World Peace isn't found in the world, it's found in you

​I've come to believe the lack of world peace is not because people are at war with one another, it's actually the consequence of so many people living a war within themselves.

The more conflict we have within, the more likely it is we'll develop a need to let that conflict out. And that outlet will likely be a someone else. Demonizing one another is the tool we often grab first as we blindly go to war with our demons within.

Until we're living in a family or community or state or country or world that becomes the battlefield for internal tensions revealing themselves in external wars. And the day comes when we get so far removed from the reality of the things that disturb our insides, that we're fully convinced it's the outside world that needs fixed and not an inside world that needs healed.

It's so backwards, isn't it? Destructive. Hurting one another for causes that are rarely the cause.

And it's sad. Because this peace we are all truly longing for is a peace within. It is a healing within. It is a peace that is far more available to us than we have come to know. A peace that is far more available to us than the peace we are scripting and chasing and trying to maintain in the worlds around us.

We are chasing a peace amongst people who have long lost sight of it. Who no longer believe in it.

Nearly all religions and spiritual practices are built on the idea of quieting ourselves - finding a peace that lives within us - as the foundation for creating the peace we long for outside of us.

Prayer and meditation and mindfulness and contemplation and reflection - all practices that offer the chance for inner peace - are often ignored because to many of us, those words themselves have come to mean something other than what they are - peace.

They are often ignored at the expense of us chasing our own methods of peace, that many times start to resemble war.

In many ways, it's the same reason that counseling and therapy and vulnerable connections with friends and family and pastors are ignored. The minute we start addressing the demons within us is the minute we begin to see the demons around us aren't our demons at all.

They aren't our fight. They aren't our path to peace....

We are our own path to peace. We are the navigators of the inside out process that long ago got redefined as the other way around.

But it CAN be turned around again. It can be made right. It starts with quieting the noise within that so often hides itself in the noise outside of us. Noise we yell louder and louder to quiet.

Only to have the noise go on. And on.

The peace you're searching for is right there. Inside you. It's a peace that is found in the quiet corners of your mind and your heart and your soul and in your body.

The world peace we are longing for will never be found fighting wars outside of us. It can only be found healing the wars within.

Peace starts with knowing that. Then turning around. And fighting for the right cause.

That cause is you.

Don't neglect it.