Hello there!

I am super happy and grateful to have new subscribers signing up every day with the release of the new book, Love, Intimacy and Opening Your Heart. I want to welcome you all, and give you some more tips and inspiration to help you in your own path of self transformation.

But first, as a big thank you to everyone who downloaded the book and forwarded it to friends, I am going to do something new ….anouncing:

A Facebook Live Video on the topic of Opening Your Heart on

Wednesday December 6^th at 12pm PST/ 3pm EST

I will send out more information about this in the coming days. For now though, here is an article to inspire you further on the topic of Inner Peace:

Warrior for Peace in Today’s World Does NOT mean hiding from reality but seeing reality just as it is

Standing up as a warrior for Peace in today’s world does not mean hiding from the harsh realities that we face but in fact it means being present enough and strong enough to see reality just as it really is and stay open.

That is why vulnerability is your greatest strength, because to remain open in the face of reality just as it really is takes courage.

“Instead of going through Grand Central Station four times a day like someone hounded and forever in a rush, we can walk there consciously, as a seeker. Instead of living haphazardly, dispersed in a multitude of thoughts, which not only lack any excitement but are also as exhausting as a broken record, we can gather the scattered threads of our consciousness and work on ourselves at every moment. Then life begins to become surprisingly exciting, because the least little circumstance becomes an opportunity for victory; we are focused; we are going somewhere instead of going nowhere.”

– Sat Prem: Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure of Consciousness

In order to make sense of this statement, I want to define a couple of things. Firstly that I am a warrior for Peace and I am standing up in this role because a few weeks ago I realized that somewhere I have been hiding the fact that everything I do, including and especially my business, is all about helping myself and others to find Inner Peace.

I am on a mission to support humanity to move towards real Peace, starting with myself. Finding inner Peace on an every-day basis and even moment-to-moment is the biggest thing I see that I can do to support humanity as a whole to achieve some kind of transcendence.

This statement might sound both ridiculously simple and seemingly impossible at the same time, so I want to break it down for you.

To start with, Peace in the way that I am talking about here is a state of consciousness that is tangible and even textural, that all people can identify when they experience it. It is a silence with fullness of connection. A sense of presence that many say feels like home. It is quiet and simple, yet subtle and heartbreakingly beautiful. It inspires us to rise to higher aspects of ourselves, that see beyond this moment in time, into the heartbeat of eternity. The higher aspects of ourselves shine in this Peaceful state, lifting us out of the desperate struggle of the animal body that we live in.

You might recognize the state, sometimes it is felt when someone cries from the depths of their heart and there is a silence full of presence in the aftermath. Sometimes it arrives in the dusk or dawn light, taking your breath away with the beauty of the stillness. Or it can appear when someone is dying, filling the space with light and love in a way that changes everything for everyone involved. At times, during or just after the birth of a young child there is a moment of great Peace and a sense of eternity for all who witness the scene. Occasionally in the moment of quiet right after an orchestra has played a magnificent piece of music, the pause before the clapping fills up with heart and wonder taking everyone into another realm. All of these moments can be described with the French saying, “Un ange passe”, meaning, an angel passes by.

The meditation techniques that I practice at least daily, having studied for nearly 20 years with the Clairvision School of meditation, are all about cultivating this state of Peace, or connection to the Divine.

It is funny isn’t it? Or at least it is to me, that this life long dedication to cultivating inner Peace should seem to be something I should hide from the world. I think the main reason I have unconsciously hidden this devotional aspect of my life in the past was because it seemed weird and maybe I would not be accepted as I really am. But also, let’s face it, this way of being is going against the flow of most of human kind right now. The direction of the human race is more about getting more, proving more, being successful in outward terms. It is not about valuing the inner spaces of Peace.

To put that level of devotion front and center in my life has taken a lot of dedication and will, simply because it does go against the norm. But it has also required a willingness to listen to the quietness inside, to value the simplicity or the gentle yearning for stillness.

So how do you cultivate Inner Peace?

Again I want to make a controversial claim here. Cultivating Inner Peace starts with quietening the mind.

Many times I have heard people talk about meditation and say, “you are not going to be able to quieten the mind”. To that I say, bullshit.

True at first when you start to meditate there will be phases when the mind drives you crazy. And also true it is better not to react when the mind does go crazy because if you really are meditating thoughts will come and reactions only make it worse.

However, if you start meditating with the idea that you will never have silence, then you significantly limit the possibilities of what can be achieved.

