the peace paradox

Why do we do the things that we do?

What are we reaching for?

In the end, we do it all for a feeling.

We all say we want to be happy and at peace, but in many cases, longing itself reinforces the absence of what we seek. This is what I call the peace paradox. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you loose it.

The more tightly you try to control life, the more chaotic it feels. When you look for peace, you identify with a version of yourself who lacks it.

The nature of emotion is intangible. It can’t be easily grasped, nor can we ever truly know how others experience it. If emotion could be understood with the same precision and mathematical logic as the material sciences, we might be able to formulate happiness, peace, or euphoria like a chemical equation. But it’s not like that. In this sense, I see wellbeing as more of a philosophical matter than a scientific one. This is one aspect that I believe will become more apparent in clinical settings as time goes on.

The physical things we do to achieve happiness and peace don’t always bring us closer to them. The very nature of emotion is metaphysical. Even the physical acts or possessions that we believe affect our happiness are less about their material properties and more about what they symbolize to us. What is the difference between spending your time in a luxury shop versus in your own home with those items in your possession?

Physically, really not much. What’s changed is your mental connection to what you believe is in your possession. Only your perspective has changed.

Stuff, on its own, does nothing for our mental chemistry; it’s the meaning we project onto it that matters. I wouldn’t tell you to renounce all earthly pleasures and meditate on the concept of happiness for eternity, nor would I tell you to abandon all restraint and take up heroin. But I do believe that understanding this paradox gives us a much deeper insight into how we approach our own happiness.

Whatever you are trying to feel — peace, joy, abundance, happiness — it can’t be chased; it can only be cultivated. The equally paradoxical fact of the matter is that once it is cultivated, you become more in reach of the physical outcomes you once believed would give you the feeling you were reaching for in the first place.

For example, if you have a vision for yourself, a life in which you change your habits, live cleaner, become more compassionate, and look after your health more, you might have an attachment to these ideas of physical change because you believe you will be happier for it. But when you become happy first, it’s easier to pick up those habits because you already associate them with your happiness.

Like I discussed in my blog “The Lenses of Perception,” depending on how we feel, we literally connect to some things more deeply while other things become white noise. When we are in a low emotional state, it’s more difficult to connect to the things we know are good for us and will make us happier in the long run, because we become blind to the possibility. It becomes white noise. The acts we logically know will do us good become an emotional act of walking in the dark, faith.

Now, you may think that I’ve given you the impossible task of “just being happy” to attract what you thought you wanted to be happy in the first place. But might I propose a new way of being?

Learn to sit with yourself. Face all of the things you think you suffer for in abstinence, and give yourself permission to simply be without giving yourself a reason to look beyond yourself.

I have found that meditation helps me to cultivate emotional states. The more I focus on the concept of a feeling, the closer that feeling comes. And the more you practice this in meditation, the more you physically open up those neural pathways that help those feelings show up for you day to day. It’s a practice that takes consistency, faith, and time to go deeply into, but I can, hand on heart, say it’s the most directly transformational practice I have ever taken up.

We often forget that the brain is a muscle which our mind binds itself to, and like physical muscles that need to be exercised to strengthen, so do our beliefs and emotions.

It all sounds very magical. It is woo-woo nonsense to its core. It transcends our physical laws of logic. But what laws of logic do the nature of emotion and consciousness use? This is why I believe that wellbeing is more of a philosophical matter that should be dealt with more open-mindedly.

If I am lost for meaning and don’t know what to believe, never insult me with an analytical mind in a white coat that observes my existential angst to prescribe me tasks or medication to which I can’t see the meaning. Don’t drug me into a happy dissociation from what I believe in.

Tell me to sit with myself, to work through what I believe, to understand how I feel about what I believe, and show me to wise women and philosophical gurus when I am low.

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