Bring PEACE not PainTM

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."
Mother Teresa

How do we achieve peace…peace in our communities to global peace, how do we work to put an end to any and all injustices inflicted upon mankind?

By understanding on an intellectual level, feeling on an emotional level...believing on a spiritual level that we are not only all equal and deserving of the same rights and responsibilities but even more importantly, much more importantly that we are one...one body of life, one race...one interconnected whole. Pain and injustice against one, is pain and injustice to all man and the suffering felt by one is shared by all. We must strive to cure each part to be whole.

Cultural differences, like many things that we don’t understand can be frightening and threatening. That is why at every opportunity when we are being introduced to persons of varying faiths, nationalities or lifestyles we must endeavor to learn about each other …through that learning we will begin to recognize our similarities and appreciate our differences.

The goal is in no way to try to change peoples traditions or practices, we should not strive to be a melting pot were all of our difference blend together to an unrecognizable state. We must instead see our selves as a beautiful mosaic... where it is the individuality of each piece that creates the splender and the strength of the whole.

As globalization begins to blur our borders our international bonds are being forged more by interdependence and convenience than by true humanitarian goals. The unfortunate result is often seen in in our reluctance to engage in areas of the world where the need may be great, yet we perceive no economic value. What we must come to understand is that the greatest value is not purely economic it is in protecting all mankind.

In our quest for global peace and the end of grave injustices it is easy to engage in rhetoric criticizing those in power yet taking no personal responsibility for the state of affairs in the world today.

One could easily debate that since they wielded little power over those “in charge” they were in fact powerless to affect any change. This is not true, each of us possesses not only the power to affect peaceful changes but are completely responsible to do so. We are it…we are one…we are the them.. we are the government.. we are the world and we are one...collectively and individually responsible for the world.

So today, open your heart, use your head and Bring Peace Not Pain to all you encounter...Love like hate is contagious.

LOVE

Its all about LOVE..feeling love, harvesting love, showing love…anger and hate just beget the same..How do we as human beings learn to put on our armor against anger and hate, and when hit with their bows defect them with pure white rays of LOVE. Its not easy, we naturally react in the manner we are treated.

We need to learn to retrain our “fight or flight” instinct. Not that isn’t a very valuable tool we were programmed with, but we need to take pause before reacting.

BRING Peace not Pain…..that should be easy..like bring chicken not steak..it’s a choice we make with every interaction we have. We have just forgotten that it is a choice and react with instinct…the Fight or Flight instinct that was so crucial for early man has proven itself a detrimentin the emotional evolution of Man.

In early days survival was directly related to the strength of ones Fight or Flight instinct as well as the ability to institutively identify threats…and many times threats were simply the unknown. With so much of the world unknown when confronted with something new, time spent in discovery often lead to death or destruction. It was those that could identify potential danger and deal with it accordingly that had the greatest chance for survival.

As both Man and society have evolved those innate instincts have also continued to evolve. In Prehistoric time the fight response originally revealed its self in strictly physical behavior, (man fighting his opponent). Today, that has morphed from physical to verbally aggressive behavior as well, and while early mans flight instinct was simply that..to physically move out of harms way, that to has begun to manifest itself in emotional withdrawal as well.

The fear of the unknown has survived in modern man as well, however that too has evolved, no longer limited to the immediate, exterior world around us, the fear of the unknown now lurks in our abstract future thought. This fear has also been feed and nurtured in recent years by the constant barrage of media alerts. Thus leaving us in a perpetual state of stress, with our Fight or Flight instinct in high gear. The result…a hostile and aggressive society…

So where do we go from here? How do we rewire ourselves to automatically respond with LOVE and compassion, how do we work to BRING Peace not Pain into our relationships and encounters with others?

How do learn to trust ourselves and others? How do we work to see ourselves as interconnected with all human beings? How do we lay down our pain and our fears..let loose our betrayals and our quests for revenge to those who have wronged us? How do we break down our protective walls we have constructed that have left us in self imposed isolation? How do we rid ourselves of the destructive emotions the eat away at our core, our core of HOPE and LOVE. How?

Before we can bring PEACE we must know LOVE ,LOVE..LOVE is the answer to all…if our thoughts, intentions and actions are motivated by LOVE, pure LOVE...LOVE of self, LOVE of all Mankind, LOVE of Nature, LOVE of individuals, LOVE of life..the list is endless, if we cloak all we see in white light of LOVE then reacting with hate and anger becomes very difficult if not impossible.

