In Pursuit of Peace, Part 2

Welcome back, everyone! Last week, we began an extended discussion on the subject of peace, in celebration of the holiday season. There’s plenty more to cover, so let’s jump right in.

Last time, I left off by saying that peace is your “light on the dashboard.” Whatever your circumstances might be, the presence or absence of peace tells you whether you’re in a good place internally. Consider something utterly mundane, like a traffic jam. One person is cussing, spitting, and screaming at brake lights, while the guy in the car next to him hums serenely along to his music. Their circumstances are the same, but one is at peace and the other is not. The difference can only be internal.

Of course, it bears mentioning that this is a mild example. More severe circumstances such as bereavement, serious health issues, or broken relationships will always hurt. Peace doesn’t mean there are no more tears. It means that tears are not in vain, and that in the long term, you can always return to a healthy place.

Which begs the question of how we lose our peace in the first place—and I do think that is the question, as opposed to how we can build peace from nothing. Think of children. In my experience, children are naturally very peaceful. Not in the sense of being quiet and serene, of course, and plenty of things can upset them in the short term. But they bounce back quickly and easily, and if they come from a healthy environment, they tend to be happy by default.

Usually, the only time a child isn’t happy by default is as the result of some kind of trauma. Where it gets complicated is that a child’s brain (a human’s brain, really) isn’t rational. Sometimes, a perfectly innocent event ends up being recorded as a trauma simply because of the child’s interpretation. For example, I once had a client who was traumatized by a time when her mother refused to give her a popsicle. The mother was just trying to teach her healthy eating habits, but what she heard was, “Mommy doesn’t love me enough to give me a popsicle.”

But there’s actually scientific justification for this view, of peace as a naturally occurring thing which is disrupted by lies and misinterpretation, rather than an artificial thing to be built with willpower and careful structure. You see, until pretty recently, no one really knew where illness and disease came from. Doctors could detect it when it happened, they could pinpoint risk-factors. But no one really knew why one person would manifest an illness while another with similar environmental and genetic factors would not.

Dr. Eric Nestler of Southwestern Medical University dropped the bombshell revelation that they had found the source of illness and disease, and they were calling it: cellular memories. But really, all they’re talking about is memory! These memories can affect every cell of our bodies according to either stress or growth, and it even seems that all our memories may be carried within each individual cell!

The implications of this are huge and varied, but for today, let’s focus on one in particular: if you do not have long-term, internal peace, it is a malfunction. Something in your mind, probably in your unconscious or subconscious, has misinterpreted an event or believed a lie which has created physiological stress and cost you your peace.

Repairing these lies and misinterpretations has been the focus of my career. I’ll take a moment here to point out that I have lots of free resources available (I think most of you know this already). Next week, we’ll go a little further into this process of inciting events that can come to control huge portions of our lives—but for now, I hope you take away from this that peace is your natural state.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd