Peace Beyond Mind not Peace of Mind

Peace beyond mind - not peace of mind

Some days are just for Peace. To enjoy and savour the almost imperceptible presence of peace.?

She is like the air - always present, surrounding us, even present within us, but easy to forget and not notice.

Especially easy to forget when our senses and attention gets drawn into the drama of the more ‘sensational’ emotions and feelings - whether positive or negative.

Today morning, I had an epiphany as I was walking amidst the trees (yes, I am one of those lucky people who gets to do that daily). Rather, I should say I have consciously and deliberately crafted the specifics of my life, living, and work so that I may have this privilege of spending time with trees daily.?

My morning epiphany was experiential, rather than mental. I was walking and gazing upward at the canopy of trees over my head and I just allowed myself (presence, awareness, attention - whatever you call that expansive part of our being), to move into the branches and spaces between the branches of the trees.?

Guess who I found there - Peace.?

Simple, beautiful, unassuming, unproclaiming peace.?

She didn't offer any reason or justification for being there. She didn't insist I join her, but neither did she push me away.?

With a twinkle in her eyes, she just gave me the subtlest of cues that I too was welcome to join and experience peace.?

I will not however say my serendepitious date with peace was orchestrated just by the trees. The universe often uses more than one agent - and so it had done this time as well.

Last night I read a beautiful blog written by one of my former teachers (actually a teacher once is a teacher forever, so let me rephrase that to forever teacher :-)) - Prof Srikumar Rao. Prof Rao had taught me a course on creativity and personal mastery at London Business School, 15 years ago - but as you can see he remains an active teacher in my life even today.?

In this blog Prof Rao, writes that there is no such thing as ‘peace of mind’, because the nature of the mind is to be ‘chanchal’ - “ turbulent, capricious, fickle, ever-changing, volatile, arbitrary, ill-logical and unreasonable”. He writes that when we try to ‘quiet’ our mind, when we try to ‘control’ it, we are doomed to failure.?

The alternate route he suggests (building on the works of Annamalai Swami and his Guru, Ramana Maharshi), is to recognize that the mind is just a stream of thoughts - and most of it is irrelevant mental chatter which we can just step out of - by choice.?

I read the blog last night - and was deeply touched by it. I emailed a thank you to Prof Rao, shared the article with a few friends and then went to sleep. I even sort of forgot about it.

And then this morning, when I was walking amidst the trees, I landed up doing exactly that! Stepping out of the chatter of my mind, of my own stream of thoughts and moving into the sacred space amidst the branches of the trees I so much love.

And there, just as Prof Rao promises in his article I found Peace. Not peace of mind - but peace beyond the mind.?

Do read the article (linked here https://theraoinstitute.com/there-is-no-such-thing-as-peace-of-mind/) and let me know your thoughts on it. I hope it catalyses a beautiful gateway to peace in your life as it did for me.

#peace