Making
Peace in Your Heart
—Julie M. Daley
“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” ~unknown
It is the end of another year here on Earth and the end of another year of your life.
2005 has come to an end. With the ending of each year, we have cultural traditions of reviewing the year that is over and making resolutions for the year to come. While this time of year is a wonderful time to envision what you want to create in the year to come, if we don’t make conscious choices that come from our own authentic voice, we can fall prey to the Voice of Judgment’s own tradition of creating another year’s experience of setting too high of goals and feeling once again that we simply are not and can’t ever be enough.
Two weeks ago, one of my teachers shared a story with us about ways in which we attempt to be other than what we are. Her young son was watching her get ready to come teach our dance class. As she prepared herself by showering, applying her various products, and putting on her jewelry, he innocently asked her something akin to how many ‘perfectors’ do you need to teach? Why don’t you just go teach?
She told the story in preparation for asking us to really look at how we might use the time of the end of the year to do something different. Instead of the usual year-end review and New Year’s resolutions, she suggested creating something that encouraged us to see ourselves as already whole and already enough.
The usual year-end review and resolution setting, when done consciously with curiosity and a suspended Voice of Judgment, can be a process of visioning what your heart and soul are truly yearning for, and then setting achievable clear goals that recognize your humanness.
But, if we instead are at war inside with our own sense of worth, this process can be just another opportunity to pull out the whip and once again punish ourselves for not being enough, and in the backlash of that, setting unrealistic resolutions for a perfection that we can’t reach or accomplish.
This process can create a feeling of helplessness because we can’t ever reach this perfection, a place always just outside our reach because it doesn’t exist. There is no place of perfection. Humans can’t be perfect, only human. It is in our humanness that our true loveliness shows through.
The struggle to reach perfection creates a slow death of the soul. The struggle to be what we aren’t creates a war inside of us, a battle where the Voice of Judgment keeps trying to vanquish all of our “bad” parts so that we will only consist of all that is “good”.
If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace. ~Thich Nhat Hanh
What do we find when we lay down our arms within and end the war inside? Peace. We find a peaceful heart and a feel a peace-filled quiet that hasn’t been there for a long time. Within this peace, the soul who has been unable to be heard over the harshness of the internal war can finally make itself known again. It is a tender moment of humility and grace when we come face to face again with who we once knew ourselves as.
I had an incredible experience a few weeks ago that can help explain this recognition or re-knowing. I decided to give my parents and sisters a special gift for Christmas. I decided to take the 1200 feet of 8 mm family movies my mother had given me and have them transferred to DVD. When I got the DVD back, I popped it into my computer to watch. I clicked on chapter 14, a movie of the time when our family had just moved from Michigan to California when I was not quite one year old.
As I watched, I first saw my older sister Molly walking out the front door of our house in Palo Alto. She was a little over three and so adorable. Next, my father followed out of the front door carrying me in his arms. I had a bottle in my hands and lots of curly hair. As my father walked us towards the camera, my little eyes were staring right into the camera held by my mother. It was at this point that something very strange happened.
My father walked me right into the camera. From my current perspective, watching this unfold on my computer, I suddenly came face-to-face with myself, a self that I had lost connection with but was somewhere back in the recesses of my mind and experience. This was me at a young age. When we are this young, we haven’t yet learned how to mask our true selves to be something different, the something we think everyone else wants us to be.
At one, my soul was still vibrantly alive and unspoiled by the Voice of Judgment. I was so taken aback by this surprise chance to see myself, that I stopped the DVD and just sat and stared into my own beautiful clear eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and if you look into a child’s eyes they look directly back at you, because they aren’t yet afraid to be seen. This little me was looking at the camera with pure curiosity and wonder. As I sat and regarded this other me, I could feel an instant peace come over me.
This is the tender moment available to all of us, the moment when we come face-to-face with that part of us that has always been, the child who does not compare, does not judge, does not struggle against what is, does not need perfectors to feel worthy of another’s attention. A child does not look for you to be perfect, just to be present and to see them as they see you…with peaceful loving eyes.
In reality, there is nothing to struggle against. The war inside comes from not being able to accept ourselves in our entirety. The war inside comes from learning, as children, that we aren’t enough just as we are, but that instead we must compare ourselves to others, to a perfection scale, to a yardstick that shows just what we must do to be loved. The war inside continues because we can never get off the hamster wheel that keeps us reaching for the last perfector that will make us finally acceptable.
So, perhaps a new tradition for the New Year can be a practice of making peace with yourself just as you are, without adding new perfectors to the list of things you should be or should do. Making peace means surrendering the struggle against what is true right now in this moment. Making peace with yourself means no longer denying those darker parts you feel aren’t worthy of your own love. Making peace means thanking yourself for the ways in which you learned to cope with the world you were born into. Making peace with yourself means letting go of the desire to be something other than what and who you are. Making peace means seeing all of those parts of you and bringing them together in a beautiful wholeness.
Peace-making is a healing process and it begins with me, but it does not end there. ~Gene Knudsen Hoffman
Making peace with yourself doesn’t require you to turn your back on things happening in the world that are frightfully un-peaceful. In fact, making peace inside is the first step towards helping the outside world find peace. The wars going on outside everywhere in our world are but a reflection of our own internal wars. Making peace within your own self is so powerful that it brings our own world one step further away from extinction and one step closer to peace. We can actively take part in the quest for peace in our world, but it has to start from within us, from within our own hearts, that place of abiding love.
So what will
it take for you to make peace with, and within, yourself?
copyright
2004-2006 Julie M Daley and Creative Wellspring. all rights reserved.
Limited duplication or distribution allowed with prior permission from and
credit to Julie M Daley and Creative Wellspring.
