Navigating Life with Ease – What Peace Means from a 3 Principles Perspective

Welcome. This podcast is a series of candid conversations exploring the human experience from a completely new perspective. In it, we will be diving deeply into the meaning of commonly used words and pointing you away from that old, stressful way of looking at life and towards a new paradigm. This will help you find a sense of calm, cultivate meaningful relationships, and create harmony in every aspect of your life. Here is Navigating Life With Ease with Michaela Ellis and Claire Downer.

Come on, Claire.

Whereas we should decide before someone who's gonna say hello. I don't know why we don't. We should say. It's the person whose word it is should say hello first or something like that.

Sure.

Every time we're like, hello, how are you?

Hello, good, how are you?

Yeah, good, good. Yeah. Yes. Sun's shining again here. We've had a, we've had some rain this week. It's unfamiliar in the uk Currently, it's rain, so Ross needs it, as they say. So, anyway, I've got a word. It's a nice word, actually. We just talk about peace.

Even just hearing you say the word, I felt my shoulders kind of like drop. Yeah, Interesting, because I just, I just did a short on my YouTube channel, like 15, 20 minutes ago, and in writing, a little description of it, I, I, I, I, I spoke about coming back to peace. And then I changed it and I said, coming back to yourself, to being yourself, AKA peace. Well, being you. Has really what, you know, what gives us that sense of peace, that feeling of peace, is when we're just, we're not feeling threatened, we are not defensive, we're not on guard. Protecting, attacking, judge, like there's nothing going on. We're just in this place of, okay, what comes to mind is war. And if there's not peace, there's some kind of either defensiveness or attack. And I mean, there's always a, in that. There's, there's always, I'm going to call it a give and take. It's like attack and defend. Attack and defend. There's that going on. There's no peace there. And when, when there's not that, the sense of having to protect yourself, whether it's, you know, attacking or judging or whatever, or trying to be something different than you are. Yeah, there's, there's no peace there. And when you just let all that go and go before the thought of it, before the thought of anything, that's what's left. That's presence, that's, that's us before our thinking mind, our personal mind, chimes in. That's what's first coming up about that, about peace. I like to even say the word. How about you? What do you see?

Yeah, I love what you said about his. It's before. It's before the thought. It's underneath. Sometimes it feels like our minds can get so busy and noisy and frantic. Sometimes I think in life that we miss that it's there all the time. And it can become. But it can. So it can become something we're seeking. You know, we're both mothers of children who are a little bit older now, so they're. They don't. We don't seem to lose our peace than that. There is a book called. Oh, it's something about a little bit of peace and it's. It's by Jill Murphy, I think. And it's about this mummy elephant who's trying desperately. She gets in the bath with a cup of tea and a cake and she's like ah. And then before she knows it, somebody wants to. To listen to them read or. And then somebody wants to get in the bath. Wants to get in the bath. But then actually finds that actually where there's not the resistance. Really she's okay. She loves her children. She can be at peace. Even though she'd gone off, she'd squirreled off to the bath to find the peace. I'll have to find. I'll have to find the book. It's a cute little story, but I think that. That even that just some kids story that has nothing to do with this conversation that we're having really points to how maybe peace is only ever lost to us. Not lost to us because it never goes away, but unseen by us when we're in resistance to what is because. Because you say being at peace with something, don't you? Like you hear about that when people know they're going to leave their body, you know they're going to leave the mortal coil as it was that they. They say that people say that they can be at peace with it, you know, their own passing. No. And maybe that's possible for everything to be at peace. Even if all your children get in the bath with you when you go go your candles lit and a piece of cake and then the kids all turn up. I mean I'm not sure what my kids are turning up in the bath bearing in mind they're 23 and 25. But you know, when they were little they did. Did you? So you couldn't. You couldn't even go to the lo. Your own, could you? You Remember when they were little, you even. Like, you couldn't even go to the. I used to go to the toilet in the hope that I could have five minutes and they would turn. Honey, you know, back in the day. Yeah. Maybe there's just no maybe that piece is available no matter what's going on. Because maybe resistance is the only thing that takes it away, really wanting something to be something it isn't. Because there's a difference, isn't there, between stuff happening and our suffering of the story that seems to come from the stuff happening, the suffering is different to the stuff that's happening. And that peace. Peace is available, therefore, all the time. And. And even within our own internal. I don't know, it's like a. It's like a washing machine, isn't it, in there? Sometimes, you know, that our. Even though our. Even in our. Into our own internal, perhaps emotions that we don't want to have, thoughts we don't want to have. I was chatting to a young woman client of mine earlier, and she's just talking about this niggly thought that keeps coming up. And I kind of said, well, what if it was okay? If that thought was there and you just. You just didn't have to take it too seriously or you don't have to do anything about it, you'd have to make it go away. Can you still move forward and just realize that that's just a habitual, niggly little thought that's. It's probably been there forever, really. And the context we were talking about is one of those contests where probably it's a thought that a lot of people have. It's not out of the ordinary kind of thing. And maybe we can just be at peace with all of that, even our internal experience. Maybe that's true. Peace is to be upset and be at peace with that. Be angry and be at peace with that. Be upset about something, be at peace. Now, what are. It is we can. We can be anxious, but still be at peace with being anxious. Maybe that's freedom, that even inside us doesn't need to change for us to be okay. When. When I used to title myself the Queen of Calm, one of the reasons I stopped doing that was that I kind of thought I'd set people up on a seeking of calm thing. Seeking of peace, seeking of calm. Whereas for me, it really meant that I could, you know, the capacity to be calm or be peaceful. Even when life's happening, we're happening, everything's happening, to know it's okay. And I think the key piece of that for me is often self compassion. Maybe that's really connected to peace. Yeah. You nodded then when I said self compassion connected to peace.

