Choosing Peace

"First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others."
Thomas A Kempis

Why is that although we, the vast majority of the citizens of the world, desire to live in peace …in our hearts, in our relationships and in our global communities,… that peace continues to elude us?
It eludes us because for many of us after surviving the mundane challenges of our daily day we have little reserves left to allocate towards creating peace. In many incidents, the resources we do have, our tools and weapons are limited to benign chatter…“Kitchen Bitchen” with the focus on those in power and the frustration borne of our presumed inability to affect any change, either personally or globally.
It is here where we fall miserably short, for the greatest power…the power to bring about a paradigm shift is in each of us. BRING PEACE NOT PAIN is dedicated to helping each of us to establish/reestablish peace and to connect and know our personal power.
To engage this power for our quest for peace…personal, interpersonal and global peace, we must alter our current way of thinking and subscribe to the following two statements:
1) We are all personally and collectively responsible for creating peace.
2) We all have the ability to create peace, in our hearts, in our relationships and globally.
If it is global peace we strive for…the end of injustices the world over, we must begin the campaign by first conquering the demons in our own hearts and minds and embracing our own PEACE. Accomplished by?.. How?….We must acknowledge and believe that we are responsible for creating or restoring our own inner peace., no longer can we alleviate our guilt over our own inactions by placing the burden of healing on others.
We must look with clarity and love at our inner workings, while knowing that we alone are responsible for our inner peace as we alone posses the power that dictates our reactions to all exterior forces that challenge and threaten us. We must decide where we need to shore up or boundaries and where to open the gates of our hearts and allow love to freely flow.
We must practice forgiveness, forgiveness with not only those who have harmed us but ourselves as well…many times it is personal forgiveness that is the hardest to grant.

With a heart freed by understanding and forgiveness, self-governed by clarity and love we will know peace, from here we must allow conscious thought and decision-making to dictate our actions towards ourselves and others.
Conscious thought and decision-making, that is paramount to healthy interpersonal relationships as well. To BRING Peace not Pain is a choice we make with every interaction we have, unfortunately all too often it seems as we have forgotten and react with instinct. We must remember that WE have control over how we will CHOOSE to respond in any situation…we have to retrain our brains to give pause and evaluate the current circumstance prior to reacting. What are our desired outcomes? Have our previous behaviors achieved them? What is different this time? How will responding with Love and compassion affect the result? How will responding with fear based actions? These are questions we need to ask ourselves and continue to ask ourselves as we interact with others. It is here in this state of awareness and conscious actions that we will see our relationships evolve.
When our hearts are at peace and our relationships are governed by mutual respect, honesty and love we must individually and collectively foster these same guiding principals in our pursuit of global peace. We must seize every opportunity we have to bring peace and love into the lives of others...We must see each other as we are…we must appreciate our similarities and celebrate our difference…. But beyond our individual characteristic…we must believe, we must know …that we are not only all equal and deserving of the same rights and responsibilities but even more importantly… much more importantly that we are one...one body of life, one race...one interconnected whole. Pain and injustice against one, is pain and injustice to all man and the suffering felt by one is shared by all. We must strive to cure each part to be whole, we must stop using and (allowing to be use) fear and intimidation to motivate the actions of others.
As daunting as it may be…it is thru these actions and beliefs that one by one ..community by community we will begin an accelerating and rippling effect on society at large.