Peace

The Quality

• Your Gift ~ You are the oasis in the middle of the storm. Whenever things get intense, crazy or unmanageable, people know that you can provide the safe-haven — a place for them to simply show up and be. You bring an innate peace to every space that you enter, helping people feel comfortable, at ease, and like things will work out, no matter how certain it seems that they won’t. Ironically you may find yourself in a lot of turmoil as those are the places where your innate peace has the greatest impact. You are great in situations like hostage negotiation, frantic deal-making, and frightening circumstances.
• Predictability ~ As time wears on, it’s predictable that you will get frustrated with the world around you, and it’s inability to provide the circumstances where your peace can naturally be expressed. You slowly but surely contract from life, creating a life that is simple, if not irrelevant, so as to ensure the peace that you crave. Rather than expanding your capacity to bring your innate peace to the moment, regardless of the surroundings, you instead shrink life to conform to the circumstances you feel are necessary to allow yourself to be.
• Possibility ~ You are the possibility that peace is available no matter what the circumstances. When you do the work to expand yourself and bring your natural peace forward, no matter the world around you, you teach us that we don’t have to wait until retirement to love the life we are living. Peace ceases to be a function of your circumstances, and instead, a function of your being, moment by moment. In spending time with you, people discover that Peace is always available, no matter what is happening.

Common Experience Coming of Age

• Growing up, your innate peace may have been mislabelled as “not caring”. It’s possible that teachers, parents and peers, misconstrued your innate peacefulness as a sign of you being distracted, spacey or uninterested in what was going on. In fact, you may well have been paying attention, but in a way that was more restful and relaxed than the world around you was used to.

Consequences of Owning Your Gifts

• When you really allow your peace to manifest, it can be frustrating for people around you that relate to agitation as a sign of productivity, connection or empathy. Additionally, your need for peace can at times occur as frustrating for people when, rather than empathizing with and understanding how they feel, you casually suggest to them that it’s “no big deal”.

Common Shadow Sides

1. Over-compensating

• Floater ~ Unwilling to let go of your peace and unable to expand your capacity to bring your peace while experiencing sharper emotions and situations, you become disconnected — a floater. You retreat into a state of not letting anything impact you. Disconnected from the world, peace is always available, but the world’s inability to have an impact on you is a mirror for your own inability to have an impact in the world. Your peace is never disturbed, and you float through the world. Untouched and undisturbed, you are the ultimate spectator.

2. Under-compensating

Frenetic ~ Having received enough feedback to suggest that peace is a sign of laziness and uncaring, you trade in your peace for frantic action. The people with the most innate peace can often be the most busiest and frantic. Having learned that rest and relaxation are only a sign that the other shoe is going to drop, you constantly and continually control and manage the world around you. If you can just get everything done, then, finally, you can have the peace you crave.

Obvious Fixes

• Tired of floating and not making a difference, you decide to take on more projects and step into a bigger life. You accept a promotion or enter a relationship that demands more of you. Caught off guard by the shift in your experience of peace, you attempt to control and manage the people and circumstances around you so that you can still have your moments of peace. Life becomes about creating refuges for you to experience peace, rather than about expressing your peace in the midst of whatever is going on around you.
• Frustrated by the constant busy-ness present in your life, you attempt to change the circumstances around you so that you no longer have to do so much. You down-shift your life, take a new job, get rid of possessions and try to simplify. It works at first, as you have reduced the scale of the life you are living, but over time, since you have not created any internal shift, life starts to become, once again, about controlling and managing the world around you. How is it possible that a simple schedule change can drive up so much energy for you?

Typical Breakthrough Path

Your strategies are set up to abandon the concept of peace altogether, or arrange the circumstances of your life such that there is nothing around you that drives your stuff up. The breakthrough lies in realizing that you are peace, and have the ability to access that being in any and every moment. Rather than arranging your circumstances (which ultimately just shrinks the amount of life you get to experience as you get better and better at it), practise noticing how you diminish or remove your access to peace in the moment. Watch yourself creating franticity and anxiety, and practice setting that down. Your breakthrough won’t come from changing the situations and circumstances in your life — they’ll come from realizing that the obstacles to the peace you crave and deserve are within you.

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Excerpt from the Spectrums of Being — Peace