Is it easy, easy to turn our emotions, like a light switch..LOVE on hate off? Yes and no, and easier for some than others... yet not impossible for anyone.

When we came into the world the seeds of LOVE were firmly planted. If they took root and grew, or lay dormant has much to do with the environment of our birth and our early years of life. Like a flower seed in a soil, the better the conditions the stronger the flower will grow. The optimum growing condition for LOVE is a nurturing supportive environment, with LOVE the best fertilizer for LOVE. However even to those born under the most challenging of circumstance the seed remains and can be cultivated at anytime.

For those shown little LOVE in their lives the journey to PEACE may be far more difficult than others, however still obtainable. Like a mountains to be climbed …desire, determination and the proper tools can take the hike doable.

What are the tools?

A belief that you truly want peace in your heart, a commitment to work to achieve it, the willingness to take responsible in your life, for your life. Clarity in perception and thought are also paramount in achieving PEACE, but perhaps the most important tool is knowledge..the knowledge of choice, any one of us can choose at anytime to feel PEACE.

CHOICE

 A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about a tragedy. He said, “I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.” The grandson asked him, “Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?” The grandfather answered, “The one I feed.”

— a native American Indian story

Choice. What does that mean? Is it a freedom to relish or a responsibility to bear? Both...by accepting the freedom of though and action that choice affords us, we are also accepting the responsibility for the outcome (or lack of) due to a decision.

For some the fear of making the wrong decision is so great, that they would rather relinquish their decision making powers than be held accountable. In doing so they are surrendering their greatest power.

It is that power of choice that grants us our greatest freedom The freedom to choose what we want out of life and the freedom to make the choices that support that goal. The freedom to think. The freedom to believe what we want to believe. The freedom to choose who we want to be. The freedom to choose how we will interpret the actions of others, and most importantly how we will allow those actions to affect us mentally and how we will react to those actions. We are free to choose what we will bring to our relationships and what we will take away from them. We are given the opportunity of choice every day, every hour, every minute…prior to each thought or action we take we have the ability to choose what that action or thought will be, and post every encounter with external influences we have the ability to choose our responses.

Often times we haven’t consciously relinquish our ability to choose, we have just forgotten our power to exercise it and we respond with instinct. It is our default system that submit our responses. Unfortunately, those initial instincts don’t always yield the most desired results. Whether it is an innate instinct like our “Fight or Flight’ instinct, or reacting to a situation using old information instead of seeing the situation with clarity and freshness…being blindly reactive, either can hamper the outcome .

What do we want out of relationships… relationships with ourselves, with others...global relationships? Do we desire healthy, compassionate, safe, peaceful ones? Are we acting in a way as to support that objective?

For many of us, daily interactions with others afford us countless opportunities to choose if we will be agents of peace. The opportunities present themselves with all from total strangers to those in our inner circle, our work is to allow our desire for healthy, peaceful relationships and outcomes to dictate our actions.

If we strive to be agents of PEACE, then we must work to be proactive as opposed to reactive is dealing with others. In being proactive we learn to take pause and be cognizant of the fact that bringing PEACE is the outcome we desire. That may be as simple as a smile or allowing someone to go in front of us in traffic, or as challenging as stopping before reacting in the same “knee jerk reaction” when confronted repeatedly with aggressive behavior by the same offender. If PEACE truly is our quest, we must keep that in the forefront of our minds and remembering, that the most frequent and important choices we make is how we will engage with others and ourselves.

RESPONSIBILITY

 To work toward personal, interpersonal and global peace we must subscribe to the two following statements:

We are all personally and collectively responsible for creating peace.
We all have the ability to create peace, in our hearts, in our relationships and globally.
Lets talk first about being responsible for peace...we must first acknowledge that we are responsible for creating or restoring our own inner peace.

Requesting that we taking responsibility for our peace in no way underscores any pain and suffering we have endured. For those that have been personally persecuted or have first hand lay witness to a life of injustice and pain, finding that inner peace may be a far more daunting task. Or perhaps not..perhaps its equally hard for just us..the ordinary people…the ones who’s wins and losses can’t be found in any book or on the news, those of us who suffer silently from the benign chill of the world rather than the Artic frost, perhaps its equally hard to turn a loving eye on ourselves and others.

