Expressing Peace. Inner Peace (2). 96.
Inner Peace – Lilies
This will be our second look at inner peace. 83 posts ago we listed different ways to identify, define, experience our individual inner peace. Today we will take a sampling of 12 ways to achieve that inner peace.
I’ve encountered, read, and sampled dozens of suggestions to get to one’s inner peace. During the past 95 days, I’ve shared many of the regular, repeated practices I enjoy. Today, let me offer a list of one dozen tips I agree with. More importantly, let me encourage you to look for, identify/create, and cherish your own steps to inner peace. Oh, and share them, please!
Meditate. Whether you engage in structured, formalized meditation or merely allow your mind to relax and let go of thought, a few minutes of mindful meditation take a strong first step.
Exercise. You can run or swim or lift weights or walk or perform yoga or raise and wave your arms. Exercise can be as strenuous or as relaxing as you wish.
Express yourself, your peace. Let your creativity out. Let your editorial critic go and just enjoy drawing, writing poems, singing, dancing, telling stories, sculpting.
Love yourself. Make several minutes free to remind yourself how wonderful you are. If it helps, list ways you are wonderful. If it helps, read the list out loud. Frequently, regularly tell yourself “I love you.”
Spend time with nature. Get outside. Look around and notice. Take deep breaths and register the scents. Listen to nature’s music.
Simplify. Limit your To Do list to only 2 or 3 items. Don’t be slave to mindless tasks: i.e., check your e-mail only 2 times a day. Remind yourself to “keep it simple, sweetie”.
Accept. I consider it the Serenity Prayer’s “title line”: the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. It’s my favorite line of the prayer. Because to accept makes it possible to…
Forgive. Gerald Jampolsky (Love Is Letting Go of Fear) said, Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions. I think it’s good advice to look first to myself and see what I need to forgive there, first.
Enjoy what you do; do what you enjoy. It’s not impossible to find something enjoyable in any task. Creating joy is our God-given power (one of them!). Also it’s a good idea to be sure you make time to do what you enjoy doing. You deserve it.
Apply kindness. A happy dose of peace automatically follows performing an act of kindness. The potential for those acts is infinite. The only real work is keeping eyes and ears open to discover them. The reward is worth the work.
Ignore judgements. In other words, don’t take it personally. When you feel you’re being judged, remember the power of forgiveness. Remember the power of starting with self-forgiveness.
Protect your inner peace. Savoring the moment when you’re conscious of your inner peace will make it last. Enjoying the sensations inner peace delivers will help you not hurry on (or back) to the “other stuff” that too often gets in the way. Moments of inner peace deserve to be extended.
Provider of Peace,
as you give the endless gift of Peace,
you also let us learn ways to bring peace to ourselves.
The power of heart-listening to your Spirit
and allowing that to be heard by our minds
leads to our implementing tools to stir
our inner peace.
You let us see and hear and move and pray.
You let us think and sing and dance and rest.
You let us eat and cheer and hug and watch.
You let us do whatever we will do to let ourselves
know peace.
You help us learn from what we do
that we may do it better, that we may find
a different way and do it better still.
As you feed us, Sweet Spirit, you teach us to fish.
And we thank you.
And so it is. Amen. Amen.
Enjoy Peace. Express Peace.
In: Commitment, Forgiveness, Happiness, Inner Peace, Life, Peace, Prayer, Praying · Tagged with: Forgiveness, Joy, Peace, Prayer, praying, spiritual simplicity
Expressing Peace. Morning Fog. 95.
Morning Fog
The morning fog on my way to run in the Race for the Cure in downtown Austin was awesome. The kind of fog Mom called “pea soup.”
I love Carl Sandburg’s poem “Fog”:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
There was very little traffic at 6 a.m., Sunday morning, but I slowed down anyway. And as I did I realized the peace that morning fog gives me. Five flavors of peace:
Quiet. Whether fog really mutes sounds or not, it seems that way to me. The world is a quieter place. Perhaps because it’s early morning, yet the enveloping fog puts a sweet, sweet hush over everything.
Soft Vision. Fog bevels sharp angles and bright colors. The gray-to-white cloak softens both what I see and how I see it. The gentling of my vision, then, is easy on my mind.
Seclusion. As fog seeps into every corner, fills every space, it quilts me from the world and the world from me. Even if I have no desire to be secluded, being fog-wrapped can be beautifully comforting.
Stillness. Whether for safety or simply to enjoy the sensation, everything seems to move more slowly. That can lead to stillness and being still can be a blessing.
Clearness.As Mr. Sandburg says, the fog moves on. Following the fog, my vision appears clearer, sharper and more appreciative of the All, of which fog and you and I are part.
Consider your peace relationship with early morning fog. You may want to spend some time there the next time one rolls in.
Sweet Spirit,
the gifts of nature are endless and pleasing.
Fog is such a gift, especially in the early morning.
Fog softens everything: sight, sound, movement, thought.
