- What is peace and how do we accomplish it?
I find that peace is very much an Eastern idea.
They talk about achieving inner peace,
arriving at inner peace.
Here in the West, we talk about,
I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm overwhelmed,
and I want to not feel that way anymore.
But not feeling that way anymore
is arriving at a place of peace.
Peace is strength of mind.
Peace is what happens in your head,
not what's happening around you.
Your circumstances can be tumultuous.
They can be trying, they can be taxing.
They can be overwhelming, they can be sad and tragic,
but that you are centered.
Peace is being relaxed and calm and free from anxiety.
I'm reminded of Master Oogway in "Kung Fu Panda"
when he talks about the water,
and he says to Shifu, "Your mind is like this water.
When it is troubled, you cannot see clearly.
If you allow your mind to settle, just like the water,
the answer becomes clear."
- [Narrator] Inner peace. Inner peace, inner peace.
- In my mind, peace is achieved through three steps,
three phases that are all interrelated.
It's not necessarily one after the other.
They all kind of happen together at the same time,
but there's the mental aspect of peace,
there's the physical aspect of peace,
and there's the spiritual aspect of peace.
The mental aspect of peace is knowing that,
going back to "Kung Fu Panda", right?
Going back to "Kung Fu Panda",
Chi Long, Ti Long, what's his name, the tiger.
The big scary tiger has escaped and Shifu's freaking out
and Oogway is just as worried as everybody else,
but he knows that if he's panicked, if he's overwhelmed,
if he's freaking out, then he's not gonna think clearly,
so even though he's worried, he is calm
and he keeps his calm because he knows
that's how he's gonna be able
to find the solution with everybody.
Mentally, achieving peace is recognizing
that you have everything you need within you.
You have all the tools, you have all the strengths,
and if you don't have them,
you have the ability to acquire them,
to develop them, to face anything
that happens to you in your life.
For me, mental peace has come
from the terrible hard things that I've been through,
surviving them, coming out the other side,
and being able to feel happy again,
even if it took me months or years to get back there.
Realizing that I have it in me
to survive and thrive after almost anything.
I also think that peace comes from being centered
on something greater than yourself.
Then there's a physical component of peace.
If you think of anxiety or stress or fear or sadness
as the opposite of peace, what are you experiencing?
You're experiencing arousal, right?
You're experiencing your heart is pounding.
You're breathing is accelerated.
Your muscles are tensed up.
You find that your thoughts are racing
and that you're having a hard time
focusing and concentrating.
Breathing slow and deep, as cliche as that is
to breathe slow and deep, we talk about box breathing.
I learned this from Alicia, where you breathe in, (inhales)
hold, breathe out, (exhales) hold,
in, (inhales) hold, out, (exhales) hold.
And you do that, and you do that for a minute or two
to slow down your heart rate, to increase blood flow
and oxygen to the brain so that you can think clearly,
and to calm your muscles and to soothe your entire body
and to actually in your mind, go through the muscle groups
from your head to your toes and relax them,
like a system shutting down.
And you find that once you do that,
you're much more clear-headed
and much better able to face whatever is going on for you.
And you can't always, sometimes you have to do variations.
If I'm driving, I don't take my hands off the wheel
and do this, but I will still breathe
and bring myself to this place of calm.
If my kids have upset me and I don't want to
lash out at them and be mean and yell at them,
then I will breathe.
My kids know that when Dad's breathing,
it's time to just back away.
He's a man on the edge. Just let him breathe through this.
We talk about meditation and yoga and swimming and exercise.
What are things that help you to clear your mind
of all the many things that are happening
and focus in on one thing?
When we get overwhelmed, it's often because
we've got too much stimuli, either external
or internal in our brains, so to tune it all out,
this is another reason why we watch movies
and TV shows and read books and listen to music.
It helps us to hone in our mind on just one thing
and that, physically and physiologically,
helps us to soothe and helps us
to get into a place of peace.
The physical component of peace is relaxing your body,
that you carry stress and tension in your muscles,
in your mind, that that can affect your health.
That can affect your immune system.
Making yourself be at peace physically,
relaxed physically will allow you to face things better
than if you're falling apart.
And then the spiritual component of peace
is what is your connection to something
greater than yourself?
For some people, that's a God thing.
For others, it's nature.
It's their community. It's the world around them.
It's their family. It's their loved ones.
And for still others, their spirituality,
the thing that is greater than themselves
that they're connected to, is their higher self.
Their better self that they're working to achieve.
By being in touch with that, by being in tune with it,
you have something that you can trust in,
something reliable, something that helps you
to stay motivated and stay sharp and focused,
and that can bring you peace.
But how do we actually accomplish this?
I've talked a little bit about what peace is in this video.
We've got another of moving towards peace,
where I'm actually gonna take you
through the steps when you are disturbed,
when you are stressed and anxious,
when you are freaking out, how to actually arrive there.
So now that we've talked about what piece is,
how do you achieve it, both in the moment
and across the lifetime?
I've got a whole other video on that for you. Check it out.
Until next time, keep shining because we need your light.
(upbeat music)