Peace begins with people being at content with themselves. For some, that concept is as elusive as a winning lottery ticket. We spend so much time making our lives look like what society tells us we we need to look like, that we aren’t aware of our own thoughts. We distance ourselves from having peace because we spend so much time seeking it outside of ourselves.
We become afraid to be different, to want less, to live without tangible ease. We forge a life of having, rather than being. Our happiness becomes conditional.
Peace seeking?
To seek it is a guaranteed way to never be at peace. To be content is our first and only responsibility. Our entire existence is to wake up to the reality of being part of the world, not to dominate over it. The need to be better, faster, wealthier, stronger, morally superior is one of our animal instincts.
It’s a base feeling associated with the survivor skills of our origins. We put a label on it. We rationalize it. We compare ourselves with others as part of how we exist. But it doesn’t lead to peace. It never will. Money can buy us safety and comfort. It can’t buy us happiness. It certainly doesn’t buy us tranquility.
Are we all nomads, searching for peace?
I’ve seen it in how people go about being peaceful. We do what humans always do. We flock to the one with the perceived highest level of status. That very act of seeking the calm in others yields an invisible barricade of never finding it.
We’re competing for something that is freely available to us at any given time in our mental lives.
The intuitive, ‘gut’ feeling of how to ‘be’ is often times overshadowed by the chaos that we live in. Scientists say that our ‘intuition’ is faulty, but they overestimate their science. The ‘gut’ feeling is an organic, imbedded, instinctive whisper of a conversation we have with ourselves prior to making any and all decisions.
Peace is already there.
We know what to do to achieve peace. Our shadow advises throughout our life cycle. It’s our ego that tells our conscious mind not to listen to it.
We live in loud times. Quiet, internal, calm, peaceful beings have no need outside of themselves. Nothing to prove. Nothing to compete with. Nothing to give that is not whole heartedly accepted. Noting to share. They are unafraid or apologetic for being who they are.
To be truly at peace with our lives, we have to let go of everything, and I mean everything that we carry around with us. Including fear.
The rush toward wanting seems to precede the savoring of what is.
It’s not possible to find peace until we’re also willing to give our thoughts over to the vulnerable realization that we’re human.
Peace begins as an inside job. It’s also the greatest act of human courage there is. To just … be.
Peace!
Karen
About the Author: Karen Henry, MA CRM owns Henry Healing as a holistic well-being practitioner and writer. She’s a former university professor and current scholar practicing the infusion of positive, existential and community psychology.