Most of us have tried to find inner peace.
We might think it will come once we get our finances in order, clean up our lives, gain more recognition, find the right partner, organize our schedule, have more time to meditate, or figure out the perfect solution.
But the experience is often the same: There’s always just one more thing that needs to be taken care of before peace of mind can set in.
It may indeed seem as though external factors are what determine whether we feel calm or anxious. But that’s just not how it is.
-If that were the case, all of my clients who come to me because they’re looking for more peace and quiet would have the same (or at least similar) external circumstances. And that’s certainly not the case.
The 3 Principles suggest that calm is something that already exists within us. That it is our foundation, our default setting, to which we always return when we aren’t letting our minds wander.
Peace is who we are.
But when our minds are racing with thoughts about finances, our partner, our schedule, or uncertainty about whether we’re doing our job well enough—or other things—it can be hard to feel at peace, and we can easily come to believe that it’s the external factors we need to get under control. That these external factors are the cause of our restlessness, and once they’re resolved, we’ll be able to find peace.
But our minds are world champions at finding things to get worked up about—so once we fix one thing, they just come up with something else.
The problem is never the external circumstances. It's the noisy thoughts about them.
The path to inner peace and greater well-being isn't about overthinking things and doing more; more often than not, it's actually about doing less.
A minor skirmish.
Fewer worries and catastrophic thoughts.
Less control.
Fewer attempts to figure it out.
Because when we do less, we return to the inner peace that was always there—right beneath the noisy thoughts.
In 3P-based psychology, we focus, among other things, on our relationship with our thoughts.
We foster an understanding that allows us to take our thoughts less seriously—that is, to devote less energy to them—and we work on building the confidence to dare to be present with whatever is.
And that is exactly where we can feel that inner peace, and life begins to feel easier.
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