Yes. Yeah. This going back to the, you know, this is timely. You know, there is no synchronicity. There is no, you know, this is. This is how we work in the world. We're all connected and things happen. So the title of the short was Go gentle on yourself.

Oh. Because.

It. It happens. It happens that we get caught up in things. And. Yes, I see that. The things that we get caught up in.

It's.

You know, when you. When. When I look at. We either have peace. I'm just using this as an. As a point of reference. If we look at peace and then we. We just imagine that resistance is the opposite. It's like, no, no, no, no, not.

Yeah.

Kind of the. It's like what takes away our peace. And it's like. It's a rejection of something that is. And a wanting for something different. Now, if we just allowed that to be, oh, I don't want peas tonight. I'm gonna have carrots instead. And then go do that. But we like peas. Not peas again. Oh, my gosh. Peas. Who even created peas? I don't like Pete. Like, what a waste of our.

I smell bad. It's.

So you said it about just like, accepting what is. It's like being aware of what is. I keep having this image for the last. Well, actually quite a while, but especially the last couple weeks. Few weeks. This image of a map. I've been doing a lot of hiking, and it's really. It brings peace to my body. When I'm on a trail that I've never traversed before, and then I come upon a map that tells me, you are here. It's like, right, yeah, well, we have that in us all the time. We just are so busy trying to find the markers outside and, you know, looking at all these things, and we just. If we just, like, not try and figure it out and just let ourselves settle in to where we are, we know what's next. We know the direction to go. We know. And there is a sense of peace and rest there. And. And isn't that where we tend to make our best decisions? Like, ideas come up. The idea might come up to, like, go, just do nothing, just hang out here, or maybe it will be to do something. But when the. When. When the. The inspiration or the bubbling up is the. The direction the pointing is coming from that peaceful space that who we are really are space, It. The Peace sort of gets expressed into our life where instead of fighting with something, we're going along with something that there's no resistance in that if we're following that or going with that. Yeah.

