Find Your Inner Peace with This Contemplative Practice

I worked with someone last month helping her to identify triggers causing her stress. I asked her to first recall a time when she felt truly happy. She remembered joyful times of her father taking her swimming as a young girl. After feeling the joy of these memories, sorrow arose as she told me her father passed away this past January. She felt guilty she never had the opportunity to grieve for him.

This led me to contemplate the duality of emotions we all experience: joy – sorrow, anger – forgiveness, fear – love, etc. To know one is to know the other, yet without one it is impossible to know both.

Is it our journey to find peace with both… to allow ourselves to experience the opposites and express them fully as they unfold without attaching to either extreme?

To allow our emotions to be as they are, how they are, without suppressing them or judging them as good or bad?

Part of our journey is to learn to be rooted in the stillness between the two extremes… the stillness at the center of a swinging pendulum… the silence between the sounds… the steadiness between the depths of the ocean and the rising and falling tides. This stillness exists within all of us, and from this stillness, we can watch, observe, experience fully, and allow the duality of emotions to be expressed through us as we need to express them without attachment or judgment.

Emotions come and they go, and it is OK to experience them all, however we experience them. To be rooted in our inner stillness and to allow ourselves to experience and express all emotions life brings forth within us without attaching to them or judging them is to live at peace with who we are… to love ourselves as we are… to experience the gift of life.

With Love, Light and Gratitude,
Sandy