The objective of this blog is to help you find your happiness. However, there is no way we can find happiness without inner peace. The search for happiness is also the search for peace.

Inner Peace is an important ingredient to happiness. I say all the time that the ultimate output of life is happiness, which is an emotion in itself. However, there are several things that go into finding happiness. Finding happiness is a journey and finding peace is an important step in that journey.

How do we find inner peace?

To understand that we need to first understand what it is to be peaceful?

I tried to find a definition on the dictionary, but it offers none. However, I tried to google one, and found this one to be useful.

“A peaceful life is a life that is lived with a balanced harmony inside you, and around you. It means that you feel content with whatever is going on in your life or around you, and nothing, no one can disturb this inner peace of yours.”

I like this. Although I would try to write one of my own.

What is peace?

Peace is a state of calm and poise. To be peaceful means to be at peace.

Now that we have a definition we like, let us proceed to understand how to reach such as state? What do we need to be to achieve inner peace in life?

Understand how life works

Now, one can’t be peaceful unless and until there is ignorance. Ignorance cannot lead to peace. One can only be at peace when once it aware about themselves and about life. We need to educate ourselves and form a worldview so that we can process all the information we get into some consumable form and feed it to our minds.

Only when our mind is able to process the information, we would be able to find inner peace. As long as there is ignorance and chaos in our mind, peace would be a distant possibility.

Those who find peace have a deep understanding about things that are within their control, and the things that aren’t.

The serenity prayer comes to mind:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference.

The wisdom to know the difference can only come with maturity and reflection upon the world about us. We need to let go of things that we can’t control in order to find peace.

In order to find inner peace, accept life

One of the major struggles we face as human beings is to find acceptance. We can’t get ourselves to accept life as it turns out to be. We crave for control, while forgetting that there are powers beyond us that exert influence over our lives.

None of us can deny the power of destiny and that it has an impact on how our lives turn out to be. The year 2020 for example, turned many lives around. 1.5 million people lost their lives and several millions lost their livelihood because of the infectious corona virus. None of these people had planned their lives to take the shape it did.

We need to be able to accept life. We need to accept that there are powers which are beyond us, which shape our reality more often than we accept.

Meditate and reflect on life

We mentioned that one of the ways to find inner peace to understand life. Now, one of the most important ways to understand life is meditation. Another useful method is reflection.

Both of these activities can be done in calm solitude. Just find yourself a space where you can be yourself. In order to reflect, you don’t even need this space. You just need to be by yourself in a calm and noiseless environment.

For meditation, ideally sit in a cross legged posture and focus on your breathing while letting your thoughts freely flow. Observe the thoughts that come into your mind.

This will help you understand yourselves better, which is critical to finding peace.

Do one thing at a time

Multi-tasking only sounds good as corporate jargon. None of us are capable of doing more than one thing at a time. Organize your life so you are able to focus on doing one thing at a time.

When you do one thing a time, you are able to do it peacefully and without unnecessary distraction. All of us would naturally feel overwhelmed when we have a lot to do, but we cannot intellectually work on more than one thing.

So, make a schedule, organise your time, and hit tasks one a time.

Learn how to deal with stress

Stress can be managed, and even eliminated from our lives. It would take a certain time, attitude and focus to consistently work on managing stress. You can’t quite achieve peace without reducing stress. When you are stressful in your mind, it permeates your entire body and causes you to feel disturbed.

So, in order to manage stress, go to the source of stress and handle it. You can’t manage stress by trying to avoid it.

If it’s a personal problem that’s causing you stress, deal with the person and solve the problem. If it’s a work problem, solve the problem. There are times we take a lot of stress because of unsolved problems which we can’t be sure about. We don’t know if they can be solved or not, and that become a source of stress. In such a situation, it is helpful to give yourself a timeframe within which you would want to solve the problem. If it doesn’t get solved within the timeframe, you need to take a call if you want to eliminate the problem from your life.

