Inner peace is the most valuable thing that we can cultivate. Nobody can give us inner peace, at the same time it is only our own thoughts that can rob us of our inner peace. To experience inner peace we don’t have to retreat to a Himalayan cave; we can experience inner peace right now, exactly where we are. The most important criteria is to value the importance of inner peace. If we
really value inner peace, we will work hard to make it a reality.
These are some suggestions (but not all) for bringing more peace into your
mind.
1. Choose carefully how and where we spend time.
If you are addicted to the news and spend an hour reading newspapers every day or watching television news like CNN, and other news programs 24 hours a day, the mind will be agitated by the relentless negativity in the world. The news is full of negative events going on around the world and in our community and to have it added to the 78% of negative messages we already receive daily, we
are on negative overload. We can try to detach from this negativity, but we will make our progress easier if we don’t spend several hours ruminating over the problems of the world. If you have a spare 15 minutes, don’t just automatically switch on the TV or surf the internet. Take the opportunity to be still, meditate, pray, relax, or at least do something positive. The problem is the mind feels insecure unless it has something to occupy it and relaxing or focusing on positives is unfamiliar to most, so we need to let our minds get use to this state so it can receive positives. When we really can attain a clear mind we discover it creates a genuine sense of happiness and inner peace. Balance is important in everything – including how we spend our time and where
we spend our time.
2. Control of Thoughts.
It is our thoughts that determine our state of mind. If we constantly cherish and choose negative and destructive thoughts, inner peace will always remain allusive. At all costs, we need to avoid pursuing trains of negative thoughts. This requires practice – we cannot attain mastery of our thoughts over night. Affirmations are helpful tools and “listening” to your ruminating tapes being played over and over inside your head. Counter the negative messages you are telling yourself with positive messages. Always remember that
we are able to decide which thoughts to follow and which to reject. Never feel you are a helpless victim to your thoughts.
3. Simplify Your Life
Modern life, places great demands on our time. We can feel that we never have enough time to fulfill all our tasks. However, we should seek to minimize these outer demands. Take time to simplify your life; there are many things that we can do without, quite often we add unnecessary responsibilities to our schedule. Do the most significant tasks, one at a time, and enjoy doing them.
To experience inner peace, it is essential to avoid cluttering our life with unnecessary activities and worries.
4. Spend time to cultivate inner peace.
Every day we spend 8 hours a day to earn money, can we not find time to spend 15 minutes to cultivate inner peace? No matter how much money we earn, it cannot bring us inner peace, but, if we spend 15 minutes on meditation and relaxation techniques inner peace can become a possibility. Meditation does not just mean sitting still for 30 minutes; in meditation we seek to experience a
state of consciousness which is flooded with inner peace. Prayer also is a meditation that can be used to cultivate inner peace. Asking a higher power or God to give you inner peace, then taking time to have a “relationship” with the higher power will automatically help cultivate inner peace. Sleeping 8 hours a night will also cultivate inner peace. If you are not rested – you are not giving yourself the “energy” and “rest” needed to cultivate your healthier
self.
“You cannot buy peace; you must know how to
manufacture it within, in the stillness of your daily practices in meditation.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
5. Avoid believing Flattery and Criticism
If we depend on the opinions and praise of other people, we can never have inner peace. Criticism and flattery are two sides of the same coin. They are both the judgments of others. However, we should not allow ourselves to be affected by either. When we do, we feed the ego. We should learn to have confidence in ourselves. This does not mean we will love ourselves in an egotistical way, it means we value our real self and have belief in the good qualities that are part of everyone. There is something called “healthy ego”
where one is “authentic” and “true” to self. That is part of having confidence in ourselves and trust ourselves to know what is good and what is bad for us. We are not defined by others but by our own values, judgments and ethics. Love of others and self is “healthy ego” and flattery and criticism are not “truth tellers.”
6. Be Active selflessly
Inner peace does not mean that we have to live a life of a hermit. Inner peace, can be felt amidst dynamic activity. But, this action should be done with selfless motives. When we serve others we forget our sense of self, and it is when we forget our limited self that we can have inner peace. In Japan, when someone is depressed they are asked to go out and work in a garden for several months. This is therapeutic in that it gets the depressed individual to focus on assisting plants to grow, raking a rock garden, and focusing outside of themselves which is selfless. The person soon realizes that they are no longer depressed because they have focused on positive acts and negative, depression, disappears.
7. Avoid Criticising Others
If we want inner peace, we should feel that our inner peace depends on the well being of others. If we are indifferent to the feelings of others, then it is impossible to have inner peace for ourselves. What we give out comes back. When you criticize another person, it takes negative energy, negative focus, and robs you of love. When you don’t waste your time, energy, and self on criticism, you find more time for peaceful things. If you offer a peaceful attitude to others this is what we will see return.
In today’s fast moving world, qualities such as gratitude seem to belong to another age – a simpler time when life moved along at an
easier pace and there was time to appreciate everything. Yet within this apparently meek sounding quality there lies a tremendous source of power that can radically reshape the way you look at the world.
8. What gratitude can do for us:
- Put things in perspective: Human beings have this self-defeating propensity to let the bad things in life fill our mental
vision and leave no room for the good, a tendency reflected and perpetuated by television and newspapers. Often it takes just one bad thing to happen for us dwell on it and get depressed, no matter how many good things that are happening. In cultivating a daily practice of gratitude, we start to reverse that process and gain a true perspective on life.
- Lifts us above the ebbs and tides of life: The more you develop the quality of gratitude in your life, you will start feeling grateful even when bad things happen to you, because you will have developed the inner vision/peace to see that good things and bad happenings are nothing but experiences to shape you and make you stronger. Hence you will be able to have peace of mind no matter what the outer circumstances are.
- Takes us out of our limited ego: As with other practices of self-discovery, your awareness expands and you gradually feel you are part of something much more infinite than your limiting ego and finite mortal frame. Gratitude helps us turn away from self-centeredness and realize our place in the world.
- Awakens a higher part of our being: Gratitude is primarily a quality felt by the heart center, that place in the middle of our chest where we can feel our soul, or the essence of our existence. Therefore, when we are consciously grateful, some inmost part of ourselves is awakened and we enter into the higher and nobler realms of our being.
Techniques to cultivate the quality of gratitude:
There are many different techniques to use; the important thing is that they be practiced every day, preferably at the same time each day so you can form a habit. Just after you get up in the morning is usually the best time – you aren’t likely to be disturbed, and the peace and serenity you get from the practice benefits you throughout your whole day.
- Writing down things you are grateful for: This serves as a useful beginning to the other techniques. Each day you can write down seven things that you are truly grateful for, and as you write try to feel that quality inside your heart. When you start writing, you realize how many things there are – from the big things such as the gift of life and friends down to tiny little incidents that happened yesterday such as someone giving you a smile or the chance to spend a few minutes sitting in a park.
- Expanding gratitude inside your heart: you can try silently chanting the word gratitude over and over again. Each time you repeat the word you can feel that a tiny flower of gratitude inside your heart growing and growing, expanding petal by petal.
- Cultivating inner joy: Joy carries with it the quality of expansion and awareness which gives rise to gratitude. Try breathing in and out and keeping your awareness on the river of breath entering and leaving your body. Feel that when you breathe in, pure inner joy in entering into your heart, and when you breathe out, worry tension and stress are leaving your system.
There are many things one can do to find inner peace. Your job is to find what works for you and make it a daily habit of your life. You are important and inner peace is not something that you can take in pill form, nor is it “given” to you as a gift. It is something you
“cultivate” by taking time to do the techniques needed to make it “your gift” to you!!
