Most people can barely find a moment’s peace in their hectic lives, yet others, who accomplish the same amount, simply radiate peace at all times. There is a simple but difficult step that will move you from the former group toward the latter.
It is hard to find peace. There are few, if any, people who will deny that. There is a reason why it is hard to find peace… and that’s because you lose the peace in your seeking. Peace is inside you, in your heart and in your mind. By seeking peace, you are looking at it as outside of you. Since it is, in reality, inside you, you will never find it by seeking it.
Yet those people mentioned in the first paragraph have “found” peace. They did so by learning that it was inside themselves, and giving up seeking it. You have control of virtually everything inside you, and can have more or less of it. Yet when you move it outside of yourself, you lose control of it. This is true for peace, happiness, sadness, anger… even mental focus and creativity. As soon as you make it something other than you, you lose the ability to control when you will have it and how much of it you will have.
When you seek for something to bring you happiness, you are, by that very act, placing the happiness outside of yourself. You’re saying “If only I had that, I would be happy”. When you say that, you are wrong. Even if you are happy when you have “that”, by tying your happiness to “that”, you allow someone else to take it away by taking away “that”.
It works similarly with anger. When you allow something outside of you make you angry, you are giving up control of something internal. Others can control you by doing whatever it is that makes you angry. You can take that control back by understanding that it is truly your choice to allow them to make you angry, that if you merely reframe the situation, it would not make you angry at all, and therefore it is not the situation that is making you angry, it is your perception of it, thus taking control back for yourself.
When you look inside yourself, to who you truly are, and accept that true self, you can have peace and happiness at will. All you have to do is turn back to the you that is inside, rather than the outside persona that you assume for the benefit of others. Any time you turn away from that internal self, and seek validation from outside yourself, you are giving up control of your own internal self. You are giving it to people or circumstances outside yourself, allowing them to decide whether you are at peace, sad, happy, angry, focused or distracted.
To move from always seeking and never finding to never seeking and always having, take control back for yourself. Understand that everything that you do, and everything that you feel, is inside you. Everything is your own choice… and if everything is your own choice, then all the power to choose who you are is yours, too. You are that which you choose to be.
Remember that…
