Returning to Your Inner Peace
In my very first blog post, I wrote about inner safety. This theme is still deeply central in my life, and I’m sure it always will be. Creating one’s own inner safety is a lifelong journey. You can read that earlier post here. Inner safety is followed by inner peace — only safety can create peace.
Returning to your inner peace is a return to yourself. One could say that returning to your own peace is becoming visible to yourself, exactly as you are. It is a return to your own essence, to the place where peace resides. I feel that our inner home, peace, soul, and love all live in the same place. Returning to your inner peace therefore happens automatically when you find your way back home — back into connection with yourself.
I know what I’m talking about when I say that inner peace can truly be found, even if it feels very distant right now. Everything I want to share with the world has passed through me, was learned through my own body. I want to speak about and show the things I genuinely feel and have personally lived through. I’ve opened my story from many different angles, and it’s clear from there that it hasn’t been the lightest one — as is the case for so many others. When I was younger, my own path was even too heavy to walk at times. Anxiety lived in my chest as a vague, constant knot every day. Sitting in silence was utterly impossible, because then I would have heard everything I was fighting against with all my strength.
Fortunately, we have all been given free will as a birthright. We always have the possibility to choose a new kind of path. I decided to step onto an unknown path that led me toward peace. There are as many ways to reach inner peace as there are people. Everyone must find their own way there, but hearing others’ stories can offer ways along the road. I truly see it this way: without safety, it is difficult to reach peace. And when we speak of inner peace, we must first find inner safety. Safety creates the space and the possibility for us to be at peace. By creating safety within yourself, you give yourself permission to step into a state of peace. External feelings of safety can of course help as well, but inner safety seems to be essential here.
I feel that presence acts as an anchor for peace. I believe that without presence, there is no peace — and without peace, there is no presence. I don’t believe anyone lives in a constant state of perfect inner peace, but I do believe that returning there becomes easier when there are strong, lasting anchors within. There are many ways to enter and strengthen a state of presence. Deepening the breath, settling back into the body, returning to the moment, and letting go of everything unnecessary all help me. In nature, all of this happens automatically for me, which is why I love spending time there, especially alone. Walking and being in nature becomes a direct practice of presence for me. When you’ve practiced returning to presence enough, all it takes is one deep cycle of breath to come back into the body, into yourself, into the soul, into your peace. It really can be that simple in the end — just one breath.
Inner peace has revealed itself to me as a very embodied theme. At first, I probably didn’t even know how to think about it this way, but I felt it through my body nonetheless. It is strongly connected to the nervous system — a return to the parasympathetic state, the state of recovery and calm. In the body, this feels like muscles relaxing, shoulders dropping, the breath deepening, and a long exhale of relief.
Many of us also long for another person — or others — to act as an anchor, to make it easier to settle into peace. I know that today I am that safe anchor for many people, because this deep peace is already firmly anchored within me. It can be easier to step into another person’s presence; it almost shows the way toward that peace. Through my presence, I don’t give anything extra — I simply remind you of what already lives inside you. In this way, I can act as a mirror for presence and peace. That peace lives within all of us; it is available to every single one of us. Not everyone has fully found it yet, and I want to be there to support others in finding it.
I wish that every person could experience what true inner peace feels like. It feels like an immense relief on the levels of body, mind, and soul — a great privilege. <3