Feeling Your Emotions- Peace

This is the next instalment in Feeling Your Emotions series. I started it back in 2017. The intention was to look at different emotions (such as anger, sadness and depression, fear and anxiety, peace and love) and get in touch with them, to help heal and move forward. You can read the introduction here: https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2017/11/feeling-your-emotions-introduction.html

 Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, so if you're having mental/physical issues please seek medical help in addition to reading this. :)

 

I wrote a recap of all the posts so far in 2022: https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2022/09/feeling-your-emotions-recap.html

It's now been over 2 years since I wrote that. (And 8 years ago this month since I started the whole series!) After the recap post I planned to write more in the next few months, but didn't in the end. I've been feeling very up and down and struggling at times, and haven't felt very inspired to blog much here in general. (I've been more active on my entertainment blog Star Sparkle Blog and my seasonal living blog The Seasonal Life because I don't write about as "deep" subjects on there.) However, in recent months I've felt like picking the FYE series up again. 

As I mentioned in the recap, I started with the so-called "negative" emotions, intending to work my way up to more "positive" ones. I had planned to cover love or peace next but didn't feel in a space to write about them. When I'd written the last post, I intended that the next one in the series would be peace. So here it is, although later than planned! :)

 

What is peace?

Peace is defined as "freedom from disturbance; tranquility" and "a state or period in which there is no war or war has ended" (Oxford English dictionary), as well as "a state of tranquility or quiet" (Merriam Webster) and "the state of not being interrupted or annoyed by worry, problems, noise, or unwanted actions" (Cambridge Dictionary). 

Merriam Webster offers further definitions. Those of us who don't live in warzones or unstable countries (which I'm very grateful for) are often more concerned with 2. "freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions". 

Note: This post is talking more about peace in the context of living in a relatively stable country and having some control over your day to day living. I'm not able to cover it in the other definition of living among war, civil unrest etc. For those currently going through that, I'm thinking of you. 

Here is a helpful article about how feeling peaceful shows up both physically and mentally: https://divethru.com/feeling-peaceful-a-guide-to-your-emotions/

Why might not we feel peace? 

Some reasons why we might not feel peace/peaceful are we're going a difficult time (illness, relationship problems, discrimnation, mental health issues etc.), the state of the world (or our country, government) is disturbing us, we're in a living situation that makes us feel unsafe or we're having money or work problems. There's really a lot of reasons.

How to feel more peace(ful)

Peace is an emotion that's quite hard for me to connect with because I feel like I'm in an almost constant state of anxiety, due to having anxiety in the sense of a mental health condition (particularly health anxiety) and also depression and OCD. 

As mentioned above, events in the outer world can make us feel unsafe and we can also find it hard to feel safe and experience peace if we are a "minority"/different to those around us. The media doesn't help with this, constantly focusing on negativity. It can be hard to find peace in a world that often feels chaotic, as Karen Ashley ((Renzze) writes in this post: http://renzze.com/peace-in-a-chaotic-world/

I'm not sure if it's possible to feel at peace all the time because part of being human is feeling different emotions (hence this series!), and we all go through up and downs. But feeling peaceful more often seems like a reasonable goal.

In 2021 I signed up for an email course called Inner Peace by Aedamar Kirrane. Her website isn't available anymore but the series shared 5 steps to prepare for making the shift to living from a state of inner peace, including "1. Inner Peace is a state of being." and "2. Inner peace is something we choose." I won't write them all here because of copyright (maybe there will be another course in the future) but Aedamar also talked about cultivating peace as a practice.

Here are some links about feeling peaceful:

5 Subtle Secrets to Finding Peace (Tess Whitehurst): https://tesswhitehurst.com/5-subtle-secrets-to-finding-peace/

Essential Ways to Keep Your Sense of Peace: https://uncustomary.org/some-essential-ways-to-keep-your-sense-of-peace/

How to Gain Inner Peace as an Empath (for those who identify as an empath): https://www.adventuringwithposeidon.com/blog/how-to-gain-inner-peace-as-an-empath-life-lessons

How to Protect Your Peace (video from Aileen of Lavendaire): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZXzhok1548

How to Achieve Inner Peace (another Lavendaire video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-i4a0tc1Yc 

6 steps for finding peace of mind: https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to-achieve-peace-of-mind

 

And if you're in the US and feeling distress over the recent election results, here's a post from Dominee of Self-Love Rainbow about post-election self-care: https://www.selfloverainbow.com/post-election-self-care/

 

I hope you found this post helpful. :) What do you do to help yourself feel more peaceful? If you're having a hard time right now, I hope that things get better soon.

I intend to continue this series but I'm not sure yet what the next post will be about. I did mention in the recap that I may take a look at feeling empty or jealous. When I wrote the 2nd part of Feeling Your Emotions- Happiness in 2020, I said that I would do another post on happiness. I didn't write another one in this series but I did do a post about feeling more positive, which you can see here: https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2020/11/feeling-more-positive.html

 

Find the rest of the posts in the FYE series to date in the Recap post: https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2022/09/feeling-your-emotions-recap.html

In addition to this series, I've also written several "stand alone" posts looking at other feeling states, such as feeling like a "loser", feeling lonely etc. I decided to have them as separate posts because they aren't core/basic emotions. (Maybe a future post about feeling empty would be one of those, rather than part of FYE.) The most recent is Feeling Powerless, which you can read here (plus find links to the other similar posts): https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2024/05/feeling-powerless.html

Photo: Tesco Holmbush, Shoreham-by-sea. Moonsparkle 2024.