Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.
So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.
But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?
And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.
I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.
And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.
Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal.
We can ask ourselves: who is the speaker? Who the character attacked? What is the intent giving birth to it? Do we think of one of the characters as ourself or all of them? And who is the audience for this play?
The conflict in ourselves can also come from fears of who we might be, or what might be revealed about us, or a fear of pain or past trauma ⎼ or of what we can’t understand.
David Magid’s book, Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans, pushed me to consider this question of inner peace. In it he talks about the fantasy that we can finally eliminate inner conflict, or maybe any conflict at all, by one side eliminating the other. This can lead to great horrors, not only inner pain, dissociation, and dysfunction, but genocide and wars of hate.
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons we must ignore our inner state. But in most cases, if we run from an emotion like fear, like running from a frightening figure in a dream, it increases in size. But when we turn and look at it directly, or we mindfully study each component of the emotion, each feeling, sensation, thought, then the emotion loses its grip on us. Or we write, create art, journal, exercise, sit in a beautiful setting, and be aware of fear, not fear it.
Magid discusses how we might sit in the middle between the different selves, aware of our reactivity, aware of our fear, and self-criticism. And learn from them. We are humble, thankful, compassionate not to efface ourselves to some spiritual ideal, but to confirm our shared humanity with others, and with a diversity of selves.
Magid’s discussion also reminds me of Herman Hesse’s existentialist novel Steppenwolf. The novel exposes the multiplicity of selves in the human heart, and how we impoverish life by crudely simplifying it to yes or no. Instead, we can enter our inner world, what Hesse calls a Hall of Mirrors, that reflects the inner multitudes, all that’s beautiful and ugly, joyful, and sad. And we learn to face and accept them all, learn what to take seriously and to laugh at the rest.
Laughter can enable us to reconcile contradictions and be comfortable with discomfort and complexity.
Dramatic? Yes. But it’s one perspective on how we can give up torturing ourselves over the distance between a dreamed ideal and a dreaded reality. We are deeper, more diverse than we might’ve been taught to expect.
Maybe if the time is right, we can allow ourselves to sit comfortably with here and now. We can let ourselves feel and hear our inner dialogues and recognize they’re only staged plays or abstractions from reality, not the whole of reality. Maybe then we can learn from them and let them go. We can sit with a smile that’s maybe a little bit like that of some Buddhas, like people comfortable with themselves. And we feel the deep joy embedded in presence that inclines us to laughter.
And then, feeling so alive in our bodies, maybe we can feel free enough to act to create a world closer to our ideals and compassion. And that is a very healing sort of peace.
**There are links imbedded throughout the blog that were helpful to me and might be helpful for you if you want to pursue any of the practices mentioned in this piece.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