As Sat Prem says in his book about one of India’s spiritual giants, a scholar, a yogi and an activist – Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure of Consciousness:

“When we sit with our eyes closed to silence the mind, we are at first submerged by a torrent of thoughts– they crop up from everywhere, like frightened or even aggressive rats. There is but one way to stop the racket: to try and try again, patiently and persistently, and above all not to make the mistake of struggling mentally with the mind – we must shift our concentration elsewhere. All of us have, above the mind or deep inside, an aspiration, the very thing that has put us on the path in the first place, a yearning of our very being, a password that has a special meaning for us; if we cling to that, the work is easier, it becomes positively oriented instead of negatively– and the more we repeat our password the more powerful it becomes.”

Meditation is the start of a journey for someone that really wants to cultivate Inner Peace. The first step is choosing a style of meditation that really works, one that does claim to give you the tools to achieve silence. For me, that is the Clairvision style of meditation because it is an energetic style that gives you the practical method for focusing on something other than the mind. See the book Awakening the Third Eye by Samuel Sagan for more about this style.

Whatever style you choose to use to cultivate your consciousness towards Peace, make sure that it is one that you resonate with. Check out the people who have practiced it for a long time and see if they have had results. Notice for yourself, even if your mind is still active at the beginning there should be moments of stillness or a sense of a change in state when you practice the technique.

Meditation is not the end-point of the journey though. At least for me, I know I cannot be requiring myself to be in retreat for my whole life in order to have this state. I want it to work in the world.

As Sat Prem says:

“But exercises in meditation are not the real solution to the problem (although they may be necessary at the beginning to provide the initial momentum), because even if we achieve relative silence, as soon as we set foot outside our room or retreat, we fall back into the familiar separation between inner self and outer, inner life and wordly life. What we need is a total life; we need to live the truth of our being every day, at every moment, not only on holidays or in solitude. And blissful meditations in bucolic settings will simply not achieve this.”

Barriers to Inner Peace

There are a number of barriers to Inner Peace for a modern person living in the world today. I am going to start by outlining one major obstacle that everyone faces when they start to go inside.

Emotional wounds or scars that sit not too far below the surface of the ordinary mind have a major influence on us every single day. These lurking land mines in our consciousness start to go off when we begin to become still and turn our awareness inside.

When I started to meditate in 1999 in London, UK, I experienced big states of heart and warmth very quickly turning into firey agitation, pain and emotional hell. I went to silent meditation retreats in Wales and north of London to find that the first few days were a screaming silent hell. After 5 or 6 days, there was often a kind of break-through where I ended up again experiencing even bigger states of connected stillness and fullness of presence.

I remember leaving retreat to stay with my Grandmother in Tavistock, UK feeling so full and open-hearted that I could just sing for joy but I did not have to sing because it was inside of me. Then just a few days later at her little apartment, the weight of my ordinary mind began to descend, neurosis emerged and the bitter battle of ordinary life seemed unbearable.

At the time I did not know what was going on, but I did know that I wanted to be able to choose my state of mind at all times, and experience that incredible relief of the Peace that I had on retreat while in my life.

What I later found out, actually about two years later, was that Indian texts use the term “Samskara” to describe these ticking time bombs in our consciousness.

Dr Samuel Sagan says in his book Regression: Past-Life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom

“Samskara is one of the most important Sanskrit terms in Hindu philosophy. Yoga, the union with the Higher Self, is said to be achieved as soon as the last samskara has been worked out. Therefore the primary objective of all yogas, or paths of self transformation, is to eradicate the samskaras of the mind. This is why it is so important for those who want to know themselves, or rather their Self, to have a clear visioin of all the mechanisms of their samskaras.”

Sagan defines samskaras as “the tracks left in the mind by previous traumatic experiences. Roughly speaking, samskaras are the ‘scars’ of the mind.”

One of the things that I do with my private clients as a practitioner in Inner Space Techniques is to support them to work through these scars of the mind so that they can achieve liberation. It is immensely liberating when this happens. Words cannot really describe it.

What I can say is that when I have worked through major samskaras in my own consciousness, I have found parts of my Higher Self that I did not even dream were there. I became more myself and dropped things that were no longer useful for me. And even more than that, in meditation I became more able to sit still even reaching states of supernatural stillness where I felt timeless, imovable and giant all at the same time.

Becoming a warrior for Peace, in my definition is certainly at least partly about conquering these scars of the mind. Conquering these scars of the mind also leads to seeing reality for what it really is, without the veils, without the projections, judgements and assumptions, but just as it really is. Samskaras color our consciousness so that we see everything through these old wounds, so when we can step out of them the world seems to become a different place. Not good, not bad, just the world as it is today.

There are other components that I will share, including opening the heart which will be the topic of my facebook live on Wednesday December 6^th 2017.

References

Sagan, Samuel M.D. Phd. Regression: Past-Life Therapy for Here and Now Freedom. 1996. Clairvision Foundation, Sydney Australia.

Satprem. Sri Aurobindo or the Adeventure of Consciousness. English translation 1980 Institute for Evolutionary Research. New York, New York USA.