Inner Peace

Buddha said “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” All of us want to experience inner peace. Sometimes experiencing inner peace becomes a rare phenomenon. Let us see how we create a stressful experience for ourselves and lose our inner peace. Dr. Martin Seligman in his research found that we disturb ourselves using 3 P’s.

Personalizing

Some of us take things personally. For example, a wife said to her husband “ Air conditioner is not working, have it fixed. Her husband became angry and shouted at her saying, do you mean that I don’t take care of things properly?” Such people are hypersensitive to others’ comments. They pick on what others say and construct an unproductive meaning of self with whatever is said to them. This is an example of how people personalize and hurt themselves and others.

Permanent

The second “P” is seeing negative things and creating a permanent scare in life. Some people feel any one failure will have a permanent impact on their life. For example, someone not getting selected in an interview and losing a job. It is not as if there will not be other opportunities in life and everything is lost once and for all. Though ancient wisdom says “this too will pass” we seem to cling on to unfortunate experiences in life and loose inner peace.

Pervasive

The 3rd P is believing any negative impact in life is pervasive. Once a client told me “my girl friend has left me. My boss has passed me up for promotion. I have lost money in the market. Bad luck follows me all the time. The individual is connecting every unfavorable outcome in life to reach a conclusion. This is example of a belief that mishaps are pervasive and affects ones’ whole life.

Eric Berne founder of Transactional Analysis said, “The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull” when inner peace is disturbed let’s look within ourselves and see how we are dealing these 3 P’s. An Exploration within with self awareness may show, some of us predominantly using one of the 3 P’s- personalizing , permanent or pervasiveness to hurt oneself . Some of us may successfully create stress using all three Ps.

To break out of this cycle, the first step to gain peace is the self awareness on how we use these 3P’s to disturb ourselves.

The second step is, learning how to deal with these 3 Ps. If we find ourselves personalizing, stop it . Look for facts in the situation, see what you could do personally to make the situation better and not see events as an outcome of personal failure. If we find ourselves seeing any incident as having a permanent impact on life , then narrate that experience to a close friend on the following lines. “How it started, what happened in the middle and how it will end or how you would like to end it”. This will show that there is a ending for any event in life. Always remember for every ending there will be a new beginning . This new beginning can bring hope and faith in us to dip into the exuberance of life. If we find ourselves seeing negative things as pervasive and affecting our inner peace, take a deep breath and exhale through your mouth. As you exhale say “ this is a new moment” this will cut across the continuum of difficulty and bring new light to our experience. By using these methods we can break free from our limiting patterns and gain the 4th P- Peace.