Finding Inner Peace -- Confronting your Beliefs can set you FreeFinding inner peace—it’s a concept that some people search for consciously and endlessly. Others think about it wistfully but may not think that it is really possible to find inner peace.
This describes my generation of baby boomers. Most of us gave up the idealism of the 1960’s and decided around 1975 that we had to join the rat race if we were going to have any kind of standard of living at all. And that meant pressure and beating ourselves up to climb the corporate ladder--no time for finding inner peace. The top spots were scarcer then than now, because the market cap of companies was considerably smaller and with that came fewer management and executive-level spots with a huge pool of candidates. Only the strong survived and even some of them were thrown overboard. I had been doing well with a large private company and was promoted and transferred to a field position from our home in Kansas City to Southern California in 1984. My husband left his lucrative management level position with the other big company in town and followed me to San Diego. We were both intent on finding inner peace and we thought that some mild weather might contribute to that. What we found in San Diego was both wonderful and horrible. The wonderful part was San Diego itself. It is the city with the mildest weather in the nation, incredible beach and mountain scenery and, if that isn’t enough, each little community has its own signature beauty—flower fields in Carlsbad and Encinitas, eucalyptus trees in Scripps Ranch and each beach community down the coast was more breath-taking than the next. And I loved my field position. It had the freedom I craved along with selling a product that I loved. The horrible part was about my poor husband’s employment. We didn’t know it at the time, but there was only one corporate headquarters in San Diego (that is not true today) and his specialty was one that only large companies required. The economy was also in the dumps. So he went jobless month after month when we thought he would easily find employment. It made us both feel powerless and helpless as it was going to take two good incomes to make it in California. I remember sitting on the bed in our new condo that we loved, looking out at the beautiful scene of ducks on a small lake by our house and having a panic attack so intense that I had to run to the bathroom and throw up. That was a day when I dreamed about finding inner peace. And so it went. We were always struggling in San Diego, it seemed, and the dichotomy of living in paradise and being so financially miserable was getting to us both. I thought we were going to become one of the “happy hobos” we would see on the beach wearing shorts with feet stained a dark brownish/black from going barefoot in the sun and dirt. Again I dreamed about finding inner peace. I wanted to figure out how to become so secure and self confident that I would never ever find myself in this situation again. I found the start of my journey in a most unusual place. My mom and dad spent the winter in San Diego and lived about 40 miles away. One day my mom said to me, “One of the girls here in the trailer park gave me this box of paperback books. Why don’t you take them home, keep what you like and throw the rest away.” It seemed an innocent enough conversation. I dug through the box and the only book that caught my eye was something by Shirley MacLaine, “Out on a Limb”. I started to read the book and found out it was about Shirley’s spiritual journey and mostly about reincarnation. I felt like I was doing something wrong by reading it and I hid the book from anyone else! Surely someone was going to catch me with this heretical reading material! After all, I was raised in the evangelical church and it was an absolute sin to even entertain such a thought as reincarnation. Had my mother realized what she was passing along to me? I decided not. But still I was fascinated by the theory of reincarnation. Here was someone (Shirley and her new age companions) saying that reincarnation was real, that people had had actual past life recall and that, as energy, we never really died but we would go on. I was starting to find inner peace because I realized it was possible not to fear death like I had been taught. I was unaware that this was one of the signs of spiritual awakening For someone who had been taught that there was a heaven and a hell my entire life, this was a huge revelation. I started researching reincarnation in every library and bookstore I could find. I read modern teachers and ancient writings and found, to my astonishment, that many of the world’s religions believed in reincarnation. I also found out that all references to reincarnation had been stricken from the Bible itself around 500 AD by the Catholic Church. I was finding inner peace by hiding the secret of my reincarnation research deep within me, not even sharing it yet with my husband. This research took me a long way toward finding inner peace as I contemplated the freedom of multiple lifetimes to “get it right”. This made absolute sense to me and nothing about my former religion had ever made sense. My research went on for several years before I shared my secrets with my husband and I found him to be amazingly open to the idea. He had not been exposed to organized religion growing up, so he was much more open-minded than I. But what my study did was to open my eyes to the possibility of things unseen and intangible. I became more and more open-minded about possibility itself. And I knew that my research would lead me to the information that would make me self-confident and self-sufficient. I had a new-found inner peace whenever I thought about the fact that I no longer had to fear death. I realized that my fear of it made me nervous, irritable, combative, competitive and overwrought much of the time. My revelation about reincarnation gave me a warm feeling, something that I had never before experienced in my life. So I was not about to give that feeling up. I liked that feeling of finding inner peace. I wanted more. Thus began my spiritual quest to find out my soul purpose and why I had been placed on this earth. Maybe there is something that you fear deep inside that is keeping you from finding inner peace. I urge you to research what you fear with an open mind and not to rely on what others have told you. As they say, the truth shall set you free! What sparked your spiritual journey? If you would like to share it here, I encourage you to do so.
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I Wanted (Needed) to Work from Home
Hi. My name is Carolyn.
Have you ever wanted to own your own business? Do you dream of being your own boss? I’ll bet a lot of you are like me. I worked in corporate America for over 30 years and dreamed of having my own business every day.
I was tired of corporate pressure and not being able to control my own destiny.
Then one day the pressure took its toll and I was no longer able to physically perform my job. Suddenly my desire to work from home became a necessity.
Do you have a hobby that you would like to turn into a business? I work from home now building my website about two subjects that I am passionate about--motivation and self improvement!
You can do it too! You can take charge and write your own ticket to the future.
Here's my story.