Where does inner peace come from?
Not from mulling over everything that is wrong with you, and hoping for a magical fairy to drop from the sky and liberate you into an endless wave of nirvana.
If you want inner peace, if you’re going to have the calmness and quiet that enables you to reach into the deeper echelons of the spirit, you must pause for a moment and stop to search for it.
Breathe deeply.
Then, consciously step out of the shell that you have built around yourself in the search for inner peace. Inner peace is not in the search, it is the way of your being.
First, you need to learn to think of inner peace as a journey rather than a destination.
Because many people think inner peace is some gem to be found out there, they spend a better part of their lives engaged in occult practices or poring over spiritual texts, hoping the genie of inner peace will pop out to liberate them from chaos.
But finding inner peace need not be so difficult a job. After all, it’s all about you. The power is in your hands.
Past mistakes, denials and regrets stand like unbreachable towers in the way to your potential to achieve inner harmony.
As you becaome the inner peace you seek, realize that it is a process and not an outcome.
To have it requires patience, forgiveness of self, and perseverance in the face of a combination of numerous distractions in today’s world and personal excesses.
The inability to forgive self stands as a stumbling block on your path to gain a clear awareness of self. It is ironic that to forgive other people is a far much easier act than to forgive self.
The self has an uncanny ability to coil around its deficiencies thereby exaggerating the level of disharmony that destroys a sense of inner peace.
Self-introspection, that is, an ability to rigorously analyze yourself and your thought, and habits is essential to inner peace but if done to excess it destroys the purpose that it seeks to serve.
Inner peace refers to a state of being comfortable, happy, and calm with self in spite of the circumstances or challenges that exist around you. In itself, peace is the absence of disturbance or conflict. All in all, inner peace is a reflection of harmony with the essential self.
It is achieved by looking beyond the things that cause pressure, noise and imbalance in our life.
A few quick tips can help you to begin becoming peaceful inside yourself:
1. Commit to things that bring calm, serenity, and silence into your life.
It can be anything as long as it does not cause harm to others or introduce new forms of disturbance into your life. Many people choose to take the spiritual route. Finding your spiritual self is indeed a good way to find inner peace. Find a Higher Power that will guide your thoughts and actions.
2. Be critically aware of yourself without breaking glass bottles.
If you want to find inner peace, you have to develop self-awareness by being critical of yourself but without necessarily breaking glass bottles to cut yourself open. Self-awareness is important to determining what makes you calm.
3. Breathe deeply.
It may sound inane, but it works. Breathing connects you to your essential self. That tip of your nose is the art of breath. It’s the two-faced gateway to the inner and outer worlds for enlightening your soul. Our very being depends upon it. Breathing deeply nourishes and anchors you in the present, away from fractured memories and desires of the future. The present is the gateway of being, and that where you will find inner peace.
4. Learn to meditate.
It does not have to be esoteric. When most people hear about meditation, they are immediately thrown off because they associate it with occult practice, and they think you have to be in some twisted posture in order to meditate. The key with meditation is being able to let go. You just have to focus on one thing at a time without resisting the many "monkey" thoughts that crop in your mind. As stated already it is about constantly and consistently letting go of things, ideas, thoughts or past mistakes that emasculate your desire for inner peace.
5. There is no way to inner peace, inner peace is the way.
Inner peace is not a way that you have to follow. It’s about being. You must cease to think that it is something that you can find out there. It is about who and what you are, right now, in this moment. It is not something that can be projected into the future. It’s an every moment reality. That is why listening to the flow of your breath is perhaps the most essential ingredient of finding inner peace. It allows you to always bring yourself to the present moment, and appreciate it for whatever it is.
After all, inner peace is really about appreciating life for what it is, in spite of its shape or colour.