Achieving Peace of Mind

Have you ever longed for more peace of mind?  I certainly have, and I had a very interesting conversation with Mike this week about just this topic.  Mike is an old friend from Southern California who is now a subscriber.  He said some things that made me stop and reflect on what we are doing here with the newsletter.

Mike’s background is in marketing, so he sees the world from that perspective.  He said, “What you are selling, Ken, is peace of mind.”  I had never thought of it in those terms.  From my perspective, I’m not selling anything.  This newsletter is free; if anything, I’m trying to give it away!  Mike insisted, “No, the product you’re selling – whether you get any money for it or not – is peace of mind!”

On reflection, I realized Mike was right.  What I’m trying to do is to give you the tools that will enable you to connect with your own deepest, most innermost self.  In my experience, people who have realized this deep connection also experience extraordinary inner peace.  They are people who radiate joy.  It’s not happiness they have – happiness comes when something is added to you from the outside.  No, what these people have is access to a deep current of joy that freely streams in their depths.  And it streams through every moment of their life.

You have undoubtedly noticed by now that I keep promoting meditation.  The reason I keep encouraging you to meditate is that I believe this is the most efficient way to connect you with your deepest being.  It is a way for each of us to tap into that deep peace and joy in our depths.

We typically stand at a remove from ourselves.  We are bombarded from all sides with an overload of information, so we have learned to tune out the noise that comes from outside.  Sadly, though, we seem to have internalized all of these streaming channels.  As a result, our minds give us more streaming, and it’s not so easy to shut these thoughts off.  You know, all the inner chatter about the political uproar and the changing economic situation, the uproar of friends losing their jobs, and the fear that surrounds all of us today.

There are two things you can do to connect with your deepest being.  The first is meditation, which, over time, will help you diminish and ultimately relinquish the inner chatter in your head.  The second thing you can do, which will help you find peace of mind, is to change your outward behaviors.  And this is where a second conversation came in.

I was talking with Zilvinas, who is a subscriber on the other side of the world, in Lithuania.  We are able to talk thanks to the magic of video calls, and we were focusing on how we make behavioral changes in our lives.  We asked ourselves, How do we become more generous?  We realized that you can’t just jump from our usual selfish ways to a magnificent philanthropy.  So how do you make these kinds of changes?

You start with little things, don’t you?  You become aware of the needs of others, and you push yourself to give in small ways.  Perhaps you begin by seeing something that your partner has left undone, and instead of mentally complaining, you simply take care of it.  As you continue to perform these simple acts of generosity, you begin to realize that doing so brings you a sweet kind of joy.  It’s not the “wowie-zowie-out-of-your-mind kind of happiness,” but rather a small, quiet sense of satisfaction.

After a time, this new behavior becomes your ‘normal.’  When you began to deliberately become more generous, you had to exert effort.  You had to “open your eyes” to see what needed to be done.  You had to make the conscious decision to act in a new way.  You had to follow through with a change in your actual behavior.  After a while, though, these exertions become commonplace and you realize they have become your new normal.

It reminded me a bit of what I experience with gardening.  I planted late this year, and I decided to grow some herbs.  I planted quite a variety – cilantro, oregano, parsley, thyme, tarragon – and watered them every day.  Nothing happened.  The dirt just stayed dirt.  And then, after a week or so, to my great delight, the oregano seeds began to sprout with these little pinpoints of green – so tiny that they were just barely visible.  After a few days, some of the other herbs began to sprout as well, but I noticed that nothing was happening with the parsley.  I wondered why, and then reread the seed packet again.  Parsley takes 18 to 24 days to germinate.  I was amazed that it took so long.

This means that I need to keep watering the dirt where I planted the parsley seeds for a relatively long time – a time when I will see no visible results for my efforts.  This seems to be a direct parallel with what happens as we try to change our behavior.  You have to put in a lot of effort over an extended period of time for those changes to become established.  Once they are established, though, they become our new ‘normal.’

Our conversation led Zilvinas to talk about his wife’s description of her meditation efforts.  She doesn’t use the Jesus Prayer or any of the rather fancy forms of meditation.  Instead, she simply sits still for 15 minutes or so and lets go of the chatter in her head.  She doesn’t have a particular method for doing this; she just lets go.  When she gets up from her meditation, she reports that she’s much calmer.  She said, “It’s almost like the rest of the day becomes a kind of extended meditation.”  When asked about this, she said, “My meditation seems to turn off the streaming in my head, or at least, it turns down the volume quite a bit.”  In either case, she finds herself closer to her inner being, and she reports a much greater peace of mind.

*  *  *

So we see that the most efficient way to achieve the deep inner peace we long for is to work in two parallel channels.  The first channel is to change our outward behaviors.  The major world religions have agreed that four kinds of behavior change are necessary for inner peace.  These include: no lying, no stealing, no inappropriate sexual behavior, and no violence.  As you can see, these behaviors are framed as things we should avoid.  They do not address the positive behaviors we should cultivate.  Behaviors like generosity, kindness, and concern for others.

The second channel is to change our inner behaviors, namely the thoughts that stream through our heads.  Let’s face it, most of our thinking is superfluous.  It’s a way of gossiping to ourselves about every little thing we experience.  It doesn’t move us forward, it doesn’t advance the many projects we are involved in, it’s just a lot of noisy extraneous chatter.  Its only function, if you can call it that, is entertainment.  That’s right – we constantly talk to ourselves just to entertain ourselves.  It’s like Netflix for free!  But it is not without cost.  The cost is increasing our anxiety, our depression, our loneliness, and our pain.  I don’t know about you, but for me, this cost is frequently too high to bear.

So I encourage you, this week, to observe the mental chatter taking place in your head.  Instead of taking it for granted, see if it helps you in any way.  If it does, by all means keep it.  But if your mental chatter doesn’t add to your well-being, you may want to let it go.  Just ignore it.  Let it chatter on… There is no need for you to pay attention to most of it.

Well, that winds it up for this week.  I pray that your week is filled with God’s grace, and that you are blessed with the stillness that comes when you simply ignore the internal blah-blah-blah.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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