Why inner peace comes before happiness
And Gandhi’s secret to getting both.
“For me, success is inner peace. That’s a good day for me.” - Denzel Washington
Inner peace. It’s something many of us aspire to, but seems too allusive and abstract to conceive tangibly. While inner peace might sound a little too ‘spiritual’ to some, it’s one of the most valued ideals of many of our greatest leaders.
“Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.”
We all tend to get affected by the small things sometimes. Whether it’s someone kicking the back of our chair on the bus, a negative comment from a colleague, friends or family disagreeing with our career aspirations, or hearing judgemental comments about what we study. It’s easy to be affected by the external forces we brush up against in our lives. To not be affected by those forces is to reach inner peace.
I feel as though I’ve personally gained a lot of inner peace regarding my career aspirations after much reflection on what I truly want. I can feel the difference between the comfort I now have, compared to the fear I previously had about what other people would think about my decisions. The difference is that when people now give me advice or insight, I can mull over their thought, dissect it, look at it, think about it, and decide whether I agree or disagree with their opinion based on my own personal beliefs and values.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle
When Aristotle was around, there was not nearly as much noise as there is now, and therefore the only requirement needed to consider a thought without accepting it was an educated mind. However, in our age of hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, there’s a new criteria behind the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it: a calm mind.
This ability to observe without accepting is a direct reflection of inner peace. When someone we look up to gives us advice, it’s easy to accept their word as if it’s the law and internalize their thought as if it’s our own. However, this kind of highly malleable mindset is a sign of inner chaos rather than inner peace. To ferociously seek counsel and automatically trust the opinions of the people we respect reflects a fear of trusting ourselves. One of the most difficult things to do is to block out noise, and follow our own intuition.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a time where everyone can share their input on our life choices, instead of thinking deeply about what we want for ourselves, we depend on others for their counsel. This dependence on others’ approval chips away at our independence and self-confidence, eventually leading to an inner instability which drives us to seek external validation for absolutely everything.
What should I get for lunch? Which university should I pick? What electives should I take? What career should I choose? What city should I work in? What time should I be waking up at?
“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking, you cannot find.”
– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
We have no clue what’s right for us anymore, because our inner voice is being drowned out by the noise of everyone else’s opinions. This cycle continues until we step away and actively cultivate inner trust. Like anything worth doing, cultivating trust in our intuition takes intention and practice, but it’s one of the best investments we can make in our happiness.
Gandhi’s formula for happiness
The idea of happiness gets thrown around a lot, so before addressing the connection between inner peace and happiness, I’ll leave a definition of it here which I believe embodies it best:
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” — Gandhi
How many people do you know who act almost entirely in harmony with what they say? Probably not that many. And beyond that, we don’t even know how many people say what they really think!
Do you? Do you act in harmony with what you say and think?
It’s easy to complain about our problems, while not making any conscious effort to change our circumstances. It’s easy to have ideas and not act on them. Everyone has ideas — ideas are cheap. What’s rare is people pursuing their ideas full force and acting in harmony with what they believe in. That takes courage, confidence, and more than anything — it takes inner peace.
Creating life on your own terms starts by taking time to block out the noise, opinions, advice and really listen to what is inside you.
How to gain Inner peace: Writing
The best (and only way, in my opinion) to obtain a clear image of what you’re thinking is through writing. Turn off your computer’s wifi. Turn off your phone. Pick a favourite cafe, camp out in your room for a little while or go somewhere where you won’t be disturbed and write what’s on your mind. Write about the questions you tend to ask others like:
What career should I pick? What should I be spending my time on?
Write about the things which weigh on you. Is it your career path? Body image? Lack of routine? Relationships? Goals? Write about it. When you have a clear image of your thoughts, you have a gauge to compare everyone else’s opinions to. This allows you to calmly and strategically decide which advice is valuable to you.
“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”
– Bruce Lee
When you don’t know what you think, it feels like everyone else knows more than you— so you trust them instead of looking inwards. This prevents you from absorbing what is useful, discarding what is not, and makes it impossible to add anything that is uniquely your own. You simply end up absorbing everything. And when you’re absorbing everything from many different sources, you end up so confused and overwhelmed, you become even less certain of the “right” answer than you were before you sought out counsel!
Jordan Peterson prescribes writing to everyone. He says:
“The best thing you can do is teach people how to write, because there is no difference between writing and thinking.”
He goes on to explain why writing is so important, and how writing can make you “deadly” if you do it regularly enough:
“What blows me a way about universities is that no one ever tells students why they need to write something! They just say:
Ok, you have to write the assignment.
Well, why are you writing?
Because you need the grade.
It’s like — NO! You need to learn to think. Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you under-take — and those could be battles for good things! If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So, that’s why you learn how to write. And I can’t believe people aren’t just told that. It’s the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with.”
Whether you agree with Jordan Peterson’s ideas or not, one thing we can all agree on is that he believes in what he says. The man is one of the most confident and effective speakers when it comes to expressing what he is thinking. And that’s because he writes. He takes the time to distill his thoughts so carefully that external counsel and efforts to sway him are almost entirely futile unless they have provided a more logical and sound argument than he believes he has. He trusts himself and his own opinion because he develops his opinions through deep thought and independent reflection. Again, the important point here is not the content of his ideas, but the confidence with which he expresses them. Consider the magnitude of the messages we could put into the world if we focused on refining our thoughts as ruthlessly as Jordan Peterson has refined his.
Writing breeds confidence, clarity and inner peace. And it is the first step to true happiness. Because when you write what you think, you know what you think. And when you know what you think, you can speak in alignment with your beliefs. And then finally, you can translate those thoughts and words into actions.
And when your thoughts + words + actions are all in harmony → you get happiness.
Gandhi says so, and if there’s any advice worth taking on how to achieve happiness and inner peace — it’s Gandhi’s.
We all want to live a life cultivated from our thoughts and perspective, not from ideas we have adopted from others without realizing it.
A palliative care nurse who spent 20 years taking care of people as they were dying asked her patients what their biggest regrets were in life. Do you know what was the most common regret people had as they were about to die?
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
– Top Five Regrets of the Dying, The Guardian
To be happy, you need to make decisions as the most authentic version of yourself.
Write what you think. Speak what you write. Act what you speak. Cultivate inner peace. Find happiness on the other end.
“This above all: To thine own self, be true.”
– Shakespeare
True fulfillment can only come from decisions and actions which are true to you. This is probably why not living a life true to oneself is the #1 biggest regret people have when they’re about to die. No mater how good the advice is, if it’s not aligned with your thoughts, beliefs, intuition and values, then it won’t give you the satisfaction and peace you’re trying to get from it.
“If you find and discover your authentic self, it has the biggest payoff of all. There is nothing more satisfying than being loved for who you are and nothing more painful than being loved for who you’re not, but are pretending to be.” – Neil Pasricha, The Happiness Equation
Decisions made by us and no one else often lead to the best outcomes. So ditch the pros and cons lists, stop looking online for answers, scrap the advice and insight you’ve gotten on whatever is weighing on you, and think for yourself:
What do you want?
Make choices from a place of inner peace, and you’ll find true happiness.