Renew Yourself Within Your Self

Reflections On Words By Marcus Aurelius

A Retreat From Your Thoughts

“I want to get away from it all,” we often say. We want to escape the stresses of work or life or the constant needs of the family sometimes, and our way of doing it is often to leave our location, and take a vacation.

This of course does work. This is not an article about not taking vacations. Vacations are great, partly because we tend to give ourselves permission to no longer worry about our lives back home. We give ourselves a chance to rest from the strains and the demands and of course the physical workloads that our home lives can demand.

However, our sense of refreshment does not have to be limited to once or twice a year. This would be a shame, a waste, and a symptom of not realising how much of our own stress and misery can be self-created. Our resistive responses to things that we don’t like can make us feel a great deal worse than if we were to accept them instead and take action from there…

The Problem With Acceptance

Accepting something we don’t like is of course difficult. We are conditioned to do the exact opposite. We can have the background belief that unless I resist my hardships, then they will rule my life. They will destroy me, or I simply won’t be able to deal with them anymore.

We begin to trust inner resistance as the only way to make any useful change in our lives, and we miss out on the power and clarity that comes from actually accepting what comes, and rolling with the punches, so to speak. We are then able to take action more easily, having not yet taken any damage through resistance.

Primitive Minds

Our minds are problem solvers, and our primitive brains are designed to solve immediate, clear problems that arise in the outside world through offering resistance to them.

We have minds built to effectively chase away predators, hunt animals, scavenge for food or remove something unpleasant from our caves. Our resistive mental mechanisms are not so well designed to deal with our now more sophisticated imaginations.

If we have an unpleasant thought, we try to grab it and push it away. If we have something we don’t want to do, we fight or resist it internally, only to delay the inevitable, or create suffering whilst doing it.

Freedom From The World

Our own minds can be major energy drainers or they can be pleasant heavens, but we are used to treating the world as if it is in direct control over our own state of mind. What happens dictates how I feel. Bad stuff happens, then I feel bad. Good stuff happens, then I feel good. It’s up to the world how I feel, it’s not up to me.

It doesn’t have to be like this, for the most part. There are exceptions, we are all living, reactive beings, but taking a step inside yourself with harmonious intentions, as Aurelius points out, can work wonders for your peace of mind.

How Can My Inner World Be Peaceful?

Well, this has been a task of humans for thousands of years, to work out how on earth we can remain happy and peaceful in a world that can seem as if it’s trying to make us be anything but that. Wars, conflict, fights, aggression, cruelty, evil, exploitation, work stress, relationships, human stupidity — all of these things tend to become a main point of focus for our primitive minds, in an attempt to remove them. But to remove them permanently from our society, we have to bring our collective minds to a more harmonious vibration, where these troubling situations no longer manifest as a result.

A simple tool for today, is to give yourself permission to let go of your troubles, even if it is for a very short time. You can always pick them up again later. It can help to write all your worries and stresses down, not only as a cathartic exercise, but to let yourself know that you won’t accidentally forget something you need to remember.

One of our biggest fears about letting go of stress is that we might forget our problems, and if we forget our problems…they might never get solved.

A vacation gives you permission to relax your mind. You can also give yourself that permission when you are not on vacation. Start off very small. Sit down. Set a timer for five minutes. Write down what troubles you if you can’t let it go, and then give yourself permission to no longer hold it with the attempt of fixing it at this moment.

Just the permission means that your attention is not so tightly locked into a busy mind. When the thought streams come, you also give yourself permission to not give a damn about them for a few minutes. They can do what they want. Thoughts can scream and shout. You can give yourself permission to rest, with life, exactly as it is, no longer resisting your ideas about how your mind says life is right now, and how it should be instead.

No interpretation of life is needed for a few minutes. No resistance is required on your part. Even if your mind is a mess, you let it be a mess rather than trying to frantically tidy it from within.

You rest, in yourself, and see how your mind can be either be a terrible stormy place, or your greatest retreat in the universe.

Wisdom Sticks.