Protecting Your Peace
Choosing to have peace over stress and calm over anxiety is not only possible, it is required for a healthy life.
Have you lived your life in total peace or have you had bumps along the way? Have you been keenly aware that you really do have a choice about whether you live with peace as your guiding principle or if you choose to lead with stress? Very often, when we have lots of thoughts in our heads about not being good enough, not getting it right, and being unworthy in some way, we tend to lead with stress as our guiding principle. If you stop to check in now, what is happening inside of your body? Do you feel calm and expansive or anxious and constricted in your body? Do you feel a sense of dread or fear, or do you feel light and free inside? What are your thoughts saying to you? Can you catch them or are there way too many to sort through?
As we go along in life, we often add to the level of stress in our bodies, minds, and souls. It’s inevitable in the world we live in. We have so many pressures to be the “best” at everything, to never make mistakes, to not be seen as “weak” by being too loving or too emotional. We can’t be our authentic selves because the world tells us that we are wrong for how we feel and for what we say and do. It’s sure confusing. Having to play a part and wear a mask for social approval that we rarely get anyway is very taxing on our beings. There is no peace found in this way of operating. There is only stress. And stress is our number one killer—of dreams, of clarity, of confidence, of true love, of peace, of life itself. So, what can we do to create at least a little peace in our overwhelming lives? How can we feel a tiny bit successful in this arena? Finding some small wins daily is actually the first step in coming home to ourselves in peace.
Finding Small Wins Daily
The key ingredient I have found in cultivating peace in my life is practicing gratitude and celebrating even the smallest of wins. Now, gratitude might seem silly at first, but even the noticing of the tiniest little things that we can be thankful for each day can start to increase our worldview. It shifts our mindsets almost immediately. We start to notice MORE things to be grateful for the more we practice gratitude. It can be a little game you play with yourself every day. When you wake up, list five things you are grateful for. On your way to work, add five more to the list. Keep adding things as your day goes along. It’s kind of fun! Even parts of the body you don’t think of much, like how your elbows bend, can immediately put a smile on your face and allow you to appreciate and love your body more than you did the moment before.
Why is gratitude so important? Well, the more we feel successful at things, the more our brains start to recognize that we CAN do things we thought were not possible at one point in time. We are building a new neural pathway each time we prove to our brains that we have not died from doing a “thing.” For instance, maybe I can’t hike the entire Grand Canyon in one day, but if I start by placing just one foot in front of the other each time I take a walk and I do it for longer and longer periods each time I walk, eventually, I can hike the Grand Canyon. What was once a foreign and crazy notion to my brain has now become possible and even probable to it. My brain gives me the green light to do things each time I give it evidence that I can be successful and, more importantly, that I don’t die from doing them. The brain is all about survival, so it will make us sabotage ourselves if it thinks for even one second that doing something will make us die. What does this have to do with choosing peace over stress you might ask?
Notice Your Patterns
The more we find small wins that lead to bigger ones, the more we begin to notice the ways in which we want to feel better in our lives overall. We can start to see how, when we change certain patterns and habits in our lives, we can also create peace within as well. By doing the same kinds of activities that prove to our brains that we can do the thing we thought we could not do, we can actually gain confidence in having peace and calm in our bodies too. For example, when we feel more confident that we can actually stick to an exercise plan or to a healthy diet, we start to branch out and look for other areas in our life where we can work on feeling better. Have you ever noticed this? Feeling good and healthy begets more of the same while feeling bad and unhealthy also encourages more of that. The key here is to notice your patterns in your life: the way you do your work, the way you interact with your friends and co-workers, or the way you get along most of the time with your partner or you don’t.
If you are in a dead-end job where you can’t focus well, feel like you are never able to do a project on-point, are never praised or acknowledged, and the content of your job bores you to tears every day, this is going to cause you stress. Even if you are happy to make a great salary that affords you a good life outside of work, this is still impacting your quality of life in every area of your life. You are not going home to your spouse and children feeling satisfied with a job well done. You are spending upwards of 60 hours of your life each week feeling beaten down and dragged around at work. You might feel exhausted and be hitting the bottle at night to decompress and feel at “peace.” You could be numbing out to shows or trying to feel some degree of pleasure or relief with porn. You might be mindlessly eating junk food at 10 p.m. to feel “better” and to calm your nervous system down to be able to sleep. This is life for you every day. The weekends are filled with errands and home projects, kids’ events, dinners with friends, and all the rest. This is all part and parcel of life on earth for the majority of us. There might be a long weekend or a week or two of vacation time each year, but often we are more exhausted coming back home than a vacation should make us feel. Just writing these words is creating some havoc in my nervous system and I don’t even live this kind of life anymore. The stress it creates is no joke!
Likewise, if you are enmeshed with your spouse or partner in a codependent or trauma bonded dynamic, you are not at peace. There is no way you can truly feel at peace in this kind of relationship. This is because, by virtue of the definition of a codependent relationship, one person is almost always going to be addicted to something—alcohol, work, drugs, sex, gambling, drama, porn, shopping, food, fighting and making up, controlling or manipulating, lying, love, you name it. And the one who is enmeshed with them is going to be constantly putting out the “fires” that person creates. Or they need to believe that they CAN put out those fires. They need to feel in control of the person in order to feel a sense of “peace.” And this is not true peace at all. It’s a momentary calming of a fight/flight reaction the nervous system is having. It is called a faux adaptation. It is when we use something or someone in order to feel calm. It tricks our body and mind into thinking that we ARE calm and at peace when we aren’t. It is a coping mechanism, and it does not last because it is not truly helping the nervous system auto-regulate itself. It is only temporary and then you go back to either a fight or flight reaction or into shut down or a freeze mode.
