How to Be at Peace (No Matter What): The 5-A Approach
By: Jake Lyda
Tags: Life Lessons, Coaching, Balance, Mindset, Life

The year 2020 has — for lack of a better word — sucked.

It’s difficult to keep spirits alive when the outside world gives you one dire situation after another. News outlets, social media, friends, notifications… all of these are adding to the stacking pile of stress that floods our everyday lives.

This stress makes us hold onto inflammation, which isn’t inherently evil per se but is wildly unhelpful in copious amounts. Inflammation holds excess body fat, puts our brains in a fog, kills our creativity, and keeps us in a subservient state where our perception of life is, “Woe is me, I judge myself, I blame myself, I am a victim, etc.”

This whole system of ingesting stressful data, holding it in the body, and creating an internal environment that runs into burnout and disease is what’s known as the sympathetic nervous system. You know the adage, “Fight, flight, or freeze.” That’s the sympathetic system. And while it’s a neat physiological aide whenever clear and present danger is around, it’s not nice when this mode is switched to “ON” 24/7/365. (Also, clear and present danger is a rare occurrence nowadays.)

That’s the issue with being part of a society and ecosystem built on attention. We keep our heads on a swivel, always connected, reacting x1000 to new bits of information every minute. It’s fucking exhausting, isn’t it?

Thankfully, you have a CHOICE when it comes to this game and the resistance that comes with it. I call it the 5-A Approach:

Awareness

Simply knowing where you are in life and in mindset is beneficial. Most people live reacting, always playing catchup without wondering what the hell they’re catching up to.

However, if we take a step back from the pinhole through which we gaze at reality — or our smartphones, or that specific person treating us a specific way — and look big picture, we gain clarity.

“Reality is unforgivingly complex.” — Anne Lamott

Awareness is a skill and a muscle. Therefore, we need to train up the muscle. So whether you make yourself a token (a piece of jewelry, rubber band on the wrist) or make a commitment to stop from time to time and realize you’re at odds with reality, these tactics can help you flex your awareness.

This alone might make you feel at odds with yourself. Simply acknowledging something is amiss can trigger anxiety, fear, doubt, worthlessness, and more. And that’s a good thing. Now, how the hell can it be a good thing? That brings us to the next A…

Acceptance

Once we are aware that life or reality is “wrong” or that we’re facing immense resistance to something we know in our bones to be the truth, we can move past it. Quite easily, too. The reason being is this mindset that reality isn’t as it should be is the most farcical lie our egos tell us.

I’m not sure what your spiritual beliefs are: God, the universe, Source, Yahweh, Allah…in my humble opinion, they mean the same thing, which is some cosmic entity or thing that creates life and reality as we know it. I’m just going to call it a nondenominational Source. When we say, “He/she/they should not have done that,” or, “That’s not how it should be,” or, “I wish this wasn’t the case,” you are at odds with reality. You are at odds with Source. You’re trying to say that Source is wrong because you believe you are a better creator of the universe.

The humble truth is we are NOT equipped to handle universal power. We might believe we know what’s best for our lot within the cosmos, but we have neither the emotional fortitude nor the sheer capability to run a universe like a well-oiled machine. Leave that to itself.

When we figure out that, hmm, maybe we aren’t the people to call the shots in this game of life, we can begin to accept.

This part can be broken into two steps:

1. Feel Feelings

This is a vital step because, as we’ve learned over time, suppressing emotions ain’t the way to do it. Your feelings about a certain set of circumstances — racial injustice, the president, the whole 2020 year — are real. And because your feelings are real, they deserve your respect.

So feel them fully.

Things are as they should be. Feeling something different from that creates friction with reality. Feeling that life is wrong while suppressing that very emotion? Well, that’s inflammation and disease right there.

Emotions aren’t actually due to external circumstances; they’re made by our brains as you “need” them. They can also be extracted from memories, usually when you decided to not feel them in the past. Your body hangs onto that stuff and is brought to the surface again by a triggering circumstance similar to the one from the past. Your brain keeps a record of these previous events and the emotions attached to them because the brain is an efficient machine built to preserve energy. Instead of trying to figure out how to act in each situation, it tries to subconsciously give you recorded data on how to emote due to this new set of situations.

While this might be a neat trick, our development has been bombarded with experiences in which we reacted with heavy emotion. The longer we live, the more circumstances our brains can put into the “angry” box or “sadness” box, even when it isn’t all that bad. What’s worse is that when our brain provides us with these emotions — thinking it’s helping the situation — our conscious mind suppresses those emotions due to the social stigma that fear and anger and depression are “bad.” And we don’t want to feel bad because then we feel feelings about our feelings: guilty for being sad, depressed for being angry, etc.

So the first thing (after acknowledging these feelings) is to allow yourself the space to feel your feelings in a healthy way. If you are angry at the circumstances of life, punch pillows and throw rocks into the abyss. If you’re sad about your lot in life, cry into said pillow and scream. Do these things by yourself so that A) you don’t transfer your energy to another being (they DO NOT want it), and B) so that once you’ve felt the feelings fully, you create space that isn’t immediately filled with someone else’s shit.

