Many people may believe that for them, inner peace is unattainable. Some people think that inner peace is exclusive to those who have dedicated their lives to spirituality such as Tibetan monks. Others believe that inner peace is a quality belonging to old people, and pursuing it, ultimately, means giving up the vitality and the excitement in life.
So many people refrain from any attempt to attain inner peace, leaving it to be a misconstrued concept. But the truth is that inner peace is something we all need regardless of age. Inner peace, contrary to what some people may think, does not mean a lack of energy or excitement in living. Ultimately, it is a very important inner quality to cultivate within ourselves that can allow us to experience more joy, freedom, and personal power.
What Inner Peace is All About
Inner peace could be more important than any pursuit of happiness and success. It is ultimately the bedrock of these two things because, without inner peace, it can be very hard to achieve true happiness or find lasting success that leads to fulfillment.
The pursuit of inner peace is more important than the search for happiness or success. Happiness is but a fleeting emotion and success can be taken from us just as it can be gained. But true inner peace is permanent.” – Chris Shea
If we harness this quality within ourselves, inner peace can be the very thing that empowers us to face any circumstances with strength and resilience. Knowing this makes inner peace a highly desirable state if it ultimately means our innate ability to manage our emotions in the face of stress and vexation.
Inner peace is about going out and experiencing life in all its colors, but without being completely subject to its buffetings that ultimately cause the stresses of life to affect you mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It is the ability to control fear, anxiety, or worries while overcoming difficult situations.
Inner Peace Supports Wisdom and Courage
When people have inner peace, any toxicity that confronts them won’t be enough to shatter their confidence, because they know themselves and trust in their own abilities. This does not mean that they have attained some level of eternal wisdom or are all-knowing. At times, they may lack certain things within themselves, or have a weakness that makes them vulnerable to the unstoppable stresses that life throws daily.
However, people with inner peace know that there is an answer or a resolution, even if they haven’t found it yet. This gives them the courage to apply themselves to change the situation as needed, to the degree that they can. It is having both wisdom and the courage to manage oneself to be able to find solutions, instead of becoming paralyzed by undesirable life situations.
Inner peace also provides a person with the wisdom and inner strength to remove themselves from a situation that is potentially highly destructive. When things become too toxic, it takes courage to step out of it, choosing to be proactive while remaining positive about life.
A part of inner peace is knowing when to continue moving forward, and when to acknowledge your own limitations.
Inner Peace is Acceptance but Not Defeat
An expression of inner peace may simply require accepting what the situation is at the moment – no matter how difficult and challenging it is – without resigning to helplessness and negativity. Hope and trust are maintained.
This is why those who have found and held to inner peace have managed to survive and even thrive in the face of horrors that have caused others to be crushed by them. It is a superpower life hack when developed, enabling a person to transcend former limitations, see beyond difficulty, and move towards a better place in life.
With inner peace, you can continue to grow as a person, even if circumstances and events are not looking very promising. Life will inevitably throw its many stressors and problems at us, but a person with inner peace will respond very differently and see life in a more hopeful way than one who is without it.
On the contrary, no matter how easy and gifted their life might be, people who lack inner peace will yield more easily to pressure, and make mountains out of molehills. Without inner peace, people can easily become unbalanced and inevitably succumb to unhealthy patterns as a way out and as a means to cope with life and its inevitable problems.
Ultimately, how we see and experience life is subject to our individual perspectives. A person who can draw on their inner peace knows that life is ten percent what happens, and ninety percent how they perceive and respond to what happens. For those who have inner peace, life’s experience is far more rewarding, due to the balance of acceptance and expectation.
Inner peace is priceless and in the absence of this much-needed quality, nothing in life will fill its lack.