My thoughts fly through grass
There is no end to this nature nurturing
As sky is blue and sun rests within it
I reflect on this peaceful moment in my mind
I breathe in harmony with nature waiting
While retreating from a life of unpredictability
There is an acceptance in this realisation
It is a clean and clear mind being present
Communicating calmness all day long
Peaceful and calm in souls eye!
We reach our place of inner calmness when we have both intrinsic and extrinsic means to accept our place within every moment. There maybe complete chaos outside us, but when we have inner calmness we can still experience peace.
We go through life experiencing challenges and feelings. We face many difficulties, and barriers. We try to overcome these barriers and difficulties by facing these challenges. In order to have inner calmness we need to feel good about ourselves. How do we feel good about ourselves? There are certain strategies we can use such as positive self talk, taking care of our body, practice self compassion, engage in activities we enjoy, focusing on our strengths and accepting ourselves. Lastly inner peace is about connection, connection to oneself and to others. There are times that we may face criticism, or life may get difficult, when this happens we need to remember that what others think of us doesn’t define us. We need to know that we may feel embarrassed, or even ashamed at times, these also wont define us. If we have done something wrong we own that wrongness and someone else’s opinion of what we have done doesn’t define us. Feeling shamed is not a healthy feeling, this is a feeling that is given to us by society as well as our own inner self talk.
First step to achieving inner peace is to remove self blame, self embarrassment and shame from our life. There is nothing in life that should give us shame. Everything in life happens as a result of some cause and effect, therefore we own our decisions and we have freedom to choose our action at any given moment. This means we shouldn’t be ashamed for our decisions (morally good or bad), we should instead celebrate our freedom to choose, and at the same time be responsible for our actions, part of this responsibility is joy and part of it is guilt. Inner calmness and peace is not about being great, it is about owning our actions and to be proud of being free to make decisions. It is about behaviour, and knowing most things in life are circumstantial and dependant on opinions. Therefore we need to celebrate our mistakes and our achievements as they both made us who we are today.
We can experience inner calmness by uniting two sides of opposite end, one side is our dark side and the the other is our bright side. We will go between this two opposite ends from time to time. We will lose our way from time to time. We need to know that it is in our nature to want to have balance and inner peace, but it is also in our nature to have to work for it. We don’t achieve inner calmness by just being, we simply become calm as long as we work for it. We need to balance our thoughts and our feelings. We need to have love in our life (meaning we need to be sincere in our being), we also need to be thoughtful. We need to know that our life is about amalgamation of these two. Thoughts and feelings, and us being in between them. If have too much thought, then we are fools, if we have too much love then we are naive. We need to have both thoughtfulness and love in order to be complete and to have peace.
We are shaped by our thoughts and feelings, but we need to be in contact with our external in order for our thoughts and feelings have any meaning. This contact with others and our social life is what gives meaning to our life. We get to do this through language, we communicate we accept meanings, we provide meanings, we interact, and we interpret. Therefore we go through a circular motion of sense making and rejecting ideas and feelings. We do this through language. Language is a tool we use to improve ourself, to learn from our mistakes, to cultivate our potential and to grow. Our reality is shaped through our mind, our feelings and our language.
The way we talk to ourselves, the words we use, the way we interact with the world they make us. They create us and develop us. We learn from our childhood the way we feel, the way we think, and the way we use language. Our base and foundation is our childhood, therefore if we have not been given, learned to have a good foundation, we need to build on the foundation again. We need to learn how to deal with our life ups and downs, we need to go back to our early years and build our life again. Our life is a constant learning process, the more curious we are, the more we want to learn, and the more unlearning of what we don’t need we do the better it gets and more calm we become.
We need to remember that there are times in our life where things maybe difficult. We may doubt ourselves. We maybe worries, we may not know what to do. This is normal and part of the process of learning. We get stressed, we learn or unlearn and then we get better and calmer and then the cycle begins again. This is the way of life, we need to accept this unpredictability, this helps us to build on our self steam and have balance in our life. More we try, the more we use our resources of love, thoughts and language in moderation and in a balancing manner, the better life gets.