Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello everyone and welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I'm your host and today we will be talking about how can I experience peace. It's a very beautiful topic. Simple. It's actually simple, but we need to kind of understand a couple of things. But before we get started, please consider if you're watching on YouTube, please consider like sharing and subscribing. As you know, that trips the YouTube algorithm and gets our content to more and more people. And also if you wish, please consider sharing with your friends and family as well. So today we're going to talk about experiencing peace. In my life. Okay, there's a lot of peacelessness going on. Whether it's the circumstances, and maybe we wish for peace. Do you find that you're wishing for peace? In spiritual knowledge, there's one piece of knowledge. It's actually the first lesson, which is very powerful, and it's actually the foundation of experiencing peace. The first lesson is you are a soul. That means you're a living consciousness. You're a being. You're a being of light. Living consciousness. And your nature is peace. So I am a soul. I am living energy. Living consciousness. And my nature is peace. Peace is my nature, what I feel, how I am, who I am. So in the Brahma Kumaris, we say Om Shanti. You've heard it too, probably if you've been around yoga people, but you've heard the term Om Shanti. Om means I am, Shanti means peace, but Shanti also means stillness and silence. As I'm saying this, I'm, I'm remembering how I used to perceive everything in the world. And everything was perceived based on what the circumstances were. So if there's a lot of noise, like let's say the next door neighbor's making a lot of noise and I can't have any peace because they're making noise. Or, you know, some other circumstances, some other circumstances. The kids, I can't have peace because of the way the kids are. I can't have peace because of the way work is or something like that. Or I can't have peace because of my illness, let's say, in the body. We had a student once who was a veteran. Because we work for the VA. My husband and myself work for the VA. So we did some service meditation class for the veterans and we had one veteran who had tinnitus. Tinnitus is when you get ringing in the ear and he was an, artillery soldier in the Korean War. For So he was around artillery all the time. And so he had problems with his ears. He had a constant ringing in his ears. It was loud. He shared, it was very loud and he was always having that and he just wanted it to stop and so forth. And we had an eight week meditation class and by about the sixth week he came up to me and said, can I share something with you? I said, sure. He goes, I really didn't think that this was going to work, but something happened and I wanted to share with you. I was practicing meditation. I'm doing the practice and I'm coming to class and then I was sitting the other day and I realized that even if the tinnitus is there, I can still be peaceful. It was a transformational realization for him. There was so much energy and so much emotions and so much reaction going towards that sound that he was having in his ear. So let's take a look. How much energy, emotions, and reactions am I using on different circumstances? Whether it's family, whether it's my body, whether it's work, whether it's the world, whether it's what I think is right and wrong or anything that I'm reacting to, how much energy and attention and reaction and emotion am I spending on that thing? I can't be peaceful if I'm emotional, right? I can't be peaceful if I'm angry. I can't be peaceful if I'm reacting. I think one of the issues is that we feel that being reactive, angry, emotional, sometimes people would say passionate or something like that. Although passion has like an element of truth in it, like you feel strongly about something, that's fine. But sometimes we get carried away with that too. We're too emotional. And so, If I'm spending all of that energy and emotional energy, it's not really possible for me to be peaceful and still and silent. So this is where meditation comes in. In meditation, just like that patient, that veteran who had the tinnitus, the tinnitus didn't go away, but he experienced peace because he realized I can still be peaceful even though that thing is there. That is the principle. That I want to talk about today. That we have created a scenario inside our mind that we think that life is about responding and reacting to everything that's going on on the outside. Now you might say, well, how am I going to live if I'm not responding and reacting to the outside? Well, you are, we still respond, but I'm going to ask the question, how much am I responding What intensity am I responding? Does the situation require that much, you know, the term overreacting, right? I mean, all these terms. Um, you know, come and go, but you check for yourself. Don't go by what anybody else says about your behavior. Check for yourself. Like I, nobody can tell me about my behavior. I have to look for myself. So we had another episode recently about excitement and I said that I was excited all the time and a friend of mine said, it's like your idle is running high all the time, like in a car, the idle, the engine running. So if the engine is running high with reactions and emotions and thinking and everything, and it's high, and then I'm reacting to this situation, that situation, and I'm consistently giving this much energy to it, how am I going to be peaceful? There's no respite. There's no balance. And also, maybe, like I said, I need to take a look and see, does that situation require that much energy? Well, I'll tell you what's going to happen. What happened with me was when I started meditating. And maybe you can relate to this. If any of you can relate to this, the idea that, Other people do things wrong, supposedly, and they get away with it. But as soon as I do something wrong, the whole world comes down on me. I can't get away with it, right? So I'm sure there's plenty of you out there that have that feeling. I can't get away with it. I have to do the right thing because I just can't either live with myself or whatever. So I have to take a look at my own responses and see how much I am giving to each situation. The other point I was going to make and this is a little bit philosophical, but it's it's very deep I'm only really experiencing myself So let's say i'm watching the news and i'm really frustrated at what i'm seeing going on in the world. Maybe I have strong feelings about something political or whatever And i'm watching that thing and i'm experiencing and experiencing and experiencing Are those people on the tv experiencing anything that i'm saying or doing No, right? Because they're, they taped it how many hours ago and I'm just reacting, I'm spinning my wheels and reacting and emoting and everything and creating this elevated