What I Saw From Dubai

I flew into Dubai last week not fully understanding what I was flying into.

I love Dubai. I've been spending time there since 2023 and I've made some real connections over the years. I love the smell of the place. The colours. The strange melting pot of cultures and ambition and contradiction all stitched together into one city. People love to dismiss Dubai as glitz and capitalism and pretension, and yes, that's part of it. But there's another layer underneath that you only see if you spend real time there with real people. I always look forward to going back.

This trip I had eleven days planned. I'd organised a men's circle for some of the guys out there because I could feel the fear and the anxiety and the uncertainty in the air. A lot of them are losing jobs to AI and watching their industries shift under their feet. I wanted to come and offer support.

Five days in, I met up with a friend. She's Iranian. And the conversation we had cracked something open in me that I'm still sitting with.

A different angle on the mountain

People ask me sometimes what my take is on what's happening with Iran. I usually don't engage with the political angle of these things, because politics to me feels like looking at one side of a mountain and pretending you can see all the routes to the summit. We just don't have all the information. There are so many opinions flying around and people love to talk about what they think they know, but nobody really knows. I don't like getting caught up in that.

But sitting across from someone whose mother lives in Tehran. Someone who has watched her country be bombed. Someone who has been completely uprooted, dysfunctional for two weeks, processing big T trauma in real time. That's not politics. That's a human being. And the only way to get back home to her mother is now a multi-day journey through the Caspian, driving through Turkey.

What I felt as I listened to her was something I wasn't expecting. Not just compassion, though there was plenty of that. It was the slow recognition that the version of the story I'd absorbed from headlines and social media was almost completely missing the human texture. Her love for her people. Her devotion to her land. Her quiet awareness that propaganda flows both ways and the truth is always more complicated than any single narrative wants to admit.

My heart cracked open for her. And underneath that, my heart cracked open for the whole damn situation. That here we are in 2026 and humans still haven't figured out how to simply get along.

Years ago Neale Donald Walsch said something to me that I've never forgotten. He said:

We're like children playing with matches in a dynamite room. Our knowledge has far exceeded our wisdom to use that knowledge.

Or rather, our wisdom hasn't developed in tandem with the power we now hold. And every year that passes, that gap gets more dangerous.

"You're brave to be here right now"

Then near the end of the conversation, my friend looked at me and said, "You're brave to be here right now."

I laughed it off. I said something like, I don't think there are that many bombs flying around. I genuinely hadn't been tracking the news. I'd been so absorbed in the trip and the people that I'd missed the escalation entirely.

She said, "No. Not brave because of the risk of dying here. Brave because Trump has threatened to annihilate Iranian infrastructure on Tuesday. And if that happens, Iran is going to retaliate. They're going to hit the UAE. They'll close the airspace. And you'll be trapped here."

I went back to my Airbnb and opened the news for the first time in days. And I realised the situation was much closer to going completely sideways than I had any idea about. So I made a decision. I changed my flight. I came home early.

That night I could hardly sleep. I lay in bed listening to what I now understand were missile interceptions over the city. And for the first time in my life I had the visceral sense of being inside a war zone. Not watching it on a screen. Not reading about it. Inside it.

The next morning I got on the plane, and I won't pretend I didn't feel something deep release as the wheels left the runway and I watched the little plane on the in-flight map cross out of Middle Eastern airspace. There was relief when I touched down at home.

When I woke up the following morning, the news was that a temporary ceasefire had been negotiated. Relief again, but also something more disturbing. I learned that what had been happening in Iran was that civilians were lining up along the infrastructure that was scheduled to be bombed. Forming human shields around the bridges and power plants. If the strikes had gone ahead, those bombs would have killed civilians by the thousands. And it had been on the verge of going ahead. Right up until the last minute.

I don't know how to hold all of that. I'm still trying.

A spiritual problem dressed in political clothing

Here's what I keep coming back to.

The Heart iQ lens on situations like this is more zoomed out than the political one. What I see when I look at Iran, at the United States, at the whole exhausting theatre of escalation and threat and retaliation, is a symptom of something deeper. We simply lack the unity consciousness to operate as a single human family. Everything happening on the world stage is downstream of that one fact. We have not yet collectively reached the awareness that another person is just self, cleverly disguised. Some of us can do that on an individual level, in moments, with effort. But on the tribal level, the national level, the geopolitical level? We're still children. We're still drawing lines and choosing sides and seeking domination dressed up as security.

And the harder truth underneath that is this. To do nothing in the face of regimes that genuinely terrorise their own people isn't the answer either. Some of these governments are real threats. Pretending otherwise would be its own form of denial. The problem isn't that we need to choose between intervention and pacifism. The problem is that we keep trying to solve a spiritual problem with political solutions. We keep applying force where what's actually needed is consciousness. And consciousness can't be bombed into existence.

That's the part that breaks me. Not that the world is broken, but that we have the ingredients for something so much better and we keep choosing not to use them.

The danger of certainty

The other thing I've been sitting with since that conversation is the danger of certainty. Especially the way leadership today is positioned.

Real leadership has been replaced with bravado. Whoever sounds most certain wins, regardless of whether their certainty is warranted. Could you imagine a head of state actually saying out loud, "I don't have all the information. I genuinely don't know how to solve this right now. I'm going to seek counsel and make the best decision I can." That kind of honesty would be branded as weakness. We don't celebrate the leader who lives in the question. We celebrate the one who pretends to have the answer. And then we follow them off a cliff together.

I think this is the same disease that shows up in our personal lives. The need to have a position. The need to be right. The need to find allies who agree with us so we can feel validated in our worldview. I see it constantly when people come to me wanting to gossip about someone in their life, looking for me to take their side.

That siding, that alliance-building, is one of the most subtly toxic dynamics in human relating. It feels like connection but it's actually fragmentation. It's how we destroy unity, one validated grievance at a time.

The practice underneath all of it

What I'm trying to practice instead, in my own life and in the work I do with others, is staying in the question. Acknowledging that the way I see life is incomplete. Resisting the seduction of being right. Letting another person's truth land in me without immediately reaching for my counterargument.

It's not easy. It's actually one of the hardest practices there is. But I think it's the practice the world is desperate for right now, even if it doesn't know it.

I don't know how all of this lands for you. I'm not writing this to convince anyone of anything. I'm writing it because I'm still processing what happened in Dubai and what my Iranian friend showed me. And because sometimes the most useful thing I can do as a teacher is admit the limits of what I know and offer the question instead of the answer.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. I'd love to know what's stirring in you as you sit with this. If anything.

And to my friend in Dubai. I'm thinking of you and your mother. May the ceasefire hold. May we find a way to wake up before it's too late.

---

Christian Pankhurst is the founder of Heart iQ, a methodology for embodied relational intelligence. He lives and works at New Eden in the Netherlands.