More Truthful Peace

"The good life is honest about where it lives." ~Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury

This week’s Advent meditations were intended toward peace. While I began each morning in this place of deep meditative contemplation toward peace, each day of the week was colored by the opposite: conflict, loved ones’ physical and mental health challenges, the weight of financial strain.

There was a part of me that so wanted to skip past all of the not-peace, put blinders on, stare at the soft glow of Christmas lights and the mindless warmth of a Christmas Hallmark movie, and feel the something else going on around me. Yet, I knew that first I needed to face what was in front of and behind me. First, there needed to be truth. The unexamined impulse becomes a spiritual bypassing that does nothing for true connection to real peace, I know.

In order to hold this tension, I began by recognizing how dysregulated my nervous system was. This is something teacher Danielle LaPorte says she believes has become the state we humans have grown accustomed to as if it’s normal—the state of a dysregulated nervous system. Signs of this look like feeling constantly on edge or overwhelmed, feeling frequently snappy or irritable, having “unexplained” chronic pain, living with sensory overload, having sleep problems and exhaustion, having chronic concentration issues, gut issues, immune and hormonal symptoms, and feeling highly sensitive to the emotional state of others. This doesn’t mean that if you’re feeling any of these things the nervous may be the one or only reason; however, dysregulation has become so embedded in the human condition and the results of that are many very real physical and mental symptoms.

So, I spent the week engaged with a breath practice I offer in a video below if you’re a regular subscriber. It’s called Bee’s Breath (Brahmari breath) and while the practice is short and relatively simple, the work generated an instant feeling of being more settled into my heart—the exact place I needed to rest if I was to be able to hold that tension between so much challenge and know peace at all.

Peace as I was defining it, it seems, was too limited. True peace, writes Kate Bowler, is a promise. Yet a promise of what, I wondered in my conflicted week?