That’s the only way to really deal with stress and find peace-either solve the problems that are causing you stress, or eliminate them.

Take breathing breaks

Yes, meditation is important and we should make some time for it every day. However, in addition to meditation, you can take breathing breaks through your work day, where you just distract yourself from work, and close your eyes to take a few deep breaths.

Breathing helps us find peace and makes us conscious of our life. So, we should do it consciously for a few minutes every day.

Find yourself a quiet space for stillness and silence

Find yourself a quiet space in your house or in your office where you could just go to be quiet. Stillness and silence is important for peace. Life is noisy and we need to take breaks every now and then to reflect and gain perspective on what is happening.

You need that space that you know is yours to go to, whenever you need to spend time with yourself.

Make time for solitude and travel solo

Make time for solitude. Solitude is chosen time for yourself where you don’t want company. We need to be in a state of solitude every now and then to find peace, since that’s the time we get to think about life.

Traveling is wonderful experience at any point in your life. However, traveling solo is therapeutic. I have travelled solo for a few years in my life and I do seriously believe that one of the reasons I have turned out to be thoughtful is because I gave myself time to think, read and reflect on my solo travels. I remember reading a book sitting in front of a beach and strolling across a river in the mountains, all by mountains, thinking about the kind of life I wanted to live.

You need to make time for yourself, to be with yourself and understand who you are. There is no peace without self-awareness.

Do not buy things you don’t need

Do not give in to the urge of buying everything just because you see other people have them. The society that works on feeding the rat race is responsible for it. Only buy things when you need them, and frankly I now realize after over a decade of living independently, away from parents, that we don’t really need a lot. Life is simple. We need a few basic things in the house.

However, if you continue to clutter your house with things you don’t even need, you would end up cluttering your mind too.

Keep a clean environment around you

When the rise in the morning, the first thing you should do is make up your bed again. Fold the blankets and straighten up the bed sheet. Make it look clean and tidy.

Similarly, do the same with your work space. Keep the study table neat and tidy and free from distractions.

A clean tidy physical space is a sign of a clean and tidy mind.

Keep a positive outlook towards life

Always keep a positive outlook towards life. Positivity is a set of beliefs like gratitude, assuming in your favor, believing that the future would turn out to be alright, and focusing on the good consistently, among others. Read this piece for a detailed approach on a positive life.

Positivity brings peace because when your mind is thinking in the right direction, you feel rested unlike a negative mind which is always restless.

Work hard on your dreams

Now, we all knows that results matter. However, the sheer effort that goes into working hard on our dreams brings us peace. We know that results depend on a lot of things, some of which may be beyond our capacity. However, when we give our best to an endeavour we undertake, we feel peaceful just because we know that we gave it our all.

Even if the result doesn’t turn out to be in our favour, we know we gave it all, and that helps us deal with any outcome-the knowledge that we left no stone unturned in the pursuit of our dreams.

Life is a game of persistence

Life, in the end, is a game of hard work and persistence. Some are fortunate to find success and meaning in the beginning of their lives, but all of us. Most people never find true joy, meaning and success. So, we need to keep going in the pursuit of these objectives, till we succeed without letting setbacks disturb our peace of mind. You haven’t failed until you have given up. So, don’t even think of giving up.

Peace is a prerequisite for happiness

On this blog, my mission is to help people find their happiness. I know that we can’t be happy unless we find peace in our hearts. Therefore, you must make every effort to be peaceful every day. Like we can create happiness, we can also create peace through a right combination of physical and mental effort. Do not give up on peace. It is your duty to do it for yourself.

Isn’t this a beautiful article on peace?

I am so glad it turned out to be so meaningful.

To summarize, in order to find peace, we need to take care of our physical body and our thoughts. We need to meditate, invest in self-awareness, work hard on our dreams, and persist till we make them happen. Peace is an outcome of the right kind of beliefs as we looked here. A cluttered and negative mind can never achieve peace. So, keep the slate clean, neat, tidy and positive.

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani