Peace Needs Many Voices:

The Speakers Gathering at the Inner Peace Summit

By DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar

When I first wrote about the upcoming Inner Peace Summit, I began with a question that has stayed with me:

Will we see global peace in our lifetime?

I chose then to believe that we can, and I still do.

That belief does not come from ignoring what is happening around us. We live in a world where conflict, division, displacement, political tension, fear, and uncertainty are very real. There are days when peace can feel less like something within reach and more like something humanity keeps promising itself for another generation.

And yet I continue to believe that peace is worth believing in precisely because it is difficult.

Since sharing my first invitation to the Inner Peace Summit, Sister Jenna and the Brahma Kumaris community have announced the speakers who will gather in the Washington, DC area on September 20, 2026. As I began learning more about them, I realized that I was not simply looking at a list of names and professional accomplishments.

I was looking at something much more interesting.

I was looking at many different roads leading toward the same human aspiration.

There are people coming from public service, spirituality, athletics, healthcare, meditation, restorative practices, culture, leadership, personal development, and community building. They do not all speak the same professional language. They have not all traveled the same road. They do not represent one institution, one profession, or one way of understanding the world.

And that may be exactly the point.

Peace needs many voices.

What Does It Mean to Invest in Peace?

The 2026 United Nations International Day of Peace carries the theme “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.”

I have been thinking about the word invest.

When we invest in something, we are saying that it matters enough to receive our time, attention, energy, resources, and care. We are also saying that what we do today has the possibility of producing something greater tomorrow.

That feels especially important when we talk about peace.

Peace cannot only be something we hope someone else will create for us. Governments have responsibilities. International institutions have responsibilities. Community leaders, corporations, religious organizations, educators, and civil society all have responsibilities.

But so do we.

The way we speak to one another matters. The way we respond when we are angry matters. The way we treat people whose lives, beliefs, identities, politics, cultures, or experiences differ from our own matters. The way we behave when nobody is applauding us matters.

Peace begins in places that rarely make headlines.

It begins in families.

It begins in friendships.

It begins in workplaces.

It begins in community rooms.

It begins in the willingness to listen.

And sometimes it begins within a person who has finally decided that fear, anger, pain, or uncertainty will no longer control how they move through the world.

That is part of what draws me to the Inner Peace Summit.

Thank You, Sister Jenna

My connection to this gathering began with an invitation from Sister Jenna, and I remain deeply grateful to her.

Sister Jenna has spent years creating spaces that bring meditation, consciousness, spirituality, dialogue, leadership, and social transformation into conversation with one another. Through the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Museum and her broader work, she has helped create environments where people from very different backgrounds can enter the same room without first being asked to become the same kind of person.

There is something beautiful about that.

We speak so often about building bridges, but a bridge only matters if people are willing to cross it.

The speaker lineup Sister Jenna and the Brahma Kumaris community have brought together reflects that spirit. It reminds me that peace does not belong exclusively to spiritual teachers, politicians, activists, scholars, healers, or any other single group.

Peace belongs to all of us.

Public Service and the Responsibility to Find Common Ground

Among the announced speakers is Congressman Suhas Subramanyam, who represents Virginia's 10th Congressional District.

His presence brings the world of public service directly into the conversation. His professional life has included law, technology, entrepreneurship, public policy, state government, community service, and now Congress.

I find that meaningful because inner peace should never become an excuse to withdraw from the responsibilities of the world around us.

Eventually, what happens within us meets what happens outside of us.

It meets public policy.

It meets healthcare.

It meets education.

It meets the economy.

It meets questions of dignity, opportunity, justice, and representation.

Peace cannot simply be something we feel while sitting quietly. It also has to influence the way we build institutions and the way those institutions treat human beings.

Dr. Srilekha Palle brings another perspective rooted in healthcare, community leadership, and public service. Her work as a physical therapist and healthcare leader, together with her service in Virginia advisory and professional bodies, is another reminder that wellbeing and peace are not disconnected ideas.

How people are cared for matters.

Whether they feel seen matters.

Whether they feel that institutions respect their humanity matters.

These are all parts of the larger peace conversation.

The Courage to Do the Inner Work

Other speakers bring us into the deeply personal territory where peace often begins.

Dr. Kanu Kogod has spent decades working with mindfulness, emotional intelligence, resilience, leadership, and human transformation. Her work reminds us that moments of change, loss, uncertainty, and transition can force us to confront questions about who we are when familiar structures disappear.

Diane L. Haworth has built her work around the idea of allowing love, rather than fear, to shape the way we move through life. That may sound simple until life gives us something difficult to love our way through. Grief, disappointment, conflict, rejection, and uncertainty can quickly reveal how challenging that practice actually is.

Then there is Dr. Ivy Hylton, whose work crosses psychotherapy, restorative practices, mindfulness, sound, behavioral wellness, and healing. What interests me about work like hers is the recognition that human beings cannot always separate the mind from the body, the emotional from the physical, or the personal from the collective.

We carry our experiences.

We carry stress.

We carry memory.

We carry things that have happened to us and things that have happened around us.

Inner peace does not require us to pretend those experiences never happened. It asks what we are going to do with them.

Rev. Sylvia Sumter, Senior Minister of Unity of Washington, DC, brings another lifetime of spiritual leadership centered on awareness, oneness, service, and the idea that humanity is strengthened when people are willing to move beyond the boundaries that normally separate them.

Those are not abstract ideas to me.

They are part of the practical work of peace.

When Achievement Is Not the Whole Story

One story among the announced speakers especially stayed with me as I was learning more about the group.