Fog allows the mind to let go, the heart to open more,
the peace to fill my being.
Fog encourages me to be still, even though I have a race to run.
Fog allows me to hear silence and love its sounds.
Fog shows me the beauty of what’s blurred.
Fog slows me to thank you for the often overlooked peace
you give me in such magnificently simple forms.
And so it is.
And so I thank you, GOD.
Amen. Amen.
Enjoy Peace. Express Peace.
Expressing Peace. Exhaustion. 94.
Answers to Exhaustion
Exhaustion happens. It happens physically. It happens mentally. It can even happen spiritually.
Physical exhaustion comes from over-extending our bodily energy and strength. It’s just wearing ourselves out. It comes from working, from working out, from running out of fuel.
Mental exhaustion comes from wrestling to solve a problem or racing to finish a project or juggling to organize tasks. It results from too much thinking, analyzing, studying.
Spiritual exhaustion comes from seeking, from discovering, and from embracing the Truth. We want so much to know and to fill ourselves with Truth it sometimes tires us out.
Exhaustion may be peaceful in itself as we’re unwilling and unable to do anything but recuperate. That is our being’s instinctively caring for Self.
However, exhaustion can bring stress–the stress from feeling helpless in the face of exhaustion. So, how can we draw more peace to ourselves, allowing the exhaustion to dissipate in time, allowing us to know peace as it does?
Sit outside. Allow the world to move around you, to be busy without you. Draw to your mind the difference between all that’s going on and your sitting still.
Hold a stone. Draw alongside the silence of stone/Until its calmness can claim you./Be excessively gentle with yourself. (John O’Donahue)
Be with water. A waterfall. A stream. A fountain. A rain shower. Or a recording of any one of these. Just listen.
Take a nap. Give up the battle to work (or play) through your exhaustion. Let exhaustion win; treat yourself to a nap. Without setting the alarm.
Enjoy praying. How you pray and what you pray are up to you. And really don’t matter as much as that you pray. Just allowing consciousness of spiritual connection to take over, to take attention away from the exhaustion. Just letting go…..
Fulfilling Spirit,
the energy that refuels us
is the Love and Joy and Good and Peace
you are
and we are made of.
The fatigue we bring on ourselves
is of our human doing.
Know our thanks that we can let go
of that exhaustion by accepting it
as our creation
and by knowing our exhaustion, too,
shall pass.
And know our thanks for the ways you teach
that allow us to still our minds,
rest our bodies,
and attend our hearts.
And know our thanks that you impart
to us the certainty our peace always returns.
And so it is. Amen. Amen.
Enjoy Peace. Express Peace.
In: Energy, Healing, Peacefulness, Prayer, Praying, Work · Tagged with: Joy, Love, Peace, Prayer, praying, spiritual simplicity
Expressing Peace. Change. 93.
Broken Glass Mosaic
from Moonfish Artworks
I have some thoughts about change and peace. Let’s compare yours and mine.
Change alters our familiar “way of….”.
We adopt or resist such change.
Change, then, has us use the energy our “way of…” allowed us to conserve.
That “way of…” is our comfort zone. Our comfort zone is a place of peace. We know it, we like it, we enjoy that it doesn’t demand much. Peace. Peaceful.
So, change disrupts our peace. And how we respond to that disruption, determines how well, how fully, how quickly, our peace returns.
Change puts a dent in our routines. That dent can be a gift, depending on our ability to adapt to the change. Facing change with a resilient, open mindset brings the peace back faster and often even more thoroughly.
Take, for example, post-traumatic growth. As you might guess, it’s the opposite to post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic growth is essentially living one’s life more meaningfully in the light of the trauma one has experienced. That meaningfulness is enriched with peace.
Consider the two ways of reacting to a broken vase, a vase cherished for its beauty or its history or its place in one’s heart. It is knocked from its shelf and shatters into a hundred pieces. One reaction: lasting anguish and the feeling that the vase can never be replaced. The post-traumatic growth reaction is immediately envisioning the beautiful mosaic to be constructed from the pieces. Such resilience means bouncing back, not to the original state but with acceptance to the changed state. Resilience is a type of peace.
Change may interrupt our peace. Creating our reality’s mosaic with what’s changed allows us to bring back even more peace.
Creative Spirit,
the eternity for which
you created us is changeless.
It is All Good and Love and Joy and Peace.
We mark this life with changes that are our creations.
As though to test our peace, we encounter changes
we may not want, expect or understand.
We get to choose “accept” or “resist”
Either way our peaceful comfort zone
knows upheaval in that moment.
You gave us power to change,
to move through change
and let change move through our lives.
You show us peace with which to welcome change
and to adapt to change and meet peace on the other side.
And so it is. Amen. Amen.
Enjoy Change. Express Peace.
In: Beauty, Energy, Inner Peace, Life, Peace, Prayer, Praying · Tagged with: creativity, Joy, Peace, praying, spiritual simplicity
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