American Taoist

Lately I’ve been very interested in the topic of inner peace and how one gets it.  I know I certainly don’t have it, but I guess that’s a big reason behind me being interested in this topic.

For the most part I’m a pretty content guy, I’m content with my job and my life in general, in fact I’d say I’m very happy with 95% of it.  The parts that really disrupt my contentedness only do so due to my own lack of internal peace, basically there are things that still get me all spooled up and I have trouble working to let them go.

There’s nothing in particular really that does it, it’s just the little pin pricks of life that individually are no big deal.   After a while though you begin to feel something inside you getting tighter and tighter, and before you know it you begin to feel fed up with it all and need to get away.

After all, there’s only so many straws a camel’s back can take before it breaks.

We Retreat 

We need to get away from it all and so get away is exactly what you do. 

I, personally, go on hikes.  I love walking through the woods just enjoying trees and the odd woodland critter as company.  There’s a sort of tangible calm that can be felt when you’re away from modern life and amidst nature. 

The stillness of the forest or of a mountain begins to seep into the torrent your soul is in and quiet it. 

Walking in the woods or on a mountain or in a park even, you begin to unwind and you find the peace you had been missing by beginning to let go of all those silly little things that were bothering you before.

That’s sort of the point of these excursions, to get away and focus on what really matters.  To reform that connection with nature that we can so easily lose.

A Flawed Approach

It’s always good in theory to get away for a weekend up to a mountain retreat or camping in the woods.  You reconnect with nature and find a certain sense of peace and harmony. 

Unfortunately that’s false though, as soon as you returen to modern living you will undoubtedly get all spooled up again. 

You relied on your external physical surroundings to give you a sense of peace, rather than actually having inner peace.  The difference is with actually having inner peace we can sustain that harmony with our world and our environment, wherever that may be, all the time. 

The Internal Retreat

My point of this article isn’t to say that those weekend retreats are a bad thing, quite the contrary I think they’re wonderful. 

My point is that we rely on them to reset our stress levels when we really need to find a way to maintain that peace regardless of where we are.

In effect we need to take the mountain, or the forest, with us wherever we go. 

I don’t imagine that there is a universal rule that applies to everyone, I can only speak from my own experience and guess that it’s similar for other people as well.  For me, as I mentioned before, I personally regain peace from these retreats because it clears all the shit out of the air and allows us to focus on what really matters again. 

When we’ve got our focus on that, we’re doing good and all the background noise just fades away from your attention. 

This is how we take the mountain with us, and how we walk through the forest even when we’re walking down the concrete sidewalks of Metropolis.

This is what we must strive for.

How do we keep our focus where it needs to be? Hell if I know, but if I find out I’ll be sure you let you guys know. 

The important part is realizing that there’s something lacking in the way we reset our stress levels in that they keep going back up regardless of how often we calm them back down. Once you identify a problem and a solution, you have a direction to work towards, and your journey begins.

Remember, a journey of a thousand miles something something you’ve gotta start somewhere.  That’s how the saying goes, right?

Till next time, peace!