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Agree, but it does not have to have any religious connotation attached.
And while one is not spending the time to do dedicated meditation, it helps to maintain by resolving to...."accept the things I cannot change; having the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference"
I grew up Christian and I have tried holding on to the saying, 'God will give you peace that surpasses all understanding.'
I am still waiting on it.
Anyway, I am posing this question to EVERYONE, regardless of religion or non religion.
Have you experienced peace? How? What was the situation? If you have, were you able to maintain it? Thanks
It's always interesting to me how religions try to create splits and divisions in things. In this case, it's as though there is a true peace (from God), and any other peace one may experience is less than that. A false kind maybe?
I grew up Christian and I have tried holding on to the saying, 'God will give you peace that surpasses all understanding.'
I am still waiting on it.
Anyway, I am posing this question to EVERYONE, regardless of religion or non religion.
Have you experienced peace? How? What was the situation? If you have, were you able to maintain it? Thanks
The time I most experienced what the Bible calls "peace beyond all understanding" was as follows. I was arrested for a serious charge that I truly was innocent of. Already being on Probation, the authorities did not even want to hear my side of it, and were trying to have me sent back to prison. Initially, I was in shock, trying to figure out where God was in all of this? The day after my arrest, I sensed God telling me to trust Him, that there was a reason for it, and that He would work it out for the best. In the past, I'd always played "tug of war" with God regarding "letting go". Somehow, this time I just gave Him my worries and trusted Him. Every time satan tried to get me upset and worried, I'd immeditiately give it to God. In jail, I had a strong and consistent peace- it was amazing! After 2 months, I had my day in court. Despite two "eyewitnesses" testimony, along with my Probation Officer repeatedly lying to the Judge, she believed me. I simply prayed that God would reveal the truth to the Judge, which He did. For a Judge to believe a convicted felon over a P.O. and two eyewitnesses- that is a rarity! It was God who did this, and even during the hearing- I had peace. We don't have to figure God or life out, we just need to obey Him, and trust Him with the results.
Luke!
Thank you!
Yes, this is what I have been doing for the last 8 years!
And it works!
Trust God in all our ways...completely and always...in all
the minutia of our lives...so far that trust hasn't failed!
I say to people...try it for just one week...have no cares...give
it all to 'Him'...and see!
OP if you are talking about the peace in mind yes I do have it and I do experience it.but to have mental peace is not always that easy. It's your mind that controls what you think, the prostitute from talking out loud, and saying what you feel. You can get mental reassurances from talking to yourself internally. Your mind lets your hear what you want to hear, it makes your mind focus but that doesn't mean anything you ignore won't come back. Finding mental peace is like finding that needle in a haystack, you don't know where to start without getting pricked, almost like a rose's thorns. So beautiful, but deadly. The thing about your mind is that it controls a lot of things, your mind is nothing, yet real. Where your thoughts are, the way you judge things.
I have followed 6 steps to gain my inner peace.
1.Find my self. It's a hard thing to do when it is a broad range of choices to relax, and have peace in my mind. Work is the cause of stress, it can make my strain mentally to plan out how I'll act during the weeks or months; time is what we stress over, we list a lot of things to remember for work. Sometimes, we choose to escape it, escape the calamity of life.
2Take some Time off. Usually the best thing to do is take the week or day off, relax yourself with all the typical 'spa' treatments and gourmet foods waiting at your feet. Try your best to keep your mind off work, listen to music you like, visit your relatives. Days off are your time to reconcile for the better, to have a moment's peace all to yourself without worrying about when the next work is due. There shouldn't be any concerns of work left, don't be so uptight. It what we all have - a feeling.
3Get a Summary of the mind: of peace and feelings. Peace is the calm of the ocean, the sun and sky conjoined to make the world, to let our see clouds, the endless colors that paint what you want, what you see. Mental peace is our emotions battling in our heart when we listen to music, it is the complexity that can change us, or in this case, the music we love can be relaxing. While so, we find ourselves after the time alone, thinking over how we got we where are, and what changed life so suddenly. Even than, we still maintain that small part of us that is a child, and it's good to be a child at heart. But no, as we grow, experience, we lose the part of us that was gullible. Stress is the part where we grow up, then there the emotional-mental stress of our feelings. We should be prepared, have a drink of coffee, relax yourself, and put your mind in your fantasy. What we doubt and what we feel, like love is variable, but that's another topic for a different time.
4Try not to Stress: Time and money. We stress over time, we humans stress over the tiniest things; perfectionism is all that rages. What imprints lies in your heart, your mind is the small weakness for work. And finding time in between work is hard enough, (it depends on what job you have, how much it pays, the hours of work you have, etc) they say time is money, is it? To some, it can be because you need money for rent, to buy food and all the essential human needs. We also work for the stress upon our thoughts of impressing others. Try to take it easy. Worry not, problems might find you, but you'll get over it. Survive school, or work and live.
5De-Stress: Find your hobby. While stress can make you worry over work, and what tomorrow is about, can cause your blood pressure to soar, and it's especially endangering to your health physically, mental and emotional health takes their toll here also. Know that we should not only worry about work, but our social life. With friends, bottling up emotions won't help with mental stress. If anything, it'll worsen it. Try to find your hobby, a passion for what you like. If it's helping out or working, then take little steps. It's not apocalyptic.
