Only You Can Create the Calm and Serenity You Want
Peace is a self-generated experience
If you want peace, you might seek it in the countryside, by the ocean, or on your couch as you listen to music. You might even find it there, but it doesn’t come from anywhere outside you. It lives in a place you might not look.
You forge your personal state of tranquility.
While some places and situations help you relax and enjoy calmness, they just trigger something only you can create. You might forge a link between a beautiful landscape and peacefulness. You generate the emotion you experience, though.
Only you can create the calm and serenity you want. No person, event, or activity can give you what you need. You may feel peaceful in the country, away from the hustle and bustle. But this is because your perception of the countryside as relaxing exists. If you prefer the city and built-up areas to meadows and woodlands, being in the country won’t bring peace of mind.
There are several ways to generate peace, and you’ll find the best for you by experimenting. Some people relax with a delightful book, while others find the calm they crave in exercise, the garden, or soothing sounds.
These things, however, like the scenery, are tools rather than straightforward ways to achieve a peaceful mindset. So, they don’t always work. If your mind is busy with worry, frustration, or sadness, listening to your favorite song, or doing something else you usually enjoy, won’t help.
To become proficient at creating inner peace, you need to recognize the sensation of peace itself and note when it occurs. Is it a warm glow in your heart? Or complete security and relaxation? Does it arise when you are on your own? Or with other people? Or when you do something specific?
When you remember bliss, you recreate it. The memory makes it occur again. And when you understand which circumstances prompt inner peace (act as triggers to aid harmony), you can put yourself in a prime position to create it too.
You’ll never find calm by looking for it outside yourself. It’s self-generated. So, the next time you want it, go within rather than elsewhere. The more you expand inner harmony, the easier it flows another time.
Bridget Webber is a writer and nature lover, often found in the woodland, meadow, and other wild places. She writes poetry and stories and pens psychology articles; her love of discovering what rests inside the thicket and the brain compels her to delve deep. She’s appeared in many leading publications and is the author of Nature Poems to Heal the Heart and Nurture the Soul.
