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By Jayaram V
Wherever you are and whatever you are, invite peace into your life and
embrace it. Make it the very state of your mind and an integral part of your being. Put peace in every word you speak and every expression you make so that the peace that you send out into the midst of the world through your thoughts and deeds create similar vibrations elsewhere.
Remember peace does not stay with you unless you develop certain qualities and establish certain conditions in your life. Without self-discipline, control of your thoughts, detachment, moderation in your habits and desires, appropriate awareness, attitude and approach, you cannot expect to have peace in your life and in your mind.
If you want peace to be a normal state of your mind and awareness, you must follow certain principles in life. To do so you must cultivate the following:
1. Learn to let go of things. Do not hold on to any thing. What you hold in your mind is what holds you back from being your true self. What you carry in your mind as negative thoughts from your past, is the undigested food that stays inside your consciousness like rotten meat emitting fowl energy. Let go of this foul energy with loving understanding and unending sympathy for all those who harmed you, tried to harm you, still acting against you or wanted you die, decay or get defeated in life. Forgive all those individually and repeatedly till you are at peace with yourself. Accept them as messengers of truth who have been sent into your life by the Divine to help you grow. Accept them as mere players whose sole purpose in your
life is to teach you lessons. Send peace into their homes and hearts and their minds and bodies. Unknot the knots of hatred. Severe the bonds of vengeance and the urge to get even. Let the poison flow out of your system, the poison of the past, the poison of ignorance and ill will. Learn to live with a detached mind. If you are detached even to a certain degree, you cultivate the attitude of accepting things as they come and this helps you to remain undisturbed by minor irritants and impediments in your daily life.
2. Have faith in your self and in God. With faith and confidence in your self and God you can deal with the problems and challenges of your life very successfully. You will remain steadfast amidst difficulties and follow your chosen goals with perseverance, courage and determination. In times of difficulties, faith helps you to hold on to yourself and to your inner sense of self-worth. Faith takes you closer to God and to yourself, opens up the hidden possibilities and let you channel your energies in a positive and constructive way. When you believe in Him, try to be one with Him, identify yourself with Him, appraise Him everyday and in everyway all that you have done or intending to do, you live with a sense of assurance that you
are not alone in your endeavors and that you have a great power staying with you, guarding you and watching you, sharing your problems and helping you realize your dreams and dissolve your fears.
4. Cultivate and preserve positive mental attitude. Positive thinking involves expecting the best from yourself and everything that touches you and working your way around every problem you encounter in your life. In a difficult situation, what keeps you form cracking inside is your attitude and your approach. People fail or succeed in reaching their goals to the extent they keep their hopes and aspirations intact. To maintain positive mental attitude you need not have to overlook the reality or live in an imaginary world. You have to acknowledge the problem, accept the ground realities of the situation, but keep faith in yourself and your abilities to solve it. You may not know how positive mental attitude works. In fact you need
not have to even know. But if you know how to switch it on and use it, the way you use energy or electricity, it will help you find solutions to all your problems successfully. As long as you have this unshakeable confidence and faith in yourself, in your connection with God and in the good you find in other human beings, you have positive mental attitude. It will help you guard yourself against unnecessary worries and anxieties and keep yourself focused on your goals. Without this most precious quality, life is a tough, dreary and dreadful journey. Therefore keep your faith and create conditions that invite peace into your life.
5. Be realistic in your expectations and plans. You cannot be realistic towards your life situations, unless you live in the present and are alive to the situation. If you live in the past guided by your fears or controlled by your prejudices, there is little opportunity for you to be creative and logical in solving your problems or invite peace into your life. Feel the present and the presence of all those forces that are working in your environment and become sensitive to the signals that you receive as messages from the divine to protect yourself from possible dangers and unexpected developments. Don't push away a problem because it frightens you. The more you push such problems away, the greater become their intensity and their
influence upon you. Acknowledge the reality and invite the best in you to deal with them. Know what you can achieve or do in a given situation. Be rationale in your approach to the problems of your life. You will learn to accept yourself and the reality around you unconditionally and be more at peace with yourself.
6. Give unconditional love to one and all. Let love from deep with in your heart flow into all directions, like an ethereal fragrance that knows no boundaries and preferences. Start with your spouse and children, your parents and near and dear and make them objects of your unbound love and kindness. Accept them for whatever they are and learn to forgive them for their mistakes and ignorance. You are fortunate enough to be interested in developing yourself mentally and spiritually. You have been blessed by the good in you and around you and so you know what it means to be kind, generous and forgiving. But the less fortunate ones, who matter to you, or who share your life and love may not. The more you learn to forgive them , the greater will be your inner sense of happiness and contentment with your relationships.
Instead of craving for others' love and attention, become the source of That which truly flows from God.
7.Express gratitude: All life is interconnected. Your achievements, your success and happiness have become possible because a million forces gathered together to create that reality for you. From the time you were born till today, realize in how many millions of ways you have received help and encouragement from people known and unknown to you, all those books you have read, all that knowledge that you have accumulated, the lessons you have learned, the money you received for your education, the inspiration you got. Were it not for these people and circumstances, could you have been here today reading this article? When you live with a sense of gratitude, you channel part of the wonderful energy that built you and made you into a
wonderful person back into the system so that some one else may receive the blessings and continue the tradition. You are paying back and reconnecting yourself to the world and the Creator. you are releasing the flow of abundance that made you what you are today. You are inviting peace and harmony back into your life, through your loving nature and your sense of belongingness.
8. Know the meaning of sacrifice. Do not seek, but give. Make others happy. Help them in your own individual ways. Help the poor and the orphans. Help the needy. Be like God to some one without his or her knowing. Surprise some one with your generosity. The more you give, the greater is your sense of freedom from want and obligation.
9. Reorient your thinking and your relationship with yourself. Learn to tolerate yourself and appreciate your self-worth, your talents and skills. Learn to love yourself unconditionally, discarding all negative and irrational fears and doubts you might be having about yourself. If you develop a positive and healthy opinion of yourself, you will learn to accept yourself unconditionally.
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