People ask me all the time “Why are you so focused on Heart Peace? What does that even mean? Why is it so important to you?” These are all good questions, and I have tried several other approaches to living my best life, but nothing has felt as good as finding peace!
Peace is underneath everything else. It lives beneath all the emotions and reactions of daily life. It feels like a stabilizer to me. For most of my life, my emotions and reactions have been in complete control. When I have been happy, it’s not generally been just mildly pleased, it has often been deliriously happy (which we all know isn’t sustainable and inevitably leads to an emotional crash). And when I have been sad, it wasn’t only a mild melancholy, it could be tear-inducing sadness that tended to linger. Both of these extremes and all other emotional swings have impacted my ability to concentrate and focus and maintain balance in life.
Now before you just dismiss me as some weird bi-polar extremist or some other wildly emotional woman, I ask you to consider that this is how most of us actually live, we maybe just don’t realize it or discuss it or admit to it freely or know that anything else is possible. How many times have you been so excited or happy about something or someone that you can’t stop grinning and giggling to yourself, and been distracted for more than a few hours by your giddiness? How many times have you been so sad or upset about something that tears welled up in your eyes every time you had a private moment? Or been so angry that you snapped at your family or friends or co-workers who have nothing to do with the cause of your upset? Or been angry for so long that you actually forget what you are angry about because the feeling has lingered and taken you over?
All of these examples are emotions and reactions without peace. For most of my life I had no idea anything else was possible. This was normal for me and everyone I knew…and it is still normal for most people I encounter. When my mom was sick with cancer for 13 months before she died, my sadness was consuming and felt like it would never end. It wasn’t depression, it was sadness, and there is a huge difference between those two. Depression is a medical condition…an imbalance in the brain…and it requires medical attention and treatment. Sadness is an emotion…a reaction to a situation or event…and the only way through sadness is to feel it until it evaporates.
During that terrible time when my mom was sick and I was so sad, two teachers emerged and changed my perception of what was possible. Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart” introduced me to the concept of finding the peace underneath the emotions and the reactions. I remember one concept specifically from Eckhart (I listened to the audio version of the book and can still hear his voice) that went something like “you might not be happy, but you can be at peace”. The main idea in “When Things Fall Apart”, and a theme that runs thru many of Pema’s teachings is to “lean in” to the difficult emotions. It was her book that brought the point home for me that “the only way out is through” which we have all heard so many times…but something about her words and her context made it make sense to me and made me want to try it.
These two teachings during a most difficult time introduced me to Heart Peace and though I didn’t realize it at the time, defined the course of my inner work for the rest of my life…and now it seems may be defining the course of my outer work as well.
The short answer to the questions I opened this post with is that Heart Peace is my priority because it came into my awareness when I was suffering deeply and Heart Peace shifted my suffering into something I could bear. I was still dreadfully sad for a very long time during her illness and after her death, but in Peace, I found something to stand on and trust in and believe in that was bigger and deeper than my sadness or grief. And after feeling the shift that came about during that most emotional time, I wanted to feel it more and more under all my emotions and reactions.
This did not happen overnight and sometimes still requires a conscience choice and decision to tunnel under the reactions and emotions that flair up to find the bedrock of Heart Peace that I now know is there in me and all of us. I still lose my peace…I lost it one night last week in fact…the difference now is that I know what is happening and I know what to do inside myself to go under the wild emotional reactions and find something deeper and more real to hold onto while the storm of emotions and reactions swirls.
Let’s dive in together and help each other find and maintain our connection to a deeper foundation. Peace doesn’t hide or deny emotions. Quite the contrary, I still feel powerful joy and excitement and sadness and even anger. They just don’t control me as often or for as long as they used to. I believe I feel my emotions more clearly when I remain peaceful and am more able to receive and understand the messages the emotions bring to light. Praying for Peace for you,me, and all of us!
Living Heart Peace 