Cultivating...

Inner Peace

“No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it...Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly drought to dry up. Peace is a gift not of volitional struggle, but of spiritual hospitality.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969)

Today, our spirituality group is concentrating on “the cultivation of inner peace.” What does it look and feel like? What does it mean to cultivate it? How would we be different than we are now if we had inner peace? My first response to the word cultivate is to think pro-active thoughts—when you cultivate the soil for planting, you turn it, loosen it up, break up clods, remove rocks and weeds and grubs, and add some nutrients like compost or fertilizer. Because I am a westerner, I naturally go to the “doing” parts of any process. “Get out there and get it done!” That's our motto, isn't it?

From everything I'm reading about cultivating inner peace, however, the action is more one of allowing. The holy man of India, Satya Sai Baba, put it this way: “People say, 'I want peace.' If you remove 'I' (ego), and your 'want' (desire), you are left with 'peace.'” Michael A. Singer, in his book The Untethered Soul, compares Way of the Tao (Peace) to walking blind. The blind person navigating with a cane, is feeling for the edges, for the extremes, and not the way ahead. If you locate the dangers by tapping side to side, and avoid them, the way ahead will be clear. “They're not trying to find where they should walk; they're trying to find where they shouldn't walk.”

The greatest threat to our inner equilibrium, is our need to be in control of outcomes. It is this constant desire, in every situation, to have things go the way we want them to go that distresses, and not activities outside us. Our need to be “the decider” creates the rocks and clods, the weeds and grubs, that cultivation clears. We do this by bringing awareness and compassion to them; by understanding that they belong to us, and that no matter how hard we try, how much we wrestle, we cannot control others, or the world. Then we can rest. Then we let go of doing, and simply allow. Then we will know inner peace.

                                                        In the Spirit,

                                                             Jane