Inner Peace, Like a River Under It All

Do I have inner peace? Sometimes..When I was up on the mountain during my vision quest I experienced inner peace when I let my mind relax and melted into the silence.

Silence is the experience of inner peace. My active, no, over active mind dissolves any sense of inner peace. But when I can stop the incessant inner chatter that is usually very negative and fear based, the antithiesis of inner peace, I relax with a breath and remind myself that most and I mean 99% of what my mind tells me isn’t true.

Actually my mind is a excellent soap opera story teller, the difference from the stories in our minds and the stories on tv is we know the ones on tv aren’t real, but we BELIEVE the ones in our minds. When I really stop and listen to what I tell myself all day long, how harsh, even abusive, “You’re so stupid, what an idiot, can’t you ever get it right, you’ll never be good enough”, well you get the picture… If this were a parent talking to a child we might feel compelled to protect the child or even take the child home with us. We all have this inner critic to some degree and this voice is hell bent to keep us from feeling any inner peace. Inner peace is threatening to this voice because how would we get anything done!!!! I went to hear Adyshanti and he spoke about this very eloquently.

Our ego and super ego (the inner critic) believe our survival is dependent on getting things done, the “RIGHT” things, you know making money, keeping your house clean, paying your bills, taking care of your spouse and children etc…And the inner critics job is to keep giving us that kick in the butt for fear we will stop DOING!

But what Adyshanti spoke about so clearly is when we feel inner peace we naturally do what needs to be done. We don’t stress about it because there is a flow that comes out of inner peace a natural flow. We get hungry so we eat, we need money to buy our food so we go to work, we are inspired to care for our loved ones so we do it. It’s really living in the present and allowing the choices we make came from a deeper place, our authentic nature, our hearts, our divinity rather than our minds. I love what Ekhart Tolle says about our minds, they are great tools but they are not who we are.

He also says when we are stressing, which is always from thinking about the future or the past, to ask ourselves what is true right now? For instance I worry about my writing, I have a very loud voice that says “I can’t write”. It has stopped me from writing more times than I can remember, so instead of stopping, I ask myself what is true right now? What’s true is it doesn’t matter whether I can write or not because I am writing. Whether it will be published or not, I don’t know, I will deal with that when the time comes, but for now I am feeling inner peace because I am in the moment and not listening to the stories I have told myself since I was a child about my writing abilities.

The truth is I do have inner peace, it’s always there like an under ground river flowing constantly, silently and unseen, nourishing the life above ground. When I allow myself to drop into the present moment and the silence that is always running deep I have only to stop, breathe and feel the peace bubbling up and washing over me.