I am currently revising the Body Renew manual. In the Introduction, I’d started by saying, “Most people seek to come to a place of inner peace, no matter what forms their struggles present themselves in their lives.” I wrote that three years ago, and today I still find that to be true.
Since the time I first wrote the manual, I have battled more life challenges and grown, seeing and learning more about life in the process. Yet I still maintain that most people, if you boil down their desires, are seeking to find peace within themselves.
Inner peace can only mean one thing: to have all our internal conflicts resolved, so that the critical and self-berating noises in our heads would stop, along with the pains that result from the noises.
Let me qualify by saying that inner peace is achieved in small measures rather than a constant, permanent state. It would be great if we were in a state of inner peace all the time, but how would we continue to grow if we didn’t have our inner conflicts to guide us to where we need to develop ourselves? It’s the work which we do to return to a state of inner peace that makes us grow. For we crave inner peace whenever we become overwhelmed by the tangles of desires within ourselves – some pulling us this way and some another way. We are then guided to reconcile those conflicts to come to a place of inner peace.
A conflicted state which gives rise to a desire for inner peace may look like this:
Mentally, you are tormented by self-judgements. Emotionally, you have yucky feelings about yourself – hugely uncomfortable feelings that stem from hatred for yourself. Physically, you have done things or acquired habits that make you feel bad about yourself, which preserves those thoughts and feelings about yourself. Spiritually, you’ve kept yourself limited, small and disconnected from your inner guidance.
To achieve inner peace, clean the space within you. Imagine entering the four levels of your being armed with figurative brooms, vacuum cleaner, scrubbers, detergents, etc. If inner peace resembles a sparklingly clean room, then the state you’re in which prompted you to seek inner peace would need a lot of cleaning up – cluttered, messy, things misplaced, etc.
In your mental room, clear away all cobwebs of obsessive thoughts caught in a loop, going nowhere but spinning around in the same circle until a brutal swipe breaks it apart, freeing the thoughts to move in new directions. Throw away expired items – old thoughts, beliefs, attitudes that keep you stuck.
In your emotional room, clean up the wounds in your pride and dignity. Scrub off the stains in your heart. Gather and put back together the broken pieces of your self-belief scattered all over the place.
In your physical room, line up the actions you’re taking on the top tier of a display shelf. These are actions which reinforce or add to your inner conflicts. They are usually actions that go against your values – for instance, making money from a morally unsound or questionable business. Examine them. Replace, change or discard those actions.
In your spiritual room, clear the air with a purifier and open the windows to let in the sun. Lift the glass case off the brilliant rock in the center of the room and polish it to a shine. See the rays of light from the rock of your core dazzle and mingle with the sunlight coming in through the windows.
With your thoughts untangled, emotions soothed, habits renewed and spiritual space expanded, you’ll find yourself in a state of inner peace.
Inner peace is not something that is given to you from outside, it is something that appears from inside of you when you’ve taken actions to clean up the conflicts you have with yourself. The actions may involve freeing up or letting go of energy where it is overly-concentrated, or adding to the energy where it’s scanty. Re-read the previous five paragraphs with this in mind and you may get a new level of awareness.
