Do These 3 Things for Inner Peace

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ~ Albert Einstein

There’s a sense of restlessness and dis-ease that pervades your whole life.

Maybe you find yourself feeling anxious or depressed. Maybe you lose your temper regularly. Maybe you’ve lost your sense of excitement toward life in general.

You’ve tried to break free by exercising or meditating or doing yoga. You’ve read books, taken courses, and sought advice. But nothing seems to break through the sense of dread you feel.

You’re confused because all these solutions are good, even great. And you’ve seen how they have positively impacted others.

What you may not see are all the things you’re doing that undermine your search for inner peace. These habits are so ingrained that they’re mostly invisible to you.

A three-step approach

If you’ve tried everything and still find yourself wracked by anxiety and distress, it may be time to explore another approach, one that involves the things you’re currently doing to undermine your peace.

Here’s a three-step approach to consider:

1. See

Exercising, reading, meditating, praying. These are all good and effective tools that have grown more popular as people discover their benefits.

In some ways, the great lure of such activities is that they offer an escape from one’s own life, from the dark corners we’d rather not explore. And sometimes, that’s ok.

But this first step invites you to take a look into those dark areas, but only if you feel ready and willing. And you can do that using the same tools listed above.

As you’re putting on your running shoes, simply ask the question: What invisible habits are undermining my quest for lasting peace? See what surfaces while you run, read, meditate, or pray. You have begun the process of seeing.

You can also invite the perspectives of others by reflecting on criticisms you’ve received in the past.  While it may be unpleasant to receive negative feedback, paying attention to the more helpful ones can help you become more aware of your blind spots.

Finally, you may ask trusted friends and relatives for honest feedback about what they perceived to be your greatest blind spots.

For instance, you may wonder why you have a hard time forming and maintaining relationships with others. By going through this first step, you learn that people often experience you as passive-aggressive. You realize that this habit keeps most people at arm’s length.

Seeing will be hard. You’ll want to avert your eyes. You’ll be tempted to distract yourself with more activities. As best as you can, resist these urges.

2. Name

You may be wondering, “Isn’t it enough just to see, why name?” The answer is simple.

Denial.

How many times have you “seen” something, yet denied its reality? It’s so easy to make up stories to draw attention away from unpleasant realities. We may try to blame others for our negative traits and habits. If your first thought after seeing is, “But she made me do it,” then you’re seeing but not naming.

In other words, naming allows you to accept responsibility for the reality you’re creating. You name when you say, “I react in passive-aggressive ways toward others.”

Accepting responsibility for the state you’re in gives you the power to do something about it.

3. Surrender

Here’s where most of us interpret “doing” to mean actively fighting against the parts of ourselves we dislike most.

But here, doing means surrendering all the things that take away our sense of peace. The first three steps of AA provide a helpful image of what this surrender can look like:

Step 1:  We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Surrendering may be the hardest step on your road to peace because of the myth of self-sufficiency. We’re enthralled by the myth because it means we don’t have to be vulnerable or accountable to others. That’s why the self-help industry is booming.

But you already know that self-help alone doesn’t work. You must also be willing to turn your vulnerable heart and mind to a power outside yourself.

Don’t be afraid of the dark

You lack peace not because you’re a bad person or because you’re undeserving.

You lack peace because you’re afraid of the dark.

But there’s nothing to be afraid of. You need not spend another moment in spiritual turmoil and pain. Because the light within you is greater than your darkness.