Inner War and Inner Peace

We all long for Peace, Happiness, Health and love. Even though there are conflicts around the world affecting peace in the outside world, our inner peace is affected our internal struggle. We all experience peace from time to time, but it does not last long and find ourself in internal struggles. What are the roots of these internal struggles? that affect our inner peace. Ancient Yoga scripture - Bagvat Gita says primary cause for our internal struggle is "the ignorance of who we are". Because of this ignorance and false identification to our body/mind sense complex, we feel limited and we cannot accept ourselves. This lack of acceptance can make us miserable.

In Bagvat Gita, many such causes for our internal struggles are explored. One of them is our likes and dislikes. We all have likes and dislikes in regards to people, things, situations etc... When we get what we want we become happy and when we don't get what we want we become unhappy. Most of us are driven by our likes and dislikes. In our life we perform many roles and have many responsibilities. Even though many of us are willing to take responsibility, yet we find ourselves in conflicting positions. For example, even though we may be willing to work hard, to take care of our families or people around us, we may find ourself in a well paying job, and yet we may not like the job or people whom we work with. We may be continuing in that job, to take care of our families, yet feel unhappy, dissatisfied and painful.

There is another situation, which we can all relate to is, sometimes when we get up in the morning, our body may not be ready to get up and go to work, and yet little voice in our head tells us "if you don't get up and go to work, you are going to be in trouble" and yet another voice in our head tells us "I don't like to go that boring job". So here again this internal struggle affects our peace. Like wise we can relate to many little internal conflicts in our mind, affects our peace. How can we resolve these internal conflicts? Even though we are free to make choices, sometimes, we may be constrained to make changes to our job or location?

Even though practice of Meditation, Yoga postures, Proper diet and Rest will help us to relax our body, calm our mind to gain certain degree of peace and happiness, these practices does not change our situations. So what else we can do to resolve these internal conflicts?. The most important prescription, yoga scriptures offer is to know basic things about life " Who am I?", "What do I want?", "Why Iam here?". Yoga scriptures, not only answers these questions, but also clearly goes on to say that all actions that we undertake in this lifetime is an opportunity to purify our mind, to realize who we are and to act in the service of the universe. When we develop this attitude of acting in service of others, we can purify our mind and we can slowly transform ourself to have lasting peace. Ultimately what this means is to let go of our likes and dislikes.

Recently, I read this book "7 habits of highly effective people by Steven Covey". Even though I have read this book several years ago, re-reading this book, helped me to find ways to resolve internal conflicts. In this book Steven has shared many habits that will be helpful to reduce internal conflicts and external conflicts. When we live based on our principles and vision of this life, we can proactively avoid internal conflicts. When we understand others and act cooperatively, we can not only avoid external conflicts arising from relationships, but we can accomplish our desires as well.

Even after years of practice of meditation, yoga and study of yoga scriptures, still I find myself having internal conflicts and struggles. Learning, Practicing, Growing and Evolving is the process of life. The hardest lesson Iam constantly reminded of, is to patient with myself, to be patient with the process of evolution. There is no short cut in life. 

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Venkatesh Anandasayanam is a Chopra Center Educator, trained and credentialed by Dr. Deepak Chopra M.D to teach Primordial Sound Meditation, Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga and Perfect Health programs. . He has been offering Yoga, Meditation and Ayurvedic classs and workshops for nearly 8 years in Peoria, IL, USA. He raises funds for a non-profit organization Aim for Seva - that supports childrens in rural areas of India (http://www.aimforseva.org/) and Chaitanya Educational Foundation (http://www.cefoundation.org/) - a non-profit school in Banglore, India that trains and supports mentally disabled children. www.doshaspace.com