Returning to Peace Via the Art of Listening

Photo: Peaceful mountain stream - Pony, Montana (2005). Copyright SJPhotography

Returning to Peace Via the Art of Listening (includes meditation)

There is so much going on in the world today. It can be overwhelming and feels unrelenting at times. When I find myself in the spaces between love and compassion, lagging well behind trust and grace and far away from my own safe harbor of knowing myself as enough, okay, loved, and loving – I fight to come back to that place of peace and acceptance.

But I never seem to find it where I am so fervently looking, and where I know it must be. I create more pain just trying to get out of those spaces in between – the place that feels like purgatory. In frustrating times, we want to reach for something that will soothe the ache within, take away the pain that will not relent, or find something to distract us from the grip it has over our swirling mind and floundering heart.

I have found that dropping the fight; letting go of the fear that keeps me striving in desperation to find relief, and instead allowing the subtle, and quiet voice of Love to find me is the only way home.

So often, the bridge back to peace comes in the simple and sudden instant of hearing something that cuts clearly through my chaotic thoughts and opens up a moment of spacious silence or offers a song that meets my heart and shuts off my mind. In these moments just stopping to listen can be what lights our way back to kindness, love, and our own compassionate being – hardened by life, a long winter, or just the trappings of the day. Sometimes just taking the time to simply listen, open to another voice, or sink into the sounds of harmonious music, the simple sounds of nature, or from life itself can offer relief in the darkness, and the opening to shifting negative and unhelpful hypnotic thoughts originating from deep within us. The old tapes that arise when we have lost ourselves in the weightiness and toil of life and speak of dark places, move us to outward actions of doing more to get away from This and Now and raging and blaming ourselves for all that does not feel right.