The Silent Healing of Inner Peace

“All of humanity's problems stem from
[our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaise Pascal

I'm sure we've all experienced what I call the 'waiting room syndrome'. The young man is disappointed by the sign 'SWITCH OFF YOUR PHONE'. Since Covid, there are have been no magazines in the rack – not even women's magazines. He doesn't know any of the other patients and no one's giving eye contact – not that he'd welcome it. He's read the noticeboards – twice – and is tapping his foot impatiently waiting for the screen on the wall to show his name. But might it be pleasant to be able sit in quiet contentment rather than in a state of constant agitation?

There is a simple way to find inner peace. Simple, yes, but not easy for most people. However, if we can be open enough and still enough and silent enough for long enough, something wonderful happens. It just takes patience and practice.

We used to teach our management trainees that it take three weeks to learn a new habit. That depends on individuals, but 21 days is probably a good average. Ideally that may mean doing a certain kind of activity deliberately every day, whether that's a physical task or a mental one. Repetition of any kind builds those habits into our autonomic nervous systems so we don't have to think much about the task any more. Our bodies know what to do and get on with it. We find ourselves performing a lot of daily routines in this way: driving a car, unloading a dishwasher, cleaning our teeth or taking tablets. So developing the habit of finding inner peace is no different from any of these activities. It's a matter of regularly bringing our minds and bodies into harmony. At first this will be for only short periods of time, but with practice, we find ourselves becoming more and more comfortable just doing nothing. That alone will boost our immune systems, considerably improving the levels of health they can achieve. If we're dealing with a serious illness, like cancer, the less day-to-day work we give our immune systems the more they can be put into dealing with our sick cells.

If we've never practised inner silence before, we'll need a long lead in. It's may not be helpful to throw ourselves into to a 20 or 30 minute meditation session. That's usually a road to disappointment. I've met a lot of people who say they've tried meditation and it didn't work for them. The reason is simple and it lies in that word 'tried'. Trying to do nothing is a contradiction in terms. We have to stop trying and allow our minds to come to rest. When we can do that, even for a minute or a few seconds, we need to pay attention to what we feel in our bodies as our minds pause from their incessant thinking.

The simplest and easiest way to begin practising inner silence is likely to be mindfulness. This practice has been said by psychiatrists to have made one of the most significant contributions to improved mental health over the last 20 years. It's something we can do at any time of the day, particularly when carrying out some routine task such as washing up or unloading the dishwasher. As I said before, this is a job that we do regularly so has become part of our autoimmune system. We don't have to think much about it. But once we can practice mindfully we can change a chore into a most pleasurable aspect of our day with considerable health benefits.

It is important to pay attention to the way we move our bodies: slowly and gracefully. We should also notice how every item we touch feels: texture, temperature, weight and shape. Take an attitude of loving kindness to everything. The warmth and soapiness of the water, the feel of the shape of the crockery, the hardness of the cutlery, the way we set items on the draining board. As we do this we enter into a different relationship with everything. These are not just objects we are handling. They are entities which consist of interrelated atoms all moving in harmony with each other. By paying attention to how they feel to us ,we can become aware of the harmony of movement that is going on within our bodies..

In that moment of harmonious attention – I call it 'Knowticing' – we will feel, albeit briefly at this stage, a sweet and gentle calm. This is unlikely to stay with us for long, but it is a start, and this sweet and gentle calm is something that we will want to return to, and eventually remain in, for a while. Later there may come a stage where we want to hold the inner silence for longer, but don't be tempted to do this. Allow this state of inner peace to remain for as long as it wants to and then let it go. Peace is not something that we can grasp for and hold on to. It is not our peace. It doesn't belong to us. It's an aspect of life and nature from which arises all that exists – and that includes each one of us. It is an essential source of wholeness and healing. We can eventually reach a stage when we can easily slip to and fro between the liminal boundaries of the noisy and busy temporal world and the silence of inner peace.