Why is the journey to finding inner peace seemingly so elusive for many of us?
…because it is a daily beast of a practice to figure out!
A previous Evolving Yogi post, “Transporting Your Inner Peace” originally started this discussion.
What is Inner Peace?
Inner peace is where we’re not questioning anything; not ourselves, our future, or picking at our past. In the present moment it’s a place where contentment, harmony, and serenity converge, creating a cocoon that shields us from anxiety, stress, and depression.
What Makes it Hard to Get Into:
The foundation of our inner world is our thoughts. They shape our emotions, feelings, beliefs, and opinions.
When left unsupervised, these little gremlins invoke total chaos. They agitate heightened states of fear, anger, worry and judgement of ourselves and others.
They thrive on ripping up any sense of gratitude, tranquility, or well-being into scraps of garbage. Subsequently, all of those shredded bits of debris become obstacles on our route to get to the inner peace cocoon.
Our work is to clear the path with meditation. Meditation is the light that wipes out the gremlins.
Why Meditation?
Meditation grounds us into the now so we can notice our thoughts and do the necessary housekeeping to get rid of the clutter.
We don’t have to sit on a cushion and be still with our eyes closed for long periods of time in order to have a meditation practice.
Meditation can be a lot of different things. Some alternatives are:
Cleaning
Swimming
Coloring
Gardening
Yoga
Walking
Stretching
Journaling
Conclusion:
Our thoughts really are gremlins…that’s why at night they can be the most active! Light (aka illumination) is their key destroyer.
Achieving inner peace is a byproduct of self-care. If it happens to occur on its own, it will be scarce. The more we can stoke that inner incinerator to burn off cognitive trash, the more space we can have to house contentment.
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