Where There is Peace
Ralph Waldo Emerson shares, “Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.”
Many of us are starting to re-member that creation can be a feeling—compassion, curiosity, laughter, grief, drama—and it determines whether we are at peace with ourselves or warring within. What do we create when we laugh and what do we create when we are hurt?
In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm writes, “Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinion as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as this of the majority.”
We are starting to understand that it’s time to show up for these times and choose to not be followers of the majority or bystanders. We value life so much that we are learning, at our own pace, to find peace within ourselves. And to become aware that we can transform ourselves, let go and make space for the unknown. In life, there is an unexplained death at certain moments, which allows us to release negative states of mind.
Being at Peace with Shoji
The process of transformation is a death and a birth. They are one. They are interconnected in flow. The Zen Japanese term shoji means “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a hyphen that connects the two. We cannot truly be alive without being aware of death.
Death is always with us, helping us to discover what matters most and serving as a teacher of letting go. When we experience rebirth, we understand that we’re not here on our own and that we can co-create with all the resources around us in community.
Today is a reminder of how powerful we are when we understand that we can transform our energy into form and action. When we feel a sense of outrage or a need to fight, can we question where this stems from and whether we need to spend our days and nights with these often overpowering emotions?
And these emotions, when we truly question them, are most likely deep conditioning where we learned to fear, judge, shame or condemn. And maybe at times, we ourselves were on the receiving side of this aggression and it became a learned behavior?
But instead of the division and separation we inherited, can we create greater unity, harmony and peace through compassion and discernment? What world do we want to live in is the question and what role are we choosing to play?
Inner Work is A Journey of Courage
Author Pema Chödrön believes that “Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.” Consider that it is up to each of us to be peaceful—to allow peaceful emotions to create a peaceful environment—by being compassionate and caring about how we choose to react.
This time is asking us to go on a collective journey of the human experience: to dream, connect and co-create. Our hearts know there is another world where peace is a state of being.
Is it possible to free ourselves of entanglements and old stories so we can dream, experiment, and create inner peace?