I would never attempt to rate one suffering against another’s, nor begin to judge the life affect on any human heart. We are all wired differently, my thought is just that suffering on any level can harden ones heart and we need to work to soften it.

Going on the assumption that we have all been hurt, even if we have lived a life entirely supported by the most loving and nurturing people we can not walk away unscathed by the events that have unfolded in our lifetimes. We all need to heal, heal our hearts and embrace peace.

So if much of the pain we feel has been cause by others, how do we take responsibility for our peace? By understanding that although we may have little control over events that happen to us, we do posses complete control over how we wish to allow the events to effect us.

We are “Captains of our souls, Masters of our fate”.

How we see the world and our place in it is entirely up to us. We are the stewards of our souls and of our hearts. In many ways, for some ,granting someone else the power to form our lives relives us of any responsibility to the outcome. It allows us full admission in the blame game.

Although living in a controlled environment one may endure a life of pain and frustration, for some that pain and frustration may be alleviated by embracing the role of victim. Not to say there are not true victims, every minute, everyday, there are victims, victims of violent crimes, victims of natural disasters, as well as victims of circumstance, and not to say that the wounds from theses acts are not real, or they do not bleed. They are real, they do bleed, they bleed from our skin and they bleed into our hearts and our souls. But the power to stop the bleed is inside of us.

The power to govern our hearts and souls is ours alone, one cannot have access to the inner sanctions of our hearts and souls without our permission. We must believe that the true power is the power inside us is ours, ours alone to protect or give away.

As with all great power comes great responsibility, and the power and responsibility to shape our hearts is no different.

CLARITY 

  "That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something".
           -Meredith Monk

Without being fully cognizant of one current state of being as well as the events that have brought us there, one cannot begin to heal past wounds.

It is like attempting to chart a course knowing the destination but not the starting coordinates. It is from where that first step is initiated that determines the direction of the journey.

Our inner journey is no different, if we do not honestly and completely look at ourselves, our total selves, our inner selves, our outer selves, our wounds, our hurts, our disappointments, both those perpetrated by ourselves as well as by others, we cannot expect to move forward.

FORGIVENESS

Why do we hold on to pain... pain inflicted by others or self imposed?

Do we believe that we are punishing those that caused the hurt by holding on to the pain? Or do we believe there is redemption in suffering? Have we so blurred the borders of pain and pleasure that we can’t differentiate between the two? Do we so teeter on the brink of an emotional void that the presence of any feeling is a welcome reminder that we are still alive? Do we believe that pleasure must be born of pain, without one the other can not exist? Or does one derive pleasure from pain?

Whatever the motivation, many of us not only hold on to the pain, we revisit the wound, ensuring that it stay fresh and open…like picking at a scab, as the body works to heal us, we deliberately work to impede that healing.
 
Holding on to this pain and suffering is keeping us on a self imposed tether line, allowing us to venture only so far, only so far on our road to inner peace and personal evolvement.

 Again it comes back to LOVE, self LOVE, when it is self LOVE that governs our thoughts and actions, that demands the highest and best quality of physical, spiritual and emotional life, then we have no option other than forgiveness. It is in forgiveness, forgiveness of ourselves and others that we will find our inner peace.

INNER PEACE

How do we achieve that?

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
     -Mohandas Gandhi

If it is global peace we strive for…the end of injustices the world over, we must begin the campaign by first conquering the demons in our own hearts and minds and embracing our own PEACE.

Accomplished by?.. How? By looking with clarity and love at our inner workings, while knowing that we alone are responsible for our inner peace as we alone posses the power that dictates our reactions to all exterior forces that challenge and threaten us.

By practicing forgiveness, forgiveness with not only those who have harmed us but ourselves as well…many times it is personal forgiveness that is the hardest to grant.

Then with peace in our hearts we must allow conscious thought and decision-making to dictate our actions towards others. Remembering that WE have control over how we will CHOOSE to respond in any situation…the decision as to whether we will bring PEACE or pain is entirely ours.

Only then will true peace begin to spill into our interpersonal relationships, which will then begin an accelerating and rippling effect on society at large.

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"When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town.

I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could
have made an impact on my family.

My family and I could have made an impact on our town.

Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”

Rabbi Israel Salanter