Inner Peace

We are born at peace. Our natural state is peace, joy, lightness and ease. We don’t need to learn to be at peace, we need to unlearn the patterns and behaviours that disrupt our inner peace.

As we go through life, our experiences, and traumas, shape our thoughts, emotions, actions and behaviours. These patterns become so ingrained that we forget that they are not who we are, but rather an accumulation of learned behaviours that we took on in order to protect ourselves, and to feel safe.

The journey towards greater inner peace comes from unlearning, changing these patterns, and coming back to our natural state of ease and lightness.

We often expect peace to happen when everything in our life is perfect, whereas peace is a state you nurture throughout the challenges, and that supports you to stay grounded in challenging circumstances.

All change always begins with awareness. If we are not aware of our behaviour, triggers and default patterns, we cannot change them. We can’t change what we cannot see, or what we don’t know.

Awareness is multi-faceted, it is a deep profound understanding of a core pattern.

Awareness begins when you notice the behavioural pattern and what triggers it. That’s the initial starting point. Awareness increases as you begin to see the associated emotions, thoughts and feelings that are linked to this pattern. You notice the depth, the complexity and the strength of that pattern.

For instance, if we look at a concrete example. Let’s say John suddenly becomes aware that he struggles with people pleasing, and constantly prioritises other people’s needs over his own.

• First step of awareness: Noticing the people pleasing behaviour, what this behaviour looks like, and the default actions taken in such moments. Realising that the people pleasing disrupts his own peace and joy.

• Second step of awareness: Seeing how often it comes up, what triggers it, how strong the pull is towards pleasing others, how disconnected John is from his own needs and desires.

• Third step of awareness: Being fully in tune with his own thoughts, emotions each time his people pleasing gets triggered. Noticing the resistance to changing this pattern, justifying this pattern. Realising that people pleasing is a defensive, coping mechanism to keep him safe.

In this example, John goes through several layers of awareness on this people pleasing pattern in order to understand how it shows up, what his default reactions are, and seeing that the people pleasing is a safety coping mechanism.

Awareness is the first step of the journey towards greater inner peace. The next steps are acceptance and letting go.

Acceptance of: the current moment, the situation, the other person, yourself, the pattern.

And equally acceptance of: your emotions, the strength of the emotions.

The most effective way to accept your emotions fully is to feel them fully in the body, until they naturally pass through you, as beautifully explained in David Hawkins book ‘Letting go’.

At first, this is a painful, uncomfortable experience. We have mostly learned to suppress or repress our emotions. When we sit with them, we naturally feel an urge to escape, hide, avoid, fight those feelings. Or we try to justify, understand or rationalise them through our mind. Whereas, it’s the opposite that is actually effective: just letting the emotions be, without judgement, without rationalising, without escaping.

As we become more familiar with staying fully with our emotions, they don’t linger as long, we don’t cling as much, and we surrender more easily.

This is a life long process. We become better at it, the more often we practise but it’s always a work in progress, and requires on-going awareness, and willingness to accept and let go.

One of the common blockages is the fear that by accepting, we will become complacent. We have learned throughout the course of our life to fight what we dislike or doesn’t please us. Acceptance doesn’t mean not doing anything about the situation or problem. Acceptance is acknowledging the situation, and our emotions without judgement.

Following acceptance, we are better equipped to handle and deal with a challenge, with greater clarity, creativity, courage, openness and calm.

Paradoxically, full acceptance often leads to greater aligned action, proactivity and progress than resistance does.

Though there isn’t ‘one’ way towards greater inner peace, there does appear to be common threads amongst spiritual books that indicate that awareness, acceptance and letting go represent a big part of the journey.

In ‘The Power of Now’, Eckart Tolle explains in many different ways the importance of being fully aware of the present moment and accepting it as it is.

In ‘The Untethered Soul’, Michael Singer explains the importance of letting go, and how surrendering is the key to greater peace.

Throughout spiritual literature, these three core steps - awareness, acceptance and letting go - are fundamental.

It is ironic that inner peace, that is our essence, and our natural state actually requires some work. It’s the work of undoing all these patterns, and behavioural habits that we have learned throughout our life. Though it’s a challenging path, and tough to shift such behaviours, it is well worth it.

As you walk further down that path, you will be less reactive to external events or even internal triggers, feel calmer, more grounded, more compassionate to yourself and others, and greater inner light and ease.

Thank you for reading,

Enjoy the journey,

Katie