Inner peace arises when your mind is calm and your feelings are compassionate.

 

Your mind arises from pure consciousness but then it becomes entangled in the senses and outward perceptions. The mind attaches itself to those perceptions and causes you to lose your experience of and connection to pure consciousness. You come to believe you are your thoughts and feelings. In that attachment and misplaced identity you no longer witness the thoughts- you become the thoughts- and they go on endlessly. That is a state of separation and suffering.

Inner peace is the doorway that allows the mind to rest and become reabsorbed back into consciousness, the Self, the source of the mind. Inner peace creates the circumstances that allow the realization of who you are. Inner peace restores connection and unity. When the mind calms down and feelings are compassionate, thoughts subside and what is revealed is pure consciousness – and that is God within.

Creating Inner Peace: Understand your greatness

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The world sends very mixed messages about who you are. You have been told many things. On one hand you have been told you are a sinner, you are worthless, you are shameful, you are not acceptable and you are not lovable. On the other hand the reality is that you are God, you are pure consciousness, you are the light, you are the immortal Self and you are the expression of God in this world.

Your greatness is beyond what you can even imagine because God has become you and God’s consciousness resides within you. Hold the truth of who you are, realize that truth and express that truth as your life.

Creating Inner Peace: Approach life with gentleness

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Gentleness starts with your Self. Are you gentle with yourself? How do you describe and treat yourself? When you wake up in the morning ask yourself, “How am I going to approach my day, how am I going to show up for this day?” You can show up with a judgmental, critical, dissonant mind or you can show up with a gentle, compassionate, loving mind.

Approach today with an intention to hold gentleness. Approach today knowing that you are going to recognize all the things you are grateful for. Approach the people you meet with gentleness and compassion.

Throughout your day ask this question, “How am I showing up? How am I approaching myself and others?”

Creating Inner Peace: Choose what is mentally beneficial

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Focus draws the vibration of whatever you are focusing on into you. You always have a choice what you focus on. Focus on what is pure, positive and life supporting. Choose to use your discrimination and select that which is beneficial to your mind, that which supports clarity, creativity and consciousness.

Choose thoughts that are high, virtuous and positive. Choose to be aware of what your mind is thinking and choose to bring the mind back to the present moment, back to awareness and insight.

Creating Inner Peace: Practice what creates serenity

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Serenity can be harvested from within and without. Serenity lies within, underneath your thoughts. It also exists without, in many forms.

Discover what creates serenity in your mind and practice that. For you it could be experiencing nature, experiencing silence, meditating, reflection, study, giving without conditions, loving without conditions. Spending time with great beings, reading the words of great beings, and surrounding yourself with spiritual people or having alone time – these are all practices. Practice repeating mantras and chanting.

Find what creates calmness and tranquility within your mind and practice that. All practices that purify your motives, your thoughts, your feelings and attitudes will create serenity.

Creating Inner Peace: Release attachment and aversion

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The unbalanced mind lives with dissatisfaction with ‘what is’. It clings to what could be or what was. The mind becomes attached to things, people, situations and outcomes, always expecting more happiness through having the thing or the outcome.

Attachment is a main cause of an unbalanced mind. You become adverse to what you see restricting your happiness and you become attached to what you see providing your happiness. The mind seeks happiness outside, when happiness really lies within. The mind thinks control is possible and fights for it. The mind fears loss and fears that will mean the loss of your happiness.

You live with the illusion that you have the power to stop change. Change is an immutable law of the relative universe. Change reflects the expanding, evolutionary nature of creative intelligence. Control limits flow and expansion. Allowing moves you into flow. Allowing opens you to receiving grace.

Creating Inner Peace: Thoughts: See them for what they are

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The mind is an instrument of consciousness. Thoughts are simply an activity in consciousness. You are the consciousness and energy that becomes the thought. Witness the thoughts and do not allow yourself to become lost in identification with your thoughts.

You are not your body and you are not your mind. You are the essential Self. The mind is always shape shifting. It perceives something and then shifts to reflect the thing. It creates your experience of it and creates your reactions.

When you understand your divinity, when you understand that the mind is consciousness expressing, you can release attachments. When you allow the mind to do what it wants to do and stop fighting it, then you can recognize that all thoughts in the mind are consciousness, and that recognition brings relief. That recognition turns the mind toward its pure nature.

Thoughts arise as the pulsation, the throb of the energy of consciousness. It can be helpful to focus on the pulsation, as opposed to the content of the thought. Thoughts also begin to rest when they are either ignored or the mind is filled with the thought of God.

Creating Inner Peace: Everything depends on Attitude

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Your attitude is your mental position. Your attitude will cause you to color all you experience; with gentleness and peace or dissatisfaction and judgment.

The way you do everything – think, speak, act and hear – is dependent upon attitude. If your attitude is negative, you will judge what another is saying as negative and see a situation as negative. If your attitude is positive you will see the good in all people, places and situations. If a recession happens a person with a negative attitude will see it as a disaster and a positive person will see it as an opportunity.

If you understand and experience that the world is consciousness, that you are consciousness, then you shift your attitude to the position of unity, respect, compassion, love and peace. You connect to your essential nature and express that attitude.

Creating Inner Peace: Be vigilant of outside catalysts

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All things affect you energetically; people, places and things. Become sensitive to how you feel around friends, family and co-workers and avoid negative, non-aligned energies. Surround yourself with life-supporting, resonant energies. Feel the resonance or dissonance, the alignment or non-alignment of people, places or things.

The mind becomes agitated around dissonance and reflects that energy. The mind becomes calm around resonance and reflects that energy. Choose to avoid drama, victim-hood, gossip and complaining about self and others.

Creating Inner Peace: Find refuge in that which supports your evolution

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The mind moves from fear to love when you take refuge in loving people, high teachings, and life supporting groups and communities. These become your protection from distraction and maintains an evolutionary trajectory. These become your support. These bring ease to the mind. They create a positive, life supporting atmosphere that permeates you energetically.

Creating Inner Peace: Respond mindfully

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Reactivity and distraction arise when you act without mindfulness. Create the spaciousness for a few seconds to become aware, mindful, and cognizant of where your mind wants to take you. Your thoughts are either responding appropriately with mindfulness or the mind is in a contracted state, in reactive or distractive mode. Create spaciousness within the mind to stop, look, feel and respond appropriately.

Creating Inner Peace: Realize all understandings are evolving

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Look at your mental pathways, your beliefs, your understandings and see them as always becoming, always expanding. Know that everyone is on their own journey that is perfect for them, as is your journey perfect for you, as it is, now.

All concepts, beliefs, mental positions and understandings have limitations and never touch the complete truth. Humility is born of this understanding. When, in acceptance, you allow others to hold their understanding you release your rigidity. All people are on a path of expansion and all people’s unique understandings are moving them into realization.

Creating Inner Peace: Cultivate wisdom

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The mind power of true discernment, of wisdom, starts with not knowing and ends with knowing the Self. Wisdom is seeing deeply. Take the time to look deeply into yourself and all things. Be present to the essence in all things and touch reality; Presence. Cultivate intuitive knowing.

Do not be lost in the surface fluctuations of the mind. Explore its depths and then transcend it and witness it. Wisdom is a pure lake. Wisdom is seeing the essence. When you cultivate wisdom you lay the foundation for a thriving, peaceful life.

Creating Inner Peace: See your Self in others

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When your thoughts are all self-entered, separation is increased. Separation and the resistance it fosters are the main causes of suffering and illusion. Offer to others, cherish and help others, support nature, see your divinity within and in all that exists outside of yourself.

Practice giving. Enter the flow of life and touch the inter-dependence and unity of all that is.