Feeling Calm Yet?

When meditation started to enter mainstream consciousness, the one thing everyone talked about was this sense of feeling calmer. And I think calm is a strange feeling because it isn't really an emotion.

Calm’s like the absence of difficult or unpleasant emotions. You could see emotional conflict as this ‘fight’ between wanting to feel good and feeling bad, and the internal struggle it can create.

All of this got me into thinking about the word peace.

Peace is a state. So if you think of a country at peace, it means there's no conflict happening in the country. It comes from the (Proto-Indo-European) root ‘pag ’, which means to fasten or bind together.

When we practice peace through meditation, the way we get to inner peace is largely about how we meet conflict.

We don’t fight against it - that would just create more conflict. We don’t avoid it either - that usually means the conflict grows. Carl Jung said something along the lines of: “What we resist not only persists, it also grows in size” - and this is very relevant here.

So it doesn't mean that we avoid, stop or ignore our emotions. It doesn't mean we focus on something else - or do many of the societal norms people employ to navigate difficult emotions.

There is a much simpler option, though.

We let them happen. We let them be part of our experience, binding with our awareness and being.

It's a bit like a country in a state of peace - people can protest and express themselves - even if it's uncomfortable - because that expression is the most important part.

When emotions can actually just flow and let themselves happen, they usually don't build up into something overwhelming or collapse-into-bed-and-stay-there-worthy.

And that's how we build and maintain inner peace, not through avoiding or suppressing, but

through allowing.