Being able to stabilize into what is known as the “Window of Tolerance” in your system is not possible until you heal your nervous system and limiting beliefs. And when you are in a toxic, codependent dynamic, you are almost never able to calm down your nervous system for very long, let alone heal your limiting beliefs fully. For temporary relief, you can use lots of faux adaptations, such as: controlling your partner, developing your own addiction, anger and rage, crying and manipulation, passive-aggressiveness, affairs, following them to work to make sure they are really going there, quitting your own job to stay home and “watch over” your hungover spouse so they don’t drink more, pouring out their alcohol, yelling at them for working too much, hiding their drugs, threatening to abandon them, and on and on. Again, these behaviors can create a sense of false peace inside yourself—for a little while.
Choosing Yourself Often Means Choosing Peace
Sometimes when people say “Just choose yourself” it can create more questions than answers. Have you ever noticed this? So, I want to try to help you out with something that I think could provide you with some clarity about this. The way to start the process of truly feeling peaceful is to first remove yourself from whatever brings you out of peace and into stress. Sure, people can’t just go around quitting good-paying jobs and leaving the ones they love. I know that is not always the first best choice or option. However, when it comes to your health in your body, your mind, and your soul, what is the long-term cost of you of staying where you are right now? This could be literal cost in terms of how much your health care bills will add up when you inevitably develop downstream illnesses from the stressful lifestyle you are currently living, or it could be the cost of your mental or emotional health and well-being. It could be all of this combined, too.
I know you need a paycheck. I know you love your person. I know you hope it will eventually get better because quitting the job or breaking up with someone is painful, scary, and heartbreaking. The uncertainty of what is on the other side of ending what is surely very comfortable even in the stressfulness of the discomfort is scary and adds to the stress. If you are in a codependent or trauma bonded or even what we call a “karmic” soul connection in the spiritual community, I can promise you that it won’t get better. Ever. Sorry. Here’s why: Let’s say that one person gets help and changes the way they do everything in their life. They create peace inside themselves even while still in the toxic relationship. This seems great, but it’s fleeting. This is because they actually cannot very easily or consistently maintain that higher vibration of inner peace (stabilizing into that Window of Tolerance I mentioned earlier) while interacting with toxic, lower vibrational energies. This is why in the spiritual communities we talk about detaching in love. We pull back our energy and heal and then we love from afar, even if we have to cut ties with our parents, friends, or lovers. We simply cannot heal in the same place where we became sick and that is because the other person, who is not getting better, is still sick, contagious, and going to re-infect us over and over again. Unless you want to be fighting all the time, you have to, for the survival of the relationship, go back down to their level—where the stress is brewing continually—time and time again.
Eventually, if you maintain your diet of healing, you will not be able to be around the sick person anymore. The cost to your well-being and peace is just too high to keep paying. Your body will not allow it either. You will feel sick and you might actually become physically ill as a result of sticking around. What comes to my mind first of all is digestive problems such as the burning feeling from an ulcer, GERD and IBS-type symptoms, gallbladder or liver problems, diarrhea, vomiting, loss of appetite or emotional eating to name some. This is only the digestive system. Other systems can be affected, too, and migraines, blood sugar imbalance, and cardiac issues can also develop in accordance with high stress levels. Cancers and autoimmune disorders are very common as stress accumulates over time. As a result of the pain we are in and the need to calm down, we very often don’t eat healthy food and we overconsume drugs or alcohol, which create these and even more health problems.
You met your person at one level or vibration. You were the same kind of people when you met or you would not have been able to maintain the relationship. You were aligned in the same vibrational energy and you connected through your trauma or your wounding if you are in a trauma bonded relationship. When you heal and raise your vibration, unless that other person gets moving with their healing, you will have to either go back down to that toxic vibration or Speedy Gonzalez yourself right out of there. Once you have helped your nervous system auto-regulate as it did when you were a child (before the trauma was created in you), you simply cannot be anywhere near toxic energy anymore. The fight or flight state that you were once very used to will feel like death to you once you are calm and at peace inside yourself. The shut down or freeze you might collapse into can become more extreme also, and the emptiness, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts can become larger than life if you are healed more and operating at a higher vibration and then go back down into the lower one. The fall from “on high” is a big one and can cost you a lot more than it once did when your nervous system was used to being in the swamp of life it was accustomed to.
Once more healed, the wiser, healthier, authentic part of you comes back online and, like a good and loving parent, it is not so willing to let you harm yourself anymore. After all, the love you start to have for yourself means everything now. You will feel compelled to protect your peace at any cost, even if you love the person or need that fine paycheck. If the partner or the job cannot align with your need for peace, you find the way to peace. And I am not saying that there won’t be some other kinds of stress, sadness, or fear and shame around moving away from the life you have always known. Leaving people and situations that we love and need even though they hurt us is not an easy thing to do. But in the long run, it’s smart, it’s loving yourself and making you a priority in your life, and the life you get to live after moving toward peace is a free one that feels very nice.
Choosing yourself then becomes about choosing peace—anytime you can. Just as gratitude allows us to feel more appreciative and successful so that we get more good things to be grateful for, peace operates in the same way. Once your body tastes the sweet freedom and wonderfulness that peace offers it, it wants more of that. And if you are going to be addicted to anything, be addicted to the feeling of calm and ease that peace provides you. Your body, mind, and soul will thank you!
If you are ready to choose peace over pain and need help with parts of you that feel stuck in unhealthy patterning in your life, please reach out to me for help. When we calm the nervous system and change our limiting beliefs, the body feels at ease once again. Peace reigns in our lives and we feel more joy and contentment.