blood pressure and whatever else is going on in the body, right? It's not making a direct impact on what's happening, but it's making a direct impact on me. In the last episode we were talking about meditation and I was talking about being responsible for myself. So if I am getting all excited and blaming everything else, it's kind of silly. I'm the one experiencing it. So the second thing I wrote here is mirroring the outside. Sometimes we see a situation and maybe we watch somebody talking about it. Like right now you're watching me talk. But my aim is not to get anybody upset or make money. I'm not making any money doing this. So I'm not out for anything. I'm not taking anything here. My aim is to help, if I can share, and maybe it can be of help to someone. But the people who are doing the news, they have people paying the bills and they are beholden to them and, maybe they want money or maybe they want ratings or maybe they want, so that's going to change what they do. They're going to do marketing and things. It's not just the news, it's marketing and everything else. It's a science of trying to get the person to react in a certain way. So if I know that and I'm watching the thing and I'm reacting, is it their fault? No, it's my responsibility to take care. But the other thing is if I'm watching somebody talk about it and I'm saying, yeah, that's right and I'm mirroring and then I start to think like them. So this is another interesting thing. Why can't I feel peace? And I'm going to say sometimes we mirror what others are thinking and doing. We pick up their attitude or we pick up their way of thinking. And actually this podcast is like this too. I'm sharing my way of thinking. Maybe someone can identify, but there's a good intention behind this one, So the next thing is create an inner self reference of peace. So like I mentioned in the beginning, I am a soul. I am living energy. My original nature is peace. So I'm creating a self reference, not a reference like, Oh, I'm peaceful when I'm laying in the hammock with the frosty drink on the beach. I am the peace. I am peaceful. I'm a soul. I'm living energy. I'm a beautiful luminous being of light consciousness. And my nature is peace. So when I say that, I'm creating a reference point. So that I don't get pulled, I will, but that I have a different reference point from the other reference points that I've been having. I'm a female, I'm in my fifties, I'm a nurse, I'm a this, I'm a political party, I'm a nationality, I'm a blah blah blah. No, I am a soul and my nature is peace. So as I'm creating this inner reference point of peace for myself and I experience that peace, I'm actually creating a memory too. I'm informing my intellect, I'm telling myself who I am now. I'm not letting somebody else tell me who I am. I'm telling myself who I am and I can experience peace because I am the peace. And then you begin to be not dependent on the outside. This is a big deal. As I'm talking about it, it's a big deal because I'm remembering. Sometimes I think, I used to use the example of a crack baby. I know this is like an extreme example, but babies who are born when their mothers are on crack or something. They're born with problems. Like they're born, their nervous system is not right. And they're usually underweight and they have like all kinds of health problems because of the drugs that's been pumped into them. In utero and then when they come out, they have problems. They have developmental problems and all kinds of problems. I'm not fully well read on this, but my understanding is that there's a lot of emotional neurological issues with babies that are born like that. And so it's kind of like that. We're coming into meditation. In a sense like that, like we've been pouring emotions into the system of the body and the mind, and we've been pouring reactions and upset and bad memories and negative thinking about myself and all this stuff. And it's been constantly being poured into the system. And then all of a sudden I say to myself, okay, now I just want to be peaceful. Well, it's not going to happen because I'm already in a bad state from all of this stuff that was happening before. So just like anyone who's born with issues, we have to kind of look at ourselves like we're coming in with a problem. I'm thinking that I am this or that, or this or that, and there's all different things that I think I am. And now I want to tell myself who I am eternally. This is where the peace is. This is what the whole point of this thing is. How do I experience peace in my life? Well, I have to be the peace. What other choice do I have? Think about it for a minute. What other choice do I have? If I say I'm going to be peaceful when, this person gets elected. I'm going to be peaceful when this person says this, or this one's nice to me, or this one gives me their money, or this I'm going to be peaceful when I am a certain weight on the scale. There's an unlimited amount of things that are out there that we have put our peace and our happiness and attached it to them. And I'm saying now that the way to experience peace in your life is to begin. Identifying yourself as peace, as a soul whose nature is peace. It's a first step. Just like the crack baby, they're not going, they're going to have problems, okay? In our minds, we have problems. That doesn't mean we can't get better. We can, but we have to start step one. Who am I? Does that mean all the rest of the stuff goes away? Does that mean I stop being a female? Does that mean I stop being a nurse? Does that mean I stop being an American? Does that mean I stop being whatever? No, all of that is still there. But those things aren't giving me peace. Maybe they will, but they're not consistently giving me peace. The only thing that can give me peace is me. Because that is already there. It's already my nature. We hear in psychology, the answers are within and things like that. I used to hear that stuff and I was like, it didn't make an impact because I was so caught up in external activity and external results. So just to finish up, peace is within. I believe that's in the Bible too, right? Peace is within. Within meaning in the self. Peace is the self. But I can't be like my normal consciousness. I have to change my consciousness in order to experience it. So I'll leave it there. I hope that that gave a little bit of food for thought of where peace is and how I can access it. You have to attach it to yourself and then tell yourself that this is who I am. And that's what we do in meditation. So please check out the links below. There's meditation practice, there's free online courses and the Brahma Kumaris website to find out a little bit more about the spiritual knowledge. All the classes and programs are free. And so we're just volunteering our time and sharing our experiences. So I'll leave it there. Remember, our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And until next time, take care. Um, uh,
