Why do we say finding inner peace is very difficult? Because it’s the most expensive thing in the world in my understanding and finding something difficult can’t be cheap, it has to be expensive. In truth-finding inner peace is difficult because we are searching for it in the wrong places like our partners, our profile, our relationships, and our status.
Inner peace is our true wealth because it stays with us till the end of our life rest everything else lives us, we may become peace and carry it ahead while all the other things are impossible to carry after we die. If we closely see, we all are users in this world, we don’t own anything here.
No matter, how much we love our saree, our favorite piece of jewelry, or any number of antiques we have collected, we are only availing it for the time being, but once we find true inner peace, we carry it throughout life. And then, Death will be a wonderful experience just like our birth.
Finding inner peace is like looking for the diamond everywhere while it is in your heart; it is so simple to understand that we are carrying a piece of heaven in our pocket and looking for it elsewhere.
Four ways for finding inner peace...
1. Marry your breath
I first heard this phrase from Radhika, a sattvic yoga teacher and I fell in love with these words immediately. This is such a beautiful thing, marry your breath. We want to marry another person who cannot even know every detail about us, who cannot stay with us till the last breath. However, our breath is one constant thing that’s attached to us from the beginning of our time on earth to the end and it is the last thing that leaves us. So, what is the difficulty in marrying our breath? After all, it is the closest thing, coming and going to our beating heart.
Once we start to give focus to our breath it makes sure to always be there, available whenever we notice it, always at our side. But we kind of love marrying our worries and difficulties, ignoring the beautiful flow of breath, keeping us alive and transporting peace inside.
2. Let loose of our logical mind
It’s imperative to let loose of our logical minds for finding inner peace. Our mind is always running a race in the background. You are sitting but it is running. You are standing and it is running, you are sleeping, and it is running. It’s like a radio which is always on, playing the same track-
“what’s right or wrong, what should we do, what we shouldn’t etc., thinking about an old good memory, making us sick in the stomach at this moment, thinking about the future, hating the current reality.
A logical mind does its best to make us guilty, judging situations or people, never giving us a break.
But if we decide to not tune into its frequency, simply by being a watcher of thoughts playing without tuning up onto that radio, by simply realizing there are many channels running here and the decision is always mine if I want to tune into it or not. What is it playing now? What’s your favorite track?
The more break we take from our logical mind, the more inner peace we will discover. Just like we see the moon in the water when the water gets calm.
3. Don’t cry sitting at a place rather take that thorn out of your way
Michael Singer explains it perfectly well. Imagine you are walking in a market full of people with a thorn prickled in your arm. No matter how hard you try can you avoid getting hurt? So you decide it is better to avoid the market and sit in your room. And somehow you started to hate crowded spaces. We avoid things, people or situation that gives us discomfort and it becomes our weakness. However, it’s possible to find inner peace in difficult situations.
If we work on it and remove the thorn, we will be so strong that nothing would break us inside, just like trees’ roots.
Avoiding life isn’t a solution, we keep on saying “We shouldn’t have done this”. This is the most regretful thing we should ever say. But can we really avoid life? Is it possible to have no interactions, no outside exposure just because it didn’t turn out well in the first place? We need to face the situation so that it leaves no marks of regret or fear. One bad incident shouldn’t stop us from taking part in another.
As Michael Singer in his newest book Living Untethered wrote
“A wise person doesn’t renounce the world: they honor the reality that’s unfolding in front of them”.
In other words, if something goes wrong, don’t close your heart. Take that thorn out that very second instead of carrying it for years and making it a scar.
4. Send hate on a date
We accept flowers with an open heart, we seldom accept criticism with an open heart and happiness.
We show kindness to people according to our thoughts, to who “we” think deserves it, we have set categories of those people who deserve the kindness and who don’t. We think someone who means to us doesn’t deserve our kindness. But that’s a filtered kindness. A kind man is kind to everything he encounters. Just like God never discriminate, the sun doesn’t discriminate nor does the air.
It is not our work to decide who is right or wrong, who deserves our kindness or not. Hate can never help finding inner peace. It is like planning to punish others but getting punished for it.
When I was smarter, I wanted to take revenge but when I was wiser, I wanted to be kind. No matter how much revenge we want to take, it affects only and only us because it is burning us inside with pain. Just like when a rocket takes off, it creates more harm on the surface than in the air.
But how can we trade hurt with kindness?
Someone has cheated on you, there is a feeling of revenge or hate for spoiling your life. We give reasons to be correct, validate it with our thoughts and take validation from likewise people around us who function on the same dynamics. Now when I say you need to be kind to that particular person who cheated. You will hate this idea too. Your mind would not be ready to accept, and it will argue with whoever would teach you to be nice.
But if you say – “I will never forgive that person”, you are not free of their hold. Hate is exactly like giving love, the intensity is the same, but the emotions are different. It is like you are carrying that hurt inside day or night without knowing and it pops out in form of anger, tears or depression. Whom is it troubling the most?
As Jesus said on the day he was crucified – “Forgive them for they don’t know what they do.”
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