How to Find Inner Peace – The Deep Pool of Knowing
Yet in a state of simple awareness the most evolutionary choices seem to come spontaneously. While the ego agonizes over every detail of a situation, a deeper part of your awareness knows what to do. – The Book of Secrets – Deepak Chopra.
The simple state of awareness brings inner peace and brings peace of mind. It helps to unfold a sense of certainty in a very uncertain world. It brings centeredness to a sense of being off centre and it brings knowing where there is doubt. It allows you to go to a place of sanctuary and to enter beyond the threshold of everyday noise and haste to a place of the sacred within you.
It helps if you can find such a place of stillness and peace in the outer world. For me, living in the beauty of the Cavan and Leitrim border counties of Ireland, I go to a place called the Shannon Pot. The Shannon Pot is a deep dark pool that arises from deep underground. It is a place of stillness and peace, but for this Irish writer and storyteller, it is much more than this. There is a small wooden bench overlooking the depth of this pool where I sometimes sit and reflect on the meaning this place has for me on a personal level and the invitation it has for the wider community called humanity.
This pool, which is part of a local walk called The Cavan Way, is deep, still and dark. Out of this deep dark pool water flows and expands to become the longest river in Ireland where it meets the Atlantic ocean in the south west of the country. In this sense this deep dark flow becomes a metaphor for my life. When I sit at this place with visitors I tell them the story connected to this place. This is a story about how the river got its name and is connected to my love of life. I invite it to become a metaphor for the wild and precious life that is the potential within the lives of such visitors.
The Shannon Pot is dark and deep. You are also dark and deep. The word dark, as used here, does not imply that you are in any way evil. Darkness, as used here, means the ability to enter womb time. This is a magical time of becoming. This is the invisible time of incubation and creativity when the invisible is becoming visible. It is a time of waiting and allowing. What is birthed into the light arises out of the dark. The dark and the light, in that sense, are not separate in the same way that death and birth are not separate. In the same way that time and the timeless are not separate nor form and the formless are not separate.
The invitation from this pool of deep water represents the underground stream that is always creating from within you. It bubbles up as inspirational ideas. It bubbles up as the experience of the new which flows as Love in action to the boundless ocean of Love that is life creating from the formless world into the world of form. In this way you are like the river that takes the name of the Shannon. Except that most of us live, not as the river of life moving as a cycle of the Ocean of Love, but as stagnant pools of ideas of who we are and who we choose to remain. We live in the stagnant pool of the ego separate from the river of life and Love.
The river of life that arises from the depth within you knows how to flow and knows how to arise. The deep pool is also the pool of wisdom that knows how to live the life you are here to be and to give and receive in abundance. This deep wisdom is the knower within. It is the still small voice that I invite you to acknowledge and listen too. This deep pool of wisdom isn’t something you learn. You cannot acquire it from a book. It is arising from the knowing of who you are and who you are here to become. That is, if you are prepared to trust this arising from your interior awareness.
This knowing of the deep dark birthing of Creation within you and through you is real education. It is not simply more acquired knowledge. It is revelation. It reveals to you peace of mind and a sense of real inner peace. It connects you beyond the personal to the One Mind and the Ocean of Love. This knowing gives you inner peace because you know beyond doubt that Creation and you are a ceaseless becoming and that you are the birthless deathless expression of Love in form. This is real information but it is not simply more information about a subject called inner peace.
No one can find inner peace except by working, not in a self- centered way, but for the whole human family – Peace Pilgrim
How do you begin to become a knower of peace of mind? You spend time in silent awareness each day without engaging in trying to achieve results . You do this practice with what can be called an attitude of pure intention. Pure intention requires deep honesty. It, however, does not require judgement. Be honest about your intention. Do you want inner peace, peace of heart and the peace that passeth understanding? Or do you simply want more material comfort, a more loving relationship or more personal power. Be honest. One direction will give you peace of mind and the other will lead you more deeply into the separate sense of self which is the absence of peace. Which master are you intent on serving? Is it self or Self? Is it the knowledge of who you think you are or the invitation to the deep interior knowing of who you truly are?
This inner knower knows you by heart. It is the gateway into the depth of the heart and the flow of life, as is, through a mind that is willing to trust this inner power. This is a gentle power but it is a power that is to be used only in the service of Love and that includes loving who you are simply because you are. You are not here to prove that you deserve this knowing of yourself as Love. The fact that you are already living in form is the revelation that you are here to be. Trust this being and move from being rather than from the constant do-do of your life situation.
To be or not to be that is the question – From Hamlet – William Shakespeare
To be is a paradoxical quest. It is to journey that you take in order to come home to the beauty and grace that you already are and can never leave. All that you do is reveal this beauty and grace to yourself and in that revelation come to know the peace that you are beyond form. This is the deep peace that is available to you in the still water of simple awareness.
To find inner peace have a bit of fun by becoming a metaphor hunter. Seek out a place that you feel connected too. Spend time there. Imagine that this place is a representation of your life and its movement. Make this a regualr practice. Write about your experience of this place. Make your experience of this outer place a connection to your interior state of knowing. When you begin to connect in this way the world of the outer and the world of the inner begin to come into harmony.
Heaven lies within the eternal moment but your work is to be available to this arising of the heavenly knowing of Loves becoming through you. This becoming is unique. It is the flow of your one wild and precious life arising from the deep dark and creative pool of Universal intelligence that you are and are never apart from. It is an interior intelligence that flows from the deep interior of stillness. This is why you are invited to be still and to know. This is a sacred place and a place of sanctuary. I hope you will choose to go there or find a place in the outer world where you can connect to going there. Thus you learn to enter the blessing that you are and know the blessing that you are here to share with the world.
Finding inner peace is a key aspect of living the wild and precious life. This peace is not simply the absence of conflict but the ability to live beyond opposites (3rd and 4th chakra experience) and beyond the opposition that is experienced within. It means turning within as the first step in attaining real peace of mind. This requires trust in the process because the process is invisible and cannot be proved except through personal direct experience. This is why this journey into being who you are here to become is called The Hero’s Journey. Finding inner peace is what it says. You find it within. When you find it within the outer world will mirror your inner experience.
Deep Peace of the Infinite Peace to You. I leave you with an invitation to ride the Peace train from a man whose music and words have inspired my willingness to sing the songs I love and try to live.
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