Protect your inner peace. Without it, all the riches in the world lose their value.
The modern world is an all-out assault on our senses, and our inner peace—the constant noise, stimulation and distraction as well as the relentless pressure to do more, be more and achieve more. Like an overworked employee, the overstimulated modern brain never gets a break. And as a result, stress and anxiety levels have gone through the roof— and inner peace out the window.
Many people seek to quell this inner onslaught through adding more—more self-help, more meditation, more techniques—trawling YouTube late at night for more strategies to ‘calm’ the mind.
But true peace doesn’t come from adding anything; it comes from subtraction, from letting go, from emptying ourselves out.
The simplest way to stop the mind in its tracks is to focus your attention on the present moment.
Here is a short and simple practice you can try right now. It takes less than a minute.
- Sitting with your eyes open and looking straight ahead with a relaxed gaze, find an object in your peripheral vision that you were unaware of a moment before. Stay with the object for a few seconds.
- Now become aware of a physical sensation you were unaware of before—the feeling of your feet on the floor, an itch in your elbow.
- And lastly, notice a sound you were unaware of—the clock ticking, a dog barking in the distance.
What happens inside you when you consciously make this shift from thinking to presence? Can you see how being fully present stops thinking in its tracks?
This simple choice is available to us in any given moment: to engage with the mind and suffer or rest in the natural peace of the present moment.
The Real Reason We Suffer
The mind is like a cluttered attic, filled with old junk—prejudices, false beliefs, unfounded assumptions, and self-critical thoughts that keep you trapped in a cycle of stress and overthinking. It’s filled with stories about who you are, why you’re not enough and all the things you need to fix.
Conventional approaches such as therapy, mindset work or positive thinking focus on trying to rearrange or improve the clutter but the central question is: do you need to keep it at all?
“You can’t think your way out of a prison that’s made of thoughts.” —Krishna Dass
Even if, through therapy or positive affirmations, you succeed in creating an improved, more acceptable story about yourself, the mind will find plenty of other ways to trouble you.
Changing your story is not enough. True peace comes when we lose interest in the nature of the story.
As long as your peace is dependent on the mind being a particular way, you’ll remain a slave to its constant ebbs and flows. Up one minute, down the next.
The Content and the Container
If you look round the room you’re in right now, you see the various objects around you—the door, the walls, your clothes, your computer. What you don’t notice is the air that fills the room.
Here’s the thing. You could remove all the objects from the room, or replace them with a new set of objects but you can’t remove the space from the room?
Using the same analogy, thoughts, feelings and stories are like the objects in the room. They are moveable and interchangeable. But the space, awareness, is constant and unchanging.
Awareness remains constant, unchanging and unaffected by whatever thoughts come along… positive or negative. Recognising this is the key to ongoing peace—no matter what the mind gets up to.
The cluttered attic consists of the same two elements.
There’s the clutter itself and there is the space that it occupies. Even if the whole house were to burn down, the space would remain unaffected, untouched.
Like the space in the attic, the peace you seek is already present within you. It’s not something you need to create or achieve; it’s what remains when you stop engaging with the chatter in your head.
In every moment, you can choose to get lost in the endless mind clutter, or rest in the effortless presence of now. This is the quickest and simplest way to peace.
Would you like me to show you how? Book a call below and we can discuss it… or any other topic you like. The first call if FREE.
Stop Feeding the Chaos Protect Your Inner Peace
There are two key factors that contribute to how restless and disturbed our minds are.
The first we can’t do much about.
Restlessness is the nature of the mind. It’s part of being born a human, and affects everyone to some extent or other.
As the Indian spiritual teacher, Nisargadatta said:
“There’s no such thing as peace of mind; Mind means disturbance. restlessness itself is mind.”
The other factor that determines our level of peace, or otherwise, are the choices we routinely make.
It’s clear that activities such as doom scrolling on social media, consuming negative news or constantly moaning about the state of the world are not conducive to inner peace.
And mental habits such as dwelling on past disappointments, worrying about the future or analysing every decision to death don’t help either.
In these cases, protecting your inner peace isn’t about implementing calming techniques. It’s about removing the things that disturb and agitate.
There’s not much point spending the day moaning about the Scottish weather (our national pastime!) then scrolling YouTube for techniques on calming the mind.
If a lake is muddy, you don’t need to fix the water. You just need to stop stirring it.
What do you need to change to protect your peace?
What stirs up your mental turbulence?
Too much social media? Judging yourself and others harshly? Endlessly complaining about the state of the world? Hanging out with negative people?
The question is:
How willing are you to protect your peace and make it a priority in your life?
Are you ready to make it more important than complaining, more important than blaming, more important than being right?
When you commit to prioritising your peace, the how is pretty straight forward.
You don’t need any new techniques to calm the mind. You need to remove the things that disturb you and decide to stop indulging in the mind’s endless drama and focus instead on the peace of present moment awareness. I can show you how.
The choice is yours. You can focus on the clutter or on the space in the room—on the mind or on the present moment.
Don’t Touch the Mind—Protect Your Peace
The teachers Mooji, who I sat with a lot, used to say: “You suffer because you are open for business.”
Inner peace isn’t something you need to create through rearranging or polishing the mind clutter—it’s what remains when you stop getting involved… when you shut up shop.
Thoughts, emotions, and worries are self-arising. They come and go by themselves, like passing clouds. They only stick around to cause trouble if you get involved with them. If you give them your attention.
Withdraw your interest and they have no power to affect your peace.
The next time a thought arises, don’t argue with it, don’t try to push it away and don’t follow it down a rabbit hole. Don’t give it a place to land. Just notice it and let it pass, like a cloud drifting across the sky.
“You are the sky. Everything else is just weather.”— Pema Chodron
There is a simple choice in every moment—to get tossed around by the mind’s endless dramas or to choose instead to remain as the sky—to protect your peace by making the present moment more important than any thought cloud that passes by.
The Effortless Path to Peace
Protecting your inner peace isn’t about forcing stillness or controlling your thoughts—it’s about stepping back and recognising that you don’t have to engage. You don’t have to get tangled up in the mind’s stories. You don’t have to fix anything.
Let go of unnecessary mental clutter. Stop feeding the chaos. Stop interfering with the natural peace and stillness that is already here, right now. The more you yield and allow, the more that peace will become your predominant experience.
In any given moment, you can be either lost in thought or awake to the peace of now. The mind offers endless struggle, but presence offers instant freedom. Protect your inner peace—not by doing more, but by realising you don’t need to do anything at all.
What do you do to either sabotage or protect your inner peace?
Leave a comment below!