It matches up with the physical world in a way, doesn't it? That, you know, when there's friction that creates, you know, discomfort. Doesn't it? It's. It's. You know, the life isn't a straight line, but we often would like it to be savers like this. And if life's this wiggly, scratchy, pointy line and it's doing all sorts of zigzags and curves, and then we're going. No, but I want you to be straight away that the butting up of one against the other is. Is going to cause a lot of suffering. You know, that's where we're going to feel. We're not going to be in the flow. Whereas if we. If we, you know, go with it as it moves and zigzags and whatever it does, then life's going to feel a little bit nicer, say the very least. And I wonder what has us not do that. That's just. Just what. What has us resist so much of our experience? I mean, my. My fate. One of my. I think it is my favorite Sydney Banks quote is the one about if the only thing that people learned was not to be afraid of their experience. That alone would change the world. And that, you know, being at peace with our experience, being okay with it just as it is, that is where that would change the world, wouldn't it, if. If people. If we were more at peace. And when I say people, I'm clearly including myself too much of the time. I'm not okay with elements of my experience. I'm not depending on holy than thou, and I'm never, never upset with other people or circumstances or other people or other people or mostly other people. Circumstances aren't really my. I'm not really mostly bothered about those. It's mostly other people. And what's wrong with them? Why don't they live their life Claire's way? Because clearly that's the right way to live your life, folks. Goodness, I do get myself into a bit of a T about that. Yeah. So, yeah. Why do we. Well, why do we. Is because we've learned that. Well, I learned. I think, that being right was very important when I was young. Bless my mother, but I did. And so, yeah, there's resistance just around wanting everybody to do it the way I do it. But when we. Yeah. And we feel that, don't we, in our bodies. That resistance, that not going with the flow, not moving with it. If that's all we're ever feeling really. You know, we talk about in this conversation. We often say, you know, it's thought in the moment that you're feeling. But what thoughts are there other than thoughts of resistance that feel horrible? You know the, they're all anger. Well that, that's a resistance to somebody behaving in a way we don't think they should behave in. You know, what's, what's anxiety? Well, that's fear based around ideas that we've got about how we need life to in the future to be a certain way and afraid that it isn't going to be that way. Like it's all resistance, isn't it? Really all those. And it's back to that one thing rubbing up against reality. Rubbing up against thought, really. It's reality. Well, reality is what it is just is, isn't it? You can't do anything about that. Can obviously take actions in the world. But there's an awful lot of our reality where we have resistance is the stuff we can't do anything about. Yeah. And then there's us just rubbing up against reality and feeling that and therefore not feeling peaceful.

And I think it's really important to remember that the reality that we're experiencing is of our own creation. It's coming from our own mind. And then we experience our own creation through our own thought filtered mind. So it's this crazy mind blowing like show going on. When you start to get. It's like what I created this and now I'm experiencing that. Like I didn't create it because it looks like I didn't. And then you realize that you did. So even what we're creating with our own thinking, it's really that, that we're resisting. We're really resisting our own creation. We're not resisting what really like the truth of what's ex. What's wanting to express through us what is expressing. But when we're not allowing that pure form of creation to come in and we're like making it all up with our own little mind, then yeah, we're, we're really only in resistance to ourselves.

Yeah. And every day. I do want the listeners to realize that yeah, we're, we're, we're both human and we both go there on a regular basis resisting our own thought created reality that we. Yeah. All the time. Indeed all the time.

Yes.

Yeah. We're not going to Pretend to be superhuman. We have not transcended the human experience. I don't want to, actually. Life would be really boring if you did that.

All right, what would we. We'd all just be sitting around like Cheech and Chong, only not high. Just high on something different because there's.

Like, nothing going on.

Being entertained, being all peaceful. Actually, that doesn't.

That.

That sounds kind of good, but. And then it's like, okay, now what's next? Because we're made for creating something more.

Yeah, it's so true, because I was listening to George Cows Parkers, and he was talking about sort of low level happiness and deep happiness. And actually the deep happiness comes from challenge. It comes from overcoming things. And, you know, even if it's just I can't get my flippy website to do this thing I wanted to do. Even those everyday challenges that we come up against and. And, you know, making us ourselves do those things that are hard, you know, in our businesses or in our life or whatever, we're having those difficult conversations. Actually, that's what brings us the deepest level of joy and probably peace as well. Is that kind of satisfaction of. Yeah, I. I've. I've moved through something that was difficult today. You know, the. The idea that people sitting on a beach doing nothing all day, drinking cocktails, are actually happy, I think is questionable, I would say. Not on a deeper level also. Well, that didn't go where I thought it would go, so that was interesting.

That was. That was great fun. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah. See you next time.

You bet.

Ciao. Bye.

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