Cry like a toddler; it’s closer to your True Self anyway. Photo by Arwan Sutanto on Unsplash

When you actually allow yourself to feel — i.e. be human — a few physiological things happen. You utilize the adrenaline and cortisol that has been building up in your body for years upon years. This is the first wave of releasing excess inflammation and recovering your True Self.

I know feeling these types of feelings can be triggering for some people, which leads to more difficult emotions. Good. Feel that too, fully. You’re going to do some serious healing.

I have fully felt my anger, my anxiety, my sadness at the reality of the world. Is it comfortable? Definitely not. But once I felt the emotion fully, it was as if the emotion wasn’t real anymore. I’d try to find it within my psyche, and whenever I would try to embrace it, like a friend, it would disappear into the ether. This is my body naturally doing this second step…

2. Let It Go (*Cue Frozen song*)

“True balance is in your ability to let go.” — Peter Crone

Moving forward, you have now jostled all of those rough and tough emotions to the surface of your being. Now you can release them.

Feeling the feelings gave you back some power to express who you truly are. But now that’s over with; these feelings no longer serve you. So you let them go.

Here’s how you can let go:

Breathwork/meditation: Taking long, slow, deep breaths shifts your body from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state. Both breathing and meditating relax you, putting you into ease instead of a dis-ease. These practices, so long as you don’t judge yourself for “how well you do them,” let you find comfort and peace in the present moment, which is a far cry from that resistance you were feeling mere minutes ago. Look to the horizon: TURN OFF YOUR PHONE. That black mirror is a small, narcissistic, cynical viewpoint we’re always looking through. By seeing the forest in its entirety, you gain perspective and clarity about the circumstances at hand. Sure, it may seem that this one tree has a real ugly knot in the middle of its trunk, but in the grand scheme of the woods, the knot in that tree is exactly as it should be. Replace them with positive feelings: Most of us want to feel certain ways in lieu of others. Once the depression or anger or fear or sadness or guilt is felt intensely, we have the power to choose a new emotion. I’ll repeat that: We have the POWER to CHOOSE our emotions. With this newfound space created, you can begin to fill it with joy, fulfillment, clarity, peace. Sit with your eyes closed and recall memories that bring you these feelings; you’ll feel them in the current moment, which is the only time in which we actually exist.

Look to the horizon (literally; it’s for your health). Photo by Tj Holowaychuk on Unsplash

Letting go and accepting reality for what it is, instead of being in fisticuffs over the way of the world, allows you to be at ease and in a parasympathetic state. It tells your brain — and therefore your entire body — “Hey, everything’s okay, no perceived threat or real threat here, we can finally rest, digest, and recover.”

For me, I do the first one (meditation) daily now. I repeat the mantra, “Things are as they should be” on the inhale, and “I am at peace with reality” on the exhale. It activates my vagus nerve, which is what stimulates a parasympathetic state. This acceptance allows me to rest and recover, which gives my body space to be filled with things like the next A…

Appreciation

The next step is a mixture of that third way to let go (replace negative feelings with positive ones) and gratitude.

The fun thing about appreciation is this is where your ego brain can finally get on board with being a healed True Self. That’s because it can be used as the tool it’s meant to be to search for past memories that you are grateful for, as well as things you have in the present moment that you appreciate. Some people find it best to have a gratitude journal, or to speak the things they’re thankful for when they wake up or go to bed. However it works for you, accepting the circumstances and being at peace leads you to an even better state, where you feel glad about the positive circumstances. (This is a direct switch of your mindset, releasing you from the bonds of negativity bias and into the realm of positive thinking.)

Once you can dwell instead on happy past memories and the joy, fulfillment, and blessings of current reality, you can go one step further: Be grateful for the things that have yet to pass. It’s like already being at peace with future circumstances, no matter what they might be. This bleeds into the next A, so I’ll come back to it in a bit.

“Instead of focusing on the world’s problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace.” — Rhonda Byrne

The more you are thankful for your existence and for perceiving reality for what it is, the more you can stay out of a reactionary mindset where all you see is pain and grief.

From my anger and frustration at a current scenario, I have become aware of my reaction and breathed into fully feeling it and then letting it go. It creates a calmness within my mind, in which I can further explore the things I already have: A roof over my head, a beautiful wife, an amazing puppy, and enough money to cover basics, and more. I mean, what a life, right!

So far, we have become aware of resistance, accepted circumstances as true reality, felt our adverse emotions fully, let them go to create space, then took stock of the things that are actually beautiful and joyous in life. If you stopped here, that’s a lot of steps taken to be at peace in the current moment and happy no matter the circumstances. But we can go even further…

Attraction

People become what they think about and energy flows where attention goes. That’s the whole crux behind why we’ve practiced awareness, acceptance, and appreciation — to clear space for thoughts and attention focused on the positive.