Valerie Still is one of the most accomplished basketball players in University of Kentucky history. She became a professional athlete, played for the Washington Mystics, and was ultimately inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.

That would already be an extraordinary life story.

But what interests me in the context of this summit is what happens beyond achievement.

At some point, many of us confront the question of who we are when the titles become quieter.

Who are you when you are no longer standing on the court?

Who are you when the applause stops?

Who are you without your profession, your accomplishments, your social position, or the identities the world has placed around you?

Valerie's later journey into meditation and questions of identity gives another dimension to her story.

We spend enormous portions of our lives learning how to accomplish things.

We spend considerably less time learning how simply to be.

There may be something about inner peace that requires us to rediscover the person underneath all the things we have achieved.

Healing Is Part of Peace

Elisabeth Carson brings another path into this gathering through her work exploring the relationship between mind, body, emotional healing, trauma, spirituality, and personal transformation.

Kelle Jacob also works in the space where leadership, wellness, meditation, and the connection between mind and body meet.

Amita Jain, through her work in Ayurveda and yoga, represents traditions that have spent generations examining the relationship between the inner condition of a human being and the way that person moves through the world.

What I appreciate about having these perspectives represented is that they complicate our understanding of peace in a good way.

Peace is not simply the absence of war.

Peace can also involve how safe someone feels inside their own body.

It can involve whether we know how to regulate fear before fear becomes hostility.

It can involve whether we have learned to recognize pain without allowing that pain to become something we pass along to someone else.

A society can sign agreements and still contain deeply wounded people.

If we want sustainable peace, then healing has to be part of the conversation.

Culture Can Build Bridges Too

I was also pleased to see Indrani Davaluri among the announced speakers.

Her work in classical dance, teaching, filmmaking, cultural preservation, and storytelling brings another important language into the room.

Art can reach places that arguments sometimes cannot.

A dance can cross a language barrier.

Music can carry emotion without requiring translation.

A story can allow us to recognize something of ourselves inside the life of someone we thought was entirely different from us.

Culture has the ability to divide when we use it to build walls around ourselves. But culture can also become one of humanity's most beautiful bridges when we share it with confidence, generosity, and curiosity.

Karishma Venkata is also among those announced, bringing her own background in wellness and contemplative practices into the gathering.

And Cristina Rosario will be joining the speaker lineup as well. I have deliberately resisted trying to define her through information I cannot confidently verify. I would rather hear directly from her than assign her someone else's biography simply because names happen to match.

There is something appropriate about that too.

Not everyone we meet needs to be completely explained before we are willing to listen.

Sometimes we simply enter the room and allow someone to introduce themselves.

What I See When I Look at This Gathering

The more I learned about this lineup, the less interested I became in ranking accomplishments.

What interests me is the combination.

A member of Congress will be there.

Spiritual leaders will be there.

An elite athlete will be there.

People whose work involves healthcare, meditation, healing, mindfulness, culture, coaching, restorative practices, leadership, community, and personal transformation will be there.

And I will be there.

Not because I believe any one of us has the answer to global peace.

I do not.

I am going because I believe listening matters.

Curiosity matters.

Gathering matters.

And bringing people with very different experiences into the same space can matter.

No profession owns peace.

No political party owns peace.

No faith owns peace.

No country owns peace.

No race, gender, generation, economic class, or social identity owns peace.

Peace belongs to humanity.

Which means humanity has to participate in creating it.

I Look Forward to Being in the Room

On Sunday, September 20, 2026, I will attend the Washington, DC-area Inner Peace Summit at the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.

The free community gathering will take place from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM.

When Sister Jenna first invited me, I knew I wanted to support the intention behind the gathering.

Now that the speakers have been announced and I have taken the time to learn something about the people who will be there, I am even more curious about what will happen when these different experiences meet.

Five hours will not create world peace.

But five hours can change a conversation.

A conversation can change the way someone thinks.

A changed perspective can influence a relationship.

Relationships shape communities.

Communities shape institutions.

And institutions can affect the lives of millions of people.

That is how a ripple grows.

We do not always get to see where our individual contribution ends.

Maybe we are not supposed to.

Maybe our responsibility is simply to make the contribution.

Everyday Architects of Peace

The idea of becoming an everyday architect of peace stays with me.

An architect does more than imagine a building.

An architect helps create the conditions for something to stand.

That means peace cannot only remain an inspirational word that we post when the world is hurting.

We have to build something with it.

Some people will build through public service.

Others through spirituality.

Some through medicine and healthcare.

Others through education, business, advocacy, art, athletics, community service, meditation, or simply the way they raise a family and treat the people around them.

There are countless ways to participate.

What matters is that we participate.

My sincere thanks again to Sister Jenna and the Brahma Kumaris community for extending the invitation and for creating a space where so many different experiences and expressions of service can come together.

And to Congressman Suhas Subramanyam, Sister Dr. Jenna, Valerie Still, Elisabeth Carson, Kelle Jacob, Dr. Ivy Hylton, Dr. Kanu Kogod, Diane L. Haworth, Dr. Srilekha Palle, Indrani Davaluri, Cristina Rosario, Amita Jain, Karishma Venkata, and Rev. Sylvia Sumter, I look forward to hearing what each of you brings into the room.

I look forward to listening.

I look forward to learning.

And I look forward to being there.

Because I still believe that no contribution toward peace is ever wasted.

I still believe that what begins within one human being can ripple outward into the lives of others.

And I still choose to believe that peace in our lifetime is worth imagining, worth investing in, and worth working toward.

Experience Peace. Live Peace. Share Peace.

Inner Peace. Outer Impact.