Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
Siddhārtha Gautama
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Mohandas Gandhi
You should always carry peace within you, its the most beautifying thing you could ever have or do. Peace makes your heart beautiful, and it makes you look beautiful, too. You want to have perfect physical posture when you stand, sit, and walk, and peace is the perfect posture of the soul, really. Try perfect posture outside as well as inside. Peace creates grace and grace gives peace.
C. Joy Bell C.
These are turbulent times. If in doubt, open a newspaper or turn on your device. Whenever we look at our screens, or listen to the unbroken stream of world news, this upheaval, this dis-ease, cannot be overlooked.
Like one of those black holes in outer space, the vortex of destruction and violence can quickly suck us in and swallow us up. It is good to be reminded of this danger, as happened this week. It has helped me recover my sense of groundedness and gratitude, and shift to the healthier stance of non-attached engagement.
Non-attached engagement is a state of being engaged with compassion and love, in the absence of judgement or the insistence on specific outcomes. Scripture advises that we “Judge not” and recovery literature implores us to quit “playing God”, which never ends well.
A new mantra has emerged recently in my daily meditation, as happens from time to time. These mantras appear as if sent as a gift from the heavens. This latest mantra goes as follows: On the in breath, “Inner Peace”; on the out breath, “World Peace”. Used over a period of twenty or thirty minutes, the effect is both powerful and soothing.
The application of this mantra is now helping me return, whenever I have gotten off track, to the state of non-attached engagement, which is characterised by acceptance, compassion, and a practical commitment to justice and truth.
Acceptance is not to be confused with exoneration. It is simply embracing “what is” as the starting point for any further processing or response. Its opposite is denial, a protective mechanism which keeps us from being in the present moment.
Like most protective mechanisms, it has a downside. When we are not in the present moment we sacrifice our agency for change, healing, and growth. We are either consumed with shadow boxing figures from the past or anxiously anticipating threats of the future or oscillating from one to the other.
Compassion is not merely empathy. It is both walking a mile in the other’s moccasins (or our own) and a deep sense of caring and wishing that the manifestation of suffering be alleviated and the root cause thereof be transcended.
Justice is an alignment with the principle of love. Like most human beings, I oscillate, in my thinking, emotions, and actions, between fear and love, depending on my own level of mental (or spiritual) fitness and the stress levels of any given situation. Growing up, therefore, involves a constant practice of identifying fears as they arise, and then shifting to loving kindness in my attitudes and responses.
The Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality provides a simple-to-use framework for the realignment with the love principle. With practice, the fear fuelled Saboteurs (ten in all: Judge, Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, and Victim) can be intercepted before they get the upper hand, and a shift made to the love-propelled Powers of the Sage (Compassion, Exploration, Innovation, Navigation, and Activation).
The outer world is merely a reflection of the inner. Until we begin tending the wounds of growing up in dysfunction, the outer world will recreate the emotional turbulence which etched itself on our psyches and took root deeply in our bodies all those years ago. The present unfolds as an echo chamber of the unresolved past. The body keeps the score.
We didn’t feel safe as a five-year-old at home. Do we feel safe in the world today?
We struggled to find and assert our place in the family. Do we now stand firmly in our power with a clear sense of belonging and purpose?
The list could be expanded, ad infinitum.
The global human community resembles the dysfunctional family of origin in many ways. Wars are waged openly and passive aggressive stances taken. Bullying, plunder, humiliation, rejection, and abandonment are the order of the day. Constituencies vie for power over each other while emotional illiteracy and spiritual ignorance abound.
Happiness is a byproduct of compassion, justice, truth, and purpose as expressed in our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In today’s global culture it is pursued, frenetically and in vain, in line with the universal marketing messaging of an economic system which, instead of serving human needs, stakes a claim to and attempts to exact our total fealty. The pursuit of happiness is one of the most absurd concepts ever devised.
The solution to these worldly ills lies within. As we work through the childhood trauma, the energies of healing will ripple outwards. As we attend the old wounds, old thinking is replaced with new approaches and beliefs. Once the healing of the past begins, our capacity to be present in the here and now increases. Vitality and enthusiasm for life return.
This is living in recovery, transcending the dysfunction as we grow in Mental Fitness and Emotional Sobriety.
Instead of hating the people we think are war-makers, we can learn to dance with the destructive drives and disorder in our souls, the Saboteurs, which are the instigators of all wars. If we aspire to peace, then we need to engage with our Saboteurs with a deep sense of compassion.
In the first instance we need to bring compassion to ourselves for having developed these Saboteurs in response to overwhelming experiences during childhood. We can then bring compassion to ourselves and others as we gradually come to recognise the havoc they are still wreaking in our lives today.
This havoc reaches beyond the human community. In fact, it applies to how we treat every aspect of Creation. As St. Francis of Assisi pointed out: “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
This is especially valid in these times of mass extinction, the agro-industrial complex, and global warming. Trashing the planet is the product of unchecked Saboteur energies.
As far as the solution is concerned, it is not a case of destroying the Saboteurs, but rather of turning down their volume such that they no longer run our lives and, instead, utilising their signals as cues to shift to the Powers of Sage.
With practice, we can identify the emergence of Saboteur hijacking attempts just as when we inadvertently touch a hot stove. This prompts speedy corrective action. In the case of PQ Mental Fitness, the corrective action is a three-step process:
- Identify and intercept the Saboteur
- Ground ourselves in the present moment, so that we can
- Shift to and activate the apposite Sage Power(s)
As we make progress in establishing, maintaining, and increasing Mental Fitness, we can apply this three-step process in real time, thereby nipping the exertions of the Saboteurs in the bud, before damage occurs. Since we are not saints, we will not succeed in this every time.
With practice, however, we will gain traction in thwarting their efforts while increasingly applying the Powers of Sage in navigating our lives. In cases where we do get hijacked, the return to balance (ease) and making amends will happen more and more swiftly. This is a measure of our newly attained resilience.
As one of the great spiritual leaders of the 20th century, Thich Nhat Hanh, stated: “We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds – our own prejudices, fears, and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs.”
Here we can see that the realisation of world peace is primarily an inside job.
