Peace

She said she tried to meditate on peace. “But I realized I wasn’t peaceful. I was trying to fake something that wasn’t there. And I didn’t know why it mattered anyway. I didn’t feel peace; why did I or anyone else need it?”

I nodded, out of empathy.

Peace has often not only felt elusive to me – but not very desirable.

What is it exactly, anyway? Something warring countries say they want but don’t ever achieve? Long hair and potchuli? Muzak and mechanical waterfalls?

Peace = boredom. Impossibility.

Yoga Fail

I will never forget the first time I took a yoga class – the sparks of fury igniting along the edges of my skin as the instructor encouraged us to relax, feel peaceful, let go, breathe deeply, stop our thoughts, etc. Everyone but me sighed into a shared calm. I wanted to hit somebody.

I didn’t want to cooerce myself into something that wasn’t real, didn’t exist. I resented the instructor (and the world, really) for assuming that relaxation was something easy anyone could enter, like a pair of pj pants. As if everyone owned pj pants. That fit. I didn’t feel peaceful, so I felt judged, unacceptable. My thoughts, instead of stopping, raced faster against themselves in a frenzy of self-hatred.

Everyone else lay there on the floor, soaking in the piped birdsong, breathing and sighing in ecstasy.

I felt murderous, stiff, and ashamed.

Yoga twisted me into a self-conscious straightjacket. I hated it.

Faking it Won’t Make it

When I think back on this incident, and on others similar to it, my misery seems quite rational. The process goes like this:

1. It seemed I had to feel something I didn’t
2. Since I didn’t feel it, I had to make it happen
3. The way to make it happen was to ignore, “let go,” of all the knotted up, angry, sad, critical parts of myself.
4. These parts only clung to me harder when I tried to dump them out of the aircraft.

What I’ve noticed about peace from my mindfulness practice is that it is not something you can force or fake your way into feeling – precisely because they are not peaceful actions. Forcing amounts to violence; faking installs a screen of lies. Neither of these forms of control honor the truth.

You can’t think your way into feeling peace, either. Applying logic to internal commotion is like trying to reason with a toddler; it’s an act of futility. Telling yourself “there’s nothing to be upset about” or “worry gets you nowhere” or “crying doesn’t do any good” might all be factual statements (and haven’t our parents told us these things over and over, impatient with our overblown value ascribed to  a lost doll, a hurt feeling). But emotions don’t give a lick about clear-minded solutions.

So how does one find peace?

A Way to Peace

You can’t make yourself feel peace or think your way to it, but you can choose it.

You can choose to act peacefully, just as you can choose to act with love, compassion, presence – whether you feel them in your body, heart, mind, or spirit or their exact opposites.

I know, because I’ve experienced it; and I have been trying it, because it made sense when I heard it described by Tara Brach in one of her podcasts.

But I’m not one to believe or trust easily – I did have to test it.

Making the choice is not an act of didactic logic or emotional hijack – it’s not a forcing. It’s free choice, it’s free action that one practices with the whole self. In the act itself is where you find the freedom of the act, and it is also where you find – where you generate – peace.

The Act of Peace

If I’m feeling unpeaceful, and notice that – no, there is not an ounce of peace anywhere inside me – I can still choose to listen to what IS there without judgment or the intention to change it, kick it out, dress it in a costume. I can treat my feelings with an intentional attention – and there’s the peace, there’s the love, right there.

Your rabid heart is like a toddler whining, “Pay attention to me, look at me, watch what I’m doing.” No, don’t get distracted by what you think is more important, or to the parts of you that seem easier, more well-behaved, better trained.

Listen to your strain, your aches, your bitterness. Find out where they come from, what keeps them alive. Discover what’s at their core and in the roots – and have compassion, and acceptance, for what you uncover.

In this act of paying attention, you will illuminate within yourself all the peace, love, lovingkindness that is already within you, even if just as the seed of a memory, a cloud of possibility, a faint dream.

You won’t just feel peace. You will be peace.

If this is confusing, remember, peace has been described as “passing understanding” for a reason.

Advertisement