6Plans; throw them away. Today, or the week is for you all alone. Take your time. A repeated saying, but whatever, it's patience that helps with your stress. No mental peace equals havoc and distressed self. But stress is not the only things that disrupts mental peace, your inner calm self, it's often doubts and what your thoughts are like. Planning some time to yourself is almost like jinxing yourself to stress more, so throw those plans and doubts away. It's all about yourself, love yourself more. Selfish as it may seem, it's what you have to do first. Accept that not everything in this world is perfect, not even love. Perfection is an image, to hide what we really our beneath, perfection is a myth, when we are the ones that are perfect. We just don't see it, it's hidden behind masks. Where we live in a flawed world of hate and love, of death and life, of ends and beginnings. Of the old and young, see the world through shades of grey and think black and white. War and peace. What is war without any peace. Our mind is a war state of thoughts, articulating emotions that expand to our heart and let us feel. Mental peace is what we accept about our life. Maybe accepting isn't always good, while the choice we choose always have consequences without us knowing. Also there are other ways to gain the inner peace.
My note is about gaining peace in mind it has nothing to do with any religion. This is a simple but deep practice.
I think the term 'peace of mind' should be changed to 'peace of no-mind.' The mind is always active and in some kind of dialogue. It may be anxious or thoughtful, but it is always doing something. It's kind of like a computer that's just sitting there unattended. If you were to look at the Task Manager, it would still show some low-level of activity going on. Peace of no-mind can be achieved through things like meditation and yoga where active thinking is dropped.
I grew up Christian and I have tried holding on to the saying, 'God will give you peace that surpasses all understanding.'
I am still waiting on it.
Anyway, I am posing this question to EVERYONE, regardless of religion or non religion.
Have you experienced peace? How? What was the situation? If you have, were you able to maintain it? Thanks
How would I know? I don't know what the "upper limit" is to feeling peaceful. How peaceful do I have to be for it to be considered "true peace?"
At any rate, the closest I came was during my adolescence. Even though, as an athiest, I'm not really supposed to use this word, but I have to admit, there was almost something spiritual, even supernatural about those 3.5 years. It would be impossible for me to relate to anyone else how that felt and why I describe it the way I do. I suppose like any anecdotal personal experience, it just doesn't translate well to another person who wasn't there.
Suffice it to say that I still talk to many of the friends I once had during those years and they, too, have talked about how "odd" it was (odd in a good way), that it really did feel like a "magical" experience. Things weren't always good, mind you, but even when things were going wrong, it somehow felt right. I've compared it to my hatred of peas. By themselves, yuck! But put them in a stew and I don't mind them. And if you take them out of the stew, I'll be sitting there wondering what was missing ... because the stew wasn't right. Thus even the bad things were like the peas, somehow necessary within the larger context of our lives.
How did I maintain it? Well ... I didn't. Eventually we graduated and that was that. It all came to a crashing, all-too-sudden end.
Yes i have experience the peace. The best method for experience this situation is meditation and yoga. It can be possible when you give 100% concentration in one direction. I can't explain the feeling of that moment but with daily practice you will be able to feel that.
How did I maintain it? Well ... I didn't. Eventually we graduated and that was that. It all came to a crashing, all-too-sudden end.
At least you have a good memory to indulge in, and something that was actually realized to be wistful about rather than just "what might have been". My adolescence was far more traditionally awkward and frustrating, and in fact disease-riddled, which came for you later. On the other hand I licked the illness 3 decades later, so you never know. Life doesn't follow scripts -- ours or anyone else's.
Peace -- which, as you point out is in the eye of the beholder -- has to be divorced from 100% of the set of things we don't have meaningful control over (which is, in practice, most of life) if it's to be sustained and not illusion-based. The ancients claimed to have figured out ways to do this without becoming indifferent and uncaring. In the West the methods are formula and ritual-based and involve magical thinking, which puts us on an unrealizable quest for best practices. Eastern methods are more empirically grounded with magical thinking optional, and best practices already defined and codified. If you don't expect too much very soon from mindfulness meditation it is a long term discipline that is at least helpful. Helpful enough to be worth the bother? Of that I am as yet uncertain.
The key, really, is to separate yourself from your reactions to things -- meditation is only a mind training exercise that helps you to do that habitually. Yesterday my wife became aware that she was eligible to upgrade to an iPhone 6 with her carrier. I agreed to assist her, but looming large for me was a heavy work day and the approaching visit of relatives to prepare for, and the knowledge that no phone carrier wants your business badly enough that you can complete such a purchase in less than 2 hours with lots of false starts and ridiculous impositions along the way. Normally I procrastinate about such things and look for ways to avoid even bothering. This time I observed my frustration and anxiety rather than identified with it. It was an interesting experience. I can see how one can skate over the surface of such negative, button-pushing experiences without huge changes in blood pressure, and how this can be experienced as a half-arsed kind of "peace".
Three web site timeouts, three phone calls, various cat-herding activities and a few magic incantations later, my wife had her iPhone ordered and trade-in arranged and I was, if not at peace, at least not exhausted and angered by the process. Small victories, one at a time ... maybe they add up, maybe not. We'll see. Practically speaking it still took 2 hours and put enough pressure on the rest of my day that I was 3 hours late crawling into bed last night, and I'm still going to have to mainline caffeine all day today in order to function, so ... in ways it feels like a pyrrhic victory in terms of concrete outcomes, but maybe if all you can get is a subjective improvement, that counts for something. As my 2nd wife used to say, "I'll take a false sense of security if it's all I can get" :-)
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