people from another tradition, in other words, becomes an occasion for examining her own.
The anchor of her reflection is a passage she recalls from the words of Jesus about peace:
"I give you my peace. My peace I give you is not a peace that the world gives." (Jesus, as quoted by Maria Gullo in her February 2026 video)
She draws out the difference the passage implies. The peace Christ gives is "beyond what the world gives." It is "beyond your circumstances" and it "surpasses all that's going on in your life." This is the central claim of the whole piece. Much of what passes for peace in ordinary life depends on conditions: a quiet house, a settled bank balance, a country at rest. Gullo is describing something that does not need those conditions to be present in order to exist. It is, she says, "that inner peace that we choose."
Notice that the walk itself embodies a version of this. The monks are not waiting for the country to become peaceful before they set out. They are walking toward a conversation about peace while the country is still in the middle of its disagreements. Gullo's point, in her own theological vocabulary, is that peace of this kind is not postponed until conditions improve. It is entered now, from wherever you stand.
This is the place where Gullo's reflection becomes most interesting, and where a careful reader should slow down. She insists on two things at once. Peace is a choice: "We choose. We choose." But peace is also a gift: "it's a peace that is a gift and we receive this peace of Christ." These sound like they might pull against each other. If you choose it, is it still a gift? If it is a gift, what is your choosing for?
Her answer is that receiving and choosing are not opposites. You choose to receive. You open your hand. The choice is the act of consent, and the gift is what arrives when consent is given. She makes this concrete through the work of the Holy Spirit. When a person takes this peace "into our being," and "allow[s] the Holy Spirit to really weave it into who we are and to transform us," then it "becomes a part of us." The result, in her words, is that "we live it from the inside out."
That phrase, living peace from the inside out, is the hinge of the whole reflection. It means peace is not a mood you put on for church or a posture you assume when things are calm. It is meant to become the grain of a person, the way a walker's stride becomes second nature after enough miles. Gullo is not describing a feeling that comes and goes. She is describing a transformation that slowly reorganizes how you act when the feeling is absent.
The most practically useful sentences in the video come in the middle, where Gullo names what gets in the way. "We can't force our way into peace. We can't struggle our way into peace." She adds: "That's the exact opposite, right?" Then she names the actual obstacle: "any resistance to whatever is going on around us that works against us."
Many spiritual people, and many ordinary people trying to be calm, make the same mistake. They treat peace as a target to be achieved through pressure. They grit their teeth, argue themselves into serenity, or fight the anxiety until it is defeated. Gullo's reading suggests that this effort is itself a form of resistance, and resistance keeps the very disturbance in place. The alternative is not passivity. It is a different kind of attention, one that receives what is actually happening rather than arguing with it.
There is something here that also rings true of pilgrimage. A walker who fights the road, cursing every hill and every cold wind, usually goes slower and suffers more than one who accepts the terrain and keeps moving. Gullo does not make that comparison herself, but her insistence that resistance is the enemy of peace fits the logic of the walk she is describing.
The phrase that stays with many viewers is her description of how peace actually gets practiced. She says that peace can be brought "one step at a time, one breath at a time, one thought at a time, wherever I am." The three units are worth separating, because each names a different place where a person can meet peace in ordinary life.
- One step at a time. This is the body, and it is the monks' whole method. A long pilgrimage is never completed in a leap. It is completed in the next footfall, and then the next.
- One breath at a time. This is the nervous system, the place where most people first notice that they are not at peace, because the breath becomes shallow before the mind has caught up.
- One thought at a time. This is the mind, where resistance usually lives. Peace here means noticing a thought without making it the next step in an argument.
The qualifier matters too: "wherever I am." Gullo is not asking for a retreat or a special setting. The peace she describes is meant to travel with you into the grocery line, the difficult phone call, and the news feed that makes the country feel so divided. The monks' walk, which passes through many towns and many ordinary days, is a picture of exactly this kind of portable practice.
Gullo ends by turning the reflection into a shared act. She asks viewers to make a renewed declaration: "Yes, I receive. I choose to receive. And I choose peace. The peace that is in spite of the circumstances." She acknowledges that there are details of every life that a person might want to change, and she says plainly that this does not stop the peace from being available now.
She also points people toward ongoing practice. She invites them to her contemplative prayer community, where she says the community prays and lives for peace together. She mentions audio tracks she has posted on Insight Timer, and a Facebook group called The Deeper Connection community. And she closes with a blessing, asking that God cause his face to shine upon her listeners, be gracious to them, and give them "that peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding."
What makes the piece land is its restraint. Gullo does not claim that the monks are secret Christians, or that their walk is a Christian act in disguise. She simply lets a witness from another tradition show her something about her own, and then she asks what she and her listeners will do with it. That is a generous way to respond to someone else's faithfulness.
If this reflection has stayed with you, the most useful next step is the simplest one: try the three units she names. For a day, notice your steps, your breath, and your thoughts, and when you feel resistance rising against what is happening, ask whether you are struggling into peace or receiving it. You do not need to be on a pilgrimage to practice this, and you do not need to share her faith to recognize the distinction she is drawing between a peace that is forced and a peace that is lived from the inside out.
To go further, watch Gullo's original video in full, which runs under five minutes. Her ministry, The Deeper Connection, is at thedeeperconnection.org, and her audio tracks can be found on Insight Timer by searching for Maria Gullo. Readers who want to follow the walk itself should look for current coverage of the monks' journey, since the video was recorded while the pilgrimage was still underway.
