A Peaceful Self

When people change quickly and extensively enough, they no longer know who they are, how they feel or how they will react. Their history becomes obsolete. They have been born again as the real people they were meant to be, and the pretend selves become just a memory.

However, the real self is an unknown factor and the unfamiliar can be scary, especially with quick change. The key is to go at an acceptable pace or expect to be uncomfortable. Whichever is decided, the desire for change must be present by focusing on the benefits that inner peace will bring.

A peaceful self has great confidence, acceptance, understanding, self-love and joy as internal building blocks. This real self will then create a new life, one filled with success and happiness because when someone’s beliefs change, his or her world changes.

Skills For Peace

The methods I used on how to switch my thinking ranged from thousands of years old to ones having been developed in the last century and can be found in many resources (including my web site). They are general enough to apply for everyone and powerful enough for lasting change.

The secret to using these skills for obtaining happiness was to implement them with the most beneficial thoughts being a conscious choice. As children, integrating information unconsciously and its acceptance as truth is one of humanity’s wonderful innate survival mechanisms.

However, while these integrated beliefs can be very useful as children, they can now become an obstacle to happiness as adults. The key to overriding this misinformation was to frequently repeat the method along with consciously choosing to replace it with specific beneficial thoughts.

It was not difficult to implement, just being mindful of what I thought and why. What took a long time was gaining this information and recognizing the difference between opinion, truth and reality. Just understanding this difference can be a huge relief and bring a certain amount of peace. But when coupled with changing from distressing thoughts to useful ones, this is truly wondrous peace!

Making Peace With The Past

While attending group therapy, I discovered Dr. Burns’ book, Feeling Good, and ended my depression. However, I expected to feel happy over 50 percent of the time and not just in brief sporadic moments.

It still took me over ten more years to find the peace and happiness that permeates my life today. I gathered lots of information for trial and error experiments on myself and reality with a great deal of back and forth progress (or regression). During this emotional upheaval, I focused on learning to change my thinking, discovering truths and what thoughts made me miserable.

The beliefs that made me unhappy usually had a link to my childhood, were typically opinions masquerading as facts and conflicted with who I really am. For example, I knew information that was impossible to know, read people’s minds and communicated with animals. This was not in my parent’s reality and according to them it was defined as “crazy,” which led to my depression and self-hatred.

These unbeneficial viewpoints were not “reality” and could easily be changed when I decided on the most favorable replacement thoughts. These untrue childhood beliefs became one of my realizations for developing the self-empowering methods that I teach on obtaining inner peace.

Reinventing Myself

Most of my life I have spent searching for peace and happiness. This included reinventing myself many, many times with new looks, careers, friends, partners, locations, etc. Mostly I was repeating childhood beliefs and randomly exploring new ideas. Even though I was always working on the internal self, my focus was external. I wanted to see results because I didn't trust or know myself.

After ending my depression and still not happy, I read about a couple of people during WWII in concentration camps. One person described herself as being happy no matter what the circumstances, and the other person found meaning in the horror he witnessed and experienced. Then a realization hit me! Deep, lasting happiness comes from within and this understanding became my first important step towards inner peace.

I’ve since recognized that the path to happiness starts with knowing, accepting and loving myself. This self-love is not the vain, selfish, egotistical kind, but the type of love that provides compassion and understanding as in, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Once I discovered who I was, I then could see my talents and destiny. Life became simple, not perfect or without frustrations, but comprehensive with a wonderful feeling of great joy and inner peace.

New Year's Resolution

Not just at the beginning of the year, but every day I make a "New Year's" resolution to conscientiously choose my decisions. Of course, changes start internally and then we proceed with a plan, at least for a few months. Every year at the gym, I've noticed that January and February are the busiest months. Wanting to change isn't always enough, sometimes we have to understand the "whys" behind it. I exercise for fun, keep my immune system healthy and resolved my fear and anger around weight. However, I still don't want to be height/weight/proportional because I miss my Grandma. She died when I was eight and showed her love through great cooking. This unresolved loss became my food obsession. The experiences we had as children are huge influences in our lives today, whether we acknowledge them or not. Once we understand the "whys," we can utilize skills to change our thinking for conscientious decision making.