Peace be with me
Peace be with you
Peace be with everyone
And
Let this set us all free
Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti Aum
Peace is a necessity and our basic human right. It allows us to feel steady, at ease, resilient, calm and at home within ourselves. When we are disturbed, the conflicts within us divide the mind from body and heart from spirit. Through a consistent yoga practice you can feel a deep sense of peace within, even if the world is swirling dizzy with conflict around us.
External conflicts exasperate how we feel inside, especially if we are not at peace, we become sensitive to everything going on around us. There is a lot of conflict in our world today and it can knock us off course and if we are not calm, we can become the cause for disturbance amongst our families, friends and neighbours.
Behind conflict is the fire of anger and it can take too much space in our bodies If we are not careful, leaving little room for anything else. Anger has a way of spreading like forest fires taking everything down in its path, leaving no one unscathed, creating great crevices amongst people we once loved!
Solutions have never come from conflict, only more conflict and retaliation. As Mahatma Gandhiji once said “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”. This same conflict that occurs within us has for far too long manifested on a world-wide stage in the form of wars, Ukraine-Russia; Palestine-Israel, Ethiopia, Sudan and others.
We may not be able to directly affect the direction of current warfare from our humble abodes. We can, however, most definitely and whole-heartedly wish for peace, meditate daily for peace with an intensity that manifests into reality. And from this resting peace, solutions will arise. We could use the mantra daily:
Peace be with me, peace be with you, peace be with alland let this set us all free.
Life is too short, to be spent on being angry, isn’t it better to create and share wonderful joyous memories rather than histories of rivalry and warfare? Before joy comes peace. If we seek peace within us first, we will make our worlds more harmonious, choosing to resolve conflicts with others through careful consideration of the other’s position and compromise and joy will follow. Instead of forest fires, let’s quietly light the candle as a vigil for peace for all of humanity, one person at a time!
Peace comes from a place of love for humanity.
Do you know the film “Pay It Forward”, one of my all-time favourites where people repay the kindness of one to many others.
Well, what if one person shows loving kindness to five people in one week and then those five to another five in the second week, making 25 and so on…this is what it would look like:
| People Paying it Forward | Kindness to 5 different people | Number of benefactors reached |
1 | 1 | 5 | 5 |
2 | 5 | 5 | 25 |
3 | 25 | 5 | 125 |
4 | 125 | 5 | 625 |
5 | 625 | 5 | 3,125 |
6 | 3,125 | 5 | 15,625 |
7 | 15,625 | 5 | 78,125 |
8 | 78,125 | 5 | 390,625 |
9 | 390,625 | 5 | 1,953,125 |
10 | 1,953,125 | 5 | 9,765,625 |
11 | 9,765,625 | 5 | 48,828,125 |
12 | 48,828,125 | 5 | 244,140,625 |
13 | 244,140,625 | 5 | 1,220,703,125 |
14 | 1,220,703,125 | 5 | 6,103,515,625 |
15 | 6,103,515,625 | 5 | 30,517,578,125 |
By week 14 we will have reached 6 billion people and by week 15 the entire human population would have benefitted and room to go around again another 3 times.
Even if only we reached only 5% of this number as peaceful activists acting with loving kindness, meditating on peace, we would still reach over 1.5billion people.
One person at a time!
Is it really so implausible?
Join me today as an ambassador of peace and loving kindness towards everyone you greet, as a gift to humanity.
Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti Aum