The Peace You Long For

Do you long for  more peace and ease in your life?  I would like to invite you into an experience of peace and ease.

After your next in-breath, allow yourself a long, slow out-breath.  Melt into your out-breath, letting any tension in your body melt with it. Now, on the next in-breath, tighten your muscles.  Exaggerate the tension in your body and then say “ahh” as you melt again into your out-breath.  Revel in the deliciousness of a deep out-breath coupled with the powerful healing sound of “ahh.”  (You can also say this sound silently if you are in a public place.)  Do as many of these breaths as calls to you and then notice the shift in your experience.

Now, from this calmer place, contemplate the possibility that this moment is enough.  For just this moment, let go of your chronic addiction to seeking something better and instead be with life.  Know that there is nothing you need to fix, change or resist.  See the space you are sitting in; hear the sounds; feel the sensations of your body.  Discover the truth that this is not only enough, it is more than enough, for it is what you most deeply long for – a direct experience of life.  Feel the peace of allowing life to be exactly as it is.

Now ask yourself, did you pause for a moment and truly open into this living moment of your life or did you just think about it?  This is our suffering.  We think about life rather than directly experiencing it! Stuck in our heads, we have all spent our life trying to get to a better place, totally missing that everything we long for is right here, right now.

In order to open to life again, it is also important to contemplate that you are enough.  This is alien to most of us.  Usually we are an ongoing project to ourselves because we believe we have to be better or different than what we are to know the peace and joy we long for.  Try to imagine what your life would be like if you opened into the truth that it is okay to be exactly as you are?  What would it be like for just this moment to know that you are a unique creation of life and your perfection includes your imperfection!   Can you feel the peace of that?  Can you feel how deeply you long for this?

As you settle into enoughness, your mind will probably come up with all sorts of things that need to be fixed or changed about yourself and your life.  Initially it can be scary to relax back into life, so the mind believes that if we are not always busy fixing and managing everything that nothing will happen or something bad will happen.  But what if that is not true?  What if, as we let go into the enoughness of this moment, we enter the great river of creativity that is life and recognize that life is smarter than us.  It is giving us exactly what we need in order to come out of the problem factory of our minds and back into a direct experience of life.

So for just this moment, relax back into life and watch the subtle letting go of the chronic tightness in your body and your mind.  Allow fingerlings of joy to begin to arise inside of you – the pure joy of being alive!