Coming Home — How to Find Peace

You need to level up. This version of you isn’t your best. You’re meant to be amazing [and this isn’t it].

Yikes. The self-improvement industry, while often well-intentioned, harnesses the mind’s natural drift toward dissatisfaction and sends the message that you are never enough.

As these messages sink in, many of us learn to become escape artists. We use our minds to evade the direct experience of our lives. Outthinking, optimizing, and improving all have their place, but they do us a disservice if we never learn how to rest within ourselves.

It’s an easy trap. The world constantly sells salvation outside ourselves — an object, an identity, a future you. Yet when we acquire the object or achieve the goal, the contentment we feel arises in only one place: within.

What we’re truly looking for is an inside job. But our future-focused searching sets us up to reject our experience in the moment. This is the formula for suffering: rejecting this — whatever is here — in service of some idealized that. When we label emotions as problems, we make enemies of ordinary human life.

To taste more peace, joy, and freedom, we need to allow difficult experiences to come and go. This runs counter to our self-improvement reflex, but the rewards of making the shift are abundant.

When we allow emotions to arise and pass without resistance, we discover not only that they move and change, but that there is a larger presence — the deeper you — and it’s a good place to be.

When we stop running from ourselves — when we come home — we find solid ground. Personal growth still has a place, but it’s no longer the thing that will save us. We see we don’t need saving.

A helpful first step is to mindfully separate the raw physical sensation of emotion from the story we tell about it. The strategic mind obsesses over future solutions, but when you disengage from the narrative and feel into the body, it all gets simpler.

It’s just this feeling we need to face. As we allow it, without an agenda to fix or change it, it begins to shift on its own. As it does, the mind settles, the big problem dissolves, and in its place is peace. The home inside of yourself is revealed. And the resolution you thought was far away shows itself to be here, now.