You don’t need to meditate on a mountaintop or break the bank for a beach yoga retreat in order to find inner peace. Carving out time to relax is wonderful, but it’s amid the frantic pace of everyday life when we need serenity the most: After all, you don’t live in a yoga retreat, you live in the real world. That moment when you’re stuck in the pharmacy line and the contents of your bag spill on the floor just as your phone starts ringing? That’s when you need to find inner peace, right as you’re suppressing the urge to unleash a stream of four-letter words.
“I think often people look for circumstances to help achieve a sense of inner peace,” says Ashley Davis Bush, psychotherapist and author of The Little Book of Inner Peace: Simple Practices for Less Angst, More Calm. “In fact, this calm, compassionate, deep awareness is actually within each person. It’s as if we have a deep reservoir of peacefulness and serenity inside us. What we have to learn to do is tap into it.”
Here, Davis shares 5 of her techniques, or what she likes to call “micro-practices,” for accessing your inner calm—even if it’s been in hiding for awhile.
Peace of mind doesn’t require peace and quiet.
Have you ever been scuba diving, or even just watched a good deep-sea documentary? The ocean’s tide brings the drama when it crashes against the shore, but venture a few meters down and you’ll find a tranquil world of creatures moving at their own pace, wholly unfazed by the action up above.
