I have BIG EMOTIONS. (If you know me, you’re laughing and wondering if I could say something more obvious.) I think I’ve been this way since I was very small. My mother tells the story that you could sit me in front of the TV when I was a toddler and I would just basically laugh my little ass off at anything that was remotely funny.
Because of that, for a long time, I resisted the word peace. The very concept shouted BORING to me. Who wants to be all quiet all the time!?
I think a lot of people equate the concept of peacefulness with a certain kind of weakness. I mean, duh, our culture LOVES war in all its forms. It’s our favorite set of metaphors to apply to every aspect of life.
But like the word love, I think we are confused about what peace actually is and how it’s related to feelings and emotions.
Peace is not the opposite of war, just as love is not the opposite of hate. Peace and love do not have opposites. They are the nature of the universe. They are the fabric of everything. War and hate are human manifestations of perceived lack and unresolved pain.
Peace and love (which I see as folded into and the same as “joy”) are our true nature, and they are truly the only states from which we can create justice and goodness and art and beauty.
They do not, though, eradicate the possibility of anger and sadness and grief and rage. Those things exist within the scope of human emotion and feeling.
Peace, love, joy… these are NOT emotions or feelings but rather actions and ways of being.
So we can be angry and then still create justice through the energy of peace. (This is a lot and I’m moving through it fast but just think to the basic teachings of Gandhi, MLK, Christ, Dorothy Day…and too many others to list.)
I now think of and experience peace as clarity of vision and knowing. I like the word “clearness” even better here than clarity. CLEAR. Like clean water and bright light.
I also think that to chase peace can be a frustrating and futile effort like chasing happiness.
I believe this is why meditation to find it often doesn’t work for people. Peace is more like a shy woodland creature for many of us because we’ve known it so little in our lives and it’s not sure it can trust us. (Stay with me, here.)
Our own inner peace is so often very deeply buried under intense pain and fear and just mistrust that we can ever live in this sort of state. We’ve been taught that good things should be difficult, that life is about working hard, that love can be fleeting so watch out, that other people are our competition and should be kept at a certain distance, and that we ourselves are never strong enough, good enough, or worthy enough.
Peace feels like a golden carrot at the end of an infinitely long stick and we’ll never ever do or be enough to finally grab it, and if we did, it would very likely turn out to be an illusion and turn to dust in our grasp.
So what do we do? How do we ever find any kind of expanded internal peace/love/joy if they are all that golden carrot but are resistant to “trying.”
We start by getting more honest about all the inner crap that is clogging our way to our true, basic nature.
We do work that clears that. We resolve. We heal. We spend more time in the body, allowing the body to express itself, breathing, settling, getting more and more comfortable with some inner stillness.
The body is the key here. The body can only live in the now. And when we get deeply enough into body, brain and mind chatter start to either shut down or slow down enough that we can identify the problems, the levels of utter ridiculousness with which we torture ourselves every day. We start to CLEAR our inner sight.
For me, this happens most in dance and vigorous movement. It’s like the more my body is being engaged, the more easily I can enter the eye of my inner storm and view it from that place of quiet.
Now, after about 12 years of serious practice at this, now and only now have I finally been able to cultivate a more traditional looking meditative sort of practice, one in which I am actually seated in stillness but this has only happened because I’ve gotten to the place where that inner forest of creatures is no longer scary to me. I feel strong enough in my physical body to enter into the other layers of this body — the emotional, mental, and spiritual.
And here finally, I am able to coax out that woodland creature and feed it a bit. We’re actually becoming friends.