Our True Selves as Peace

There are moments when I am on my yoga mat that I find myself suspended between seconds. A gateway opens up in the space between my inhale and exhale and I surrender and walk through.

Here, I am on the other side of my to-do lists, detached from the worry and anxiety, shielded from the headlines, from the expectations and disconnection. It’s in this space that I know peace, and I recognize this place as truth.

I feel it restore me from the inside out. To know peace is nourishment on a cellular level, a softening throughout my entire body, and a strengthening deep within my core. Abundance dances in this space, and every breath moves me deeper into a knowing: Our true nature, beneath the dust of delusion the world kicks up, is peace.

The thought form that often pulls me out of this connection goes something like, “Do I deserve this? I shouldn’t be here while the world suffers. Do I deserve this freedom, this peace?”

Guilt closes the gateway I walked through and I am back on the other side. I linger between this question of worthiness and the feeling of freedom still ringing in my heart. I continue to sit with this experience long after I roll up my mat.

I muse on what a different place the world would be if we knew the connection between ourselves and the truth of our peace. How differently we would treat each other, organize corporations, govern countries, manage teams, teach our children. A tenderness would redefine what we consider strength and power and what constitutes wealth.

The world is set up in a way that feeds ego and starves peace. We try to buy it or wear it as a title. False promises of peace are bought and sold and traded and broken. We believe lies that peace is scarce and that for us to hold it we must take it from others, that we must win peace with brute force. We chase it thinking that peace only grows under certain conditions. We forget it’s sitting quietly within us waiting to be seen, our vision blinded by shiny things we’re too busy comparing to other people’s shiny things.

We’ve been so disconnected from knowing our true selves as peace that when we finally embrace it, even for a moment, we question it and doubt our worthiness. A tragic paradigm that sets the world on fire.

My indoctrination into the patriarchy taught me how my peace depends on whether those around me are peaceful, and it’s my job to act in a way that preserves and prioritizes the peace of others before tending to the fire of my own peace. A mission that will fail over and over and over again, because each of our own flames of peace is ours to stoke alone. A patriarchal trap designed to keep us chasing what we’re tricked into believing is outside of ourselves. A game we will always lose and they’ll call us losers for.

I return to my mat and meet peace again. I trust its gentle whispers of love and let it hold me until the pain and doubt and anxiety dissolve. I exist within its truth so I become this truth of peace. It’s flame grows stronger within me, I take it with me as an offering of warmth to the world.