Bank Holiday Reflection Peace

Everyone wants to be happy and have that feeling of inner peace in their lives, but not everyone is able to achieve it. However, if you really want inner peace and true happiness, you can obtain it.

Peace is within us all. We are programmed to be peaceful, but we allow our mind to be distracted by thoughts, anger, frustration, wishing wanting all manner of thoughts enter our mind to distract us from this peace.

We then try to escape this disturbance of our mind by imagining that we can stop them by introducing man-made distractions social media, television, alcohol, recreational drugs - all these are fighting against our inner peace. Some of us even use work as a distraction creating undue stress.

Ask yourself the question do I practice peace?

Set the peace of your mind, as your highest goal in life and organise your time around it.

The simplest way to find peace is with your breath, the breath is always with us, but are we aware of it? Let go of the baggage of life that we accumulate and sit down for just 3 to 5 minutes and focus on your breathing. Thoughts will undoubtably come to distract you but just keep focusing on your breath, the inhale, the exhale through the nostrils.

When you have finished being aware of feeling a little calmer, this will hopefully encourage you to do it more often and for longer. It is only breathing! But it will now be breathing with awareness.

A simple breathing practice for peace:

This is a beloved breathing of the yogi, as it aims to bring calm and balance in its uniting of the right and left sides of the brain. Nadi Shodhana alternate nostril breathing as follows:

• Place the thumb and ring finger just above the nose flap, near the bony cartilage
• Sit down in a comfortable meditative pose, in a chair or seated against the wall so that the spine is straight
• Close the right nostril with the thumb and inhale through the left nostril
• Close the left nostril with the ring finger and exhale through the right nostril
• Inhale through the right nostril. Close the right nostril and exhale through the left nostril this is one complete round. Do this as many rounds as you wish (if at any time you feel dizzy, please stop take a break).

Here are some of the benefits:

• Improves our ability to focus the mind
• Supports our lungs and respiratory functions
• Restores balance in the left and right hemispheres of the brain
• Rejuvenates the nervous system
• Removes toxins
• Settles stress

Written by Daphne Bath and published on Wednesday 25th August 2021 at 09:44