You Don't Need to Fix Yourself to Feel Peace

You do not need to fix yourself to feel peace. You will feel peace when you no longer need to fix yourself.

That sentence took me years to understand, and even longer to live. For most of my life, peace was always one achievement away. Once I realized enlightenment. Once the business worked. Once I looked the way I wanted, exercised enough, kept the house clean, had the relationship right. Peace was the reward at the end of a very long list of fixes.

The jammed calendar

The problem with wanting that much is what the mind does with it. When you want a lot of things, the mind says: then I need this, and this, and that. And before you know it, your calendar is so full and your inner world so loaded with requirements that you become stiff. You cannot move. You are so overwhelmed by everything you are supposed to be doing and becoming that you barely function.

That was me for a long time. And it did not work. After awakening, I started to see clearly that this approach was never going to deliver what I thought it would.

Desire is not the problem

Here is the key distinction, and it is subtle but it changes everything.

The answer is not to have no desire. Desire is natural. Wanting to improve your situation, wanting good things, having preferences, that is all part of being alive. Everyone prefers some things over others. There is nothing spiritual about pretending you want nothing.

One of my teachers put it precisely: desire is not the problem. Insistence on desire is the problem.

Peace comes when you allow a desire to be there, and you move toward it, but without insisting on its realization. You let the flow take you there rather than gripping the outcome, making it important, turning it into a big deal. The moment you insist, you create resistance, and the resistance is where peace disappears.

Why fixing yourself does not work

There is a common belief that you need to fix yourself in order to become peaceful. Improve yourself enough, and then you will finally be at rest. But this has it exactly backwards.

Our natural state is not the small, anxious, striving self. Our natural nature is already vast, already at ease. That ease is not something you build through self-improvement. It is what remains when the layers of insistence and self-rejection fall away.

The mind cannot get you there, because the mind only has access to memory. It can receive some inspiration, but mostly it works from the past. So it tells you: you need to go this way, you need to do that, you need to fix this. And it builds a rigid plan, a fixed calendar, to match. But if you let go of the need to achieve, you find that the things you want can actually flow toward you, and you can move toward them, without the grip.

Ambitious and peaceful at the same time

People assume that letting go of insistence means letting go of ambition. It does not.

I am genuinely ambitious. But I am also very peaceful, because I no longer insist on my ambition. I do not insist on reaching a certain metric. I do not insist on a particular timeline. I do not insist on anything. So I can move fully toward what I want while flowing with whatever actually happens.

This is what it means to find your natural okayness, and to let that okayness include your desires. You become okay with whatever happens, okay with being here, and from that place you can still move, still build, still create. But you are doing it from ease rather than from lack. From wholeness rather than from a sense that you are not enough yet.

The practice

This is something you develop through meditation, through contemplation, through repeatedly noticing that this, here, right now, is already okay. And then whatever arises, including tendencies you do not like or things you genuinely want to change, can be there while you remain at peace.

You can move toward what you want without needing to change what you already are, which is already peaceful underneath the noise.

Trying to fix yourself in order to be peaceful is the long way around, and it does not end. Stop needing to fix yourself, and you arrive at natural joy, natural contentment, natural peace. And from that place, if you feel called to learn something, build something, heal something, you can. But it comes from ease and joy rather than from lack. You participate fully in life, without taking it so seriously that it crushes you.

In the world, but not of it.

If you want to explore this in your own life, you can book a free call with me here: https://calendly.com/keesblok/gratis-kennismaking?month=2021-03