Practicing Peace with All Your Heart
Making Peace with Ourselves
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
-Mother Teresa
The Heart point on the Living Compass focuses on Relationships and Emotions. Today we will briefly reflect on what peace looks like in these two areas of our lives.
Peace in our relationships means that our connections with others are characterized by stability, trust, mutual care and respect, honesty, and integrity. Emotional peace means that we are comfortable feeling and expressing the full range of emotions (sadness, anger, joy, happiness, laughter, just to name a few) in healthy ways, and that we are comfortable being present to this range of emotions in others. All emotions are God-given and are neither good nor bad. It is how we handle our many emotions that creates either peace or feelings of uneasiness.
It is only by first honestly acknowledging and accepting things as they are that we can begin to make changes, to make things how we want them to be. The holiday season is often a time when tension in our relationships and an uneasiness in our emotions can be more obvious or magnified. Perhaps such magnification, rather than being a source of stress, can become an opportunity to make intentional changes, ones that can create a new sense of peace within us.
Making it Personal: Take a moment to reflect both on your relationships and how you handle your emotions. Where do you experience peace, and where do you experience feelings of dis-ease right now? What is a specific step you could take right now to create a greater sense of peace in a relationship that is tense or awkward, or in one aspect of your emotional wellness? Be specific, pray for God’s help, and then bravely, begin the step today. How could this make your life more peaceful?