Cultivating your inner peace

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Below is one of my most recent segments on “Al Dia con Leticia Mendoza”, where I shared some of my “go-to” ways of cultivating inner peace in my life.  Because, let’s be real: if we don’t have inner peace we don’t really have much.  We’ve all been there.  The approaching deadline for an intense client that is not only consuming our time, but our mind.  The fight with the friend or family member that we cannot escape…It’s in the shower, at breakfast, on our drive to work, even at the gym.  It’s just no way to live.  We can get better at carrying with us more and more inner peace by cultivating it.  We can strengthen these muscles to the point where we will have moments of unshakable inner peace...I love those moments, days, weeks, and months.  It is almost as if I walk around with an inner spa :) Here are some ways as to how I do it:

  • Be aware of your desires.  The Upanishads have a great passage that has become one of my everyday mantras: “As your desire is, so is your intention.  As your intention is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.” Before you do anything, especially make a big decision, check your desire.  Is your desire to prove someone wrong?  Is your desire to make yourself look good?  Or is your desire to shine light on the truth and let the cards fall where they will.  When you feel confident and proud of your desires, you will have inner peace.  It takes discipline to not only be aware, but to be honest as to what your true desire in any situation is, but it is SO worth it. 
  • Make your decisions from a place of love and not fear. You might tell me, “OK Judith, I am incredibly stressed out as I have to deliver something to my boss, who is incredibly mean.” OK. He’s mean.  He may not change anytime soon.  Don’t work on your project from a place of fear.  Fear tells you: “He’s going to embarrass me in front of the team, this has to be right” or “I’m going to get fired if this isn’t perfect”, etc. Love tells you: “I want to do everything possible to shine my best work in this project”, or “I want to see how far I can go, I want to break through to the next level of performance”, or “I will wake up at 530am and give myself the time to have tea, breakfast, and a jump start on my work before everyone is on email, because I love what I do”, or “This is here to grow me so I can mentor someone else”.  Just writing these few sentences I could feel the shit in energy! In this example, love might tell you “Do great on this project and find another job” but that’s another post ;)
  • Strengthen your self-esteem. I spoke about this in a previous segment I did with Leticia, though we will be revisiting this soon.  Take a look at that segment by clicking here in the meantime.  The higher your self-esteem, the less anxious you will be and the more inner peace you will have.  So much of our inner peace is disturbed by a lack of self-esteem.  Many see self-esteem as a summation of our self-confidence and our self-worth.  Many times we can have high self-confidence (confidence in our skill set to use a computer for example, or confidence in our skill set to perform a sport) but low self-worth.  In such a case, strengthening our self-worth will make all the difference in the world!
  • Surround yourself by the right people. There are some people you can’t avoid, and I have a few strategies as to how you can deal with these.  Here’s an exercise on how to better discern whose opinions matter in your life.  For those people you actually have a choice in, be careful who you choose. You want to surround yourself by people you respect, admire, get inspired by, and support you, among much more. Life is too short to choose to surround yourself by people that bring chaos, negativity, and/or lower your self-esteem with comments that stem from their own insecurities.  No thank you!  Here’s a good post on negative people and your self-esteem.
  • Have faith.  It can take whatever form works best for you, as long as it allows you to believe that tomorrow can be a better day than today.  You hear this message from so many people, one of my favorite being Steve Jobs Commencement Speech (listen to it here): “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.  This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”.  Sometimes you can’t explain your current situation, or why you should move forward with something, you just have to have faith.

Lots of love,

Judith