Appreciation helped us fill that space with gratitude for the present moment and the experiences that have happened up to this point. But what about the future? We all want amazing futures filled with abundance, love, and joy. These internal desires are worth pursuing. And the best way to get more of those into your life is through attraction.

Yes, this is The Secret philosophy: the Law of Attraction. Thoughts become things, and your brain is a prediction machine. It’s trying to find certainty in the uncertainty. The wonderful thing is that you can manipulate this mental mechanism any way you want. We naturally set it to Default and this leads to a lot of the same: same habits, good and bad; same unfulfilling relationships and jobs; same lack of health and lack of wealth.

Default is triggered by stress and sympathetic. Of course, we don’t want certain things in life, like debt or disease. But if you keep focusing on what you DON’T want, your brain will predict that that’s what’s going to happen.

“You’ll never create peace in the world when people are at war within themselves.” — Peter Crone

In a completely opposite fashion, if we shift our focus from circumstances and our reactions to them to an incredible future that we fully believe is already in our grasp, we shift our reality.

Lennon said it best. Pair your imagination with belief to create a better reality. Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

A great way to do this is via visualization. Close your eyes and imagine the positive things you want to acquire in life. Picture these as if you have them right here and now. Think of the feelings associated with these things. Odds are, they’re the same positive feelings you got from appreciation — happiness, joy, fulfillment, comfort, ease.

This visualization is doing two things:

It tells the universe what you want It has the brain tell the body that you have what you want; therefore, things are okay and you’re allowed to shift into parasympathetic

From here, you must make sure that you believe with every inch of your being that you have already achieved these wants and desires. Putting your belief in something you cannot physically see yet is called faith. Having faith in yourself and your beliefs goes a long way for resetting your life to a more peaceful state.

Finally, when these things inevitably crop up over time, you want to be open to receiving the gift. It’s that classic joke where the man is drowning in the water, passed up two boats, claiming “God will save me,” only for God to end up telling him at the Pearly Gates, “I sent you two boats, you dummy!” Don’t look an attracted reality in the mouth; simply allow space to receive your new and improved existence and add it to your ever-growing gratitude list.

For me, not only am I appreciative of the things I already have, I put my attention and intention on things in the quantum realm that I want and feel grateful for what’s inevitably coming down the pipeline. Thoughts become things, you create a reality in your mind before it becomes true materially. So why not envision a present and future life filled with good, with peace, with abundance?

Action

With all of the above activities taking place, odds are something is stirring within you. This is your intuition. Intuition, in my opinion, is our True Self. It’s how we connect to Source. It’s what the ego silences by distracting us.

Because your intuition is your best guiding light to alignment and enlightenment, through the fog of circumstance and limiting beliefs, it’s ideal if you listen to it. Perhaps through writing out your gratitude or visualizing a better future in the present moment, a random thought pops into your head. If it is truly out of the blue, and it’s something you can act on, please, for the love of your well-being and the well-being of the collective, ACT!

Action that’s based on intuition ameliorates the relationship between the ego and the Self. The ego can then be used as the tool it is to predict a better reality based on these actions, plus it can reserve and use energy based on what you actually want your life to look like. At the same time, your intuitive Self is back in the driver’s seat, controlling the show, which is where it belongs.

The key to this type of action is to do it as soon as humanly possible. If you let time get in between the intuitive thought and carrying out the action, the more chances your ego can get in the way. “Oh, you’re too tired.” “You’re not good enough yet to do this.” “Why not check Instagram instead?” The ego has a million and one tools to make you not do something intuitive. So don’t even let the brain into the equation: The second you have this intuitive inkling form in your mind and body, go ahead and do it. Once you start, you can get into a flow and the ego can get on board without whining and complaining.

I create my own “True Self To-Do List” that spells out what would make my True Self feel good in the day. I do this at night; then, when I wake up in the morning, I ask my intuition: What do you wanna do first? It usually gives me a strong answer — via muscle testing — and then I immediately go do it (hopefully). Some days, I can get distracted; I’m still human, after all. But more often than not, through repetition and practice, I can string days together of following this list and feeling all sorts of fulfillment and joy. Not only that, I’m adding one percent on the track towards an aligned, abundant life.

That way, when I look back on the time I’ve spent on this planet, I can see how much impact I have made for my life and for others. And that’s the game of life, in my opinion.

What All of This Is Doing: Allostasis (The Sixth A)

Allostasis is the process of achieving stability, or homeostasis, through physiological or behavioral change. (Wikipedia)

By becoming aware, accepting, appreciating, attracting, and acting, you are literally changing your physiology for the better. You are getting closer to homeostasis, which is the scientific word for being at ease and at peace. Stress levels are back to a regulated level, and external stimuli aren’t affecting that homeostasis.

Balancing your internal budget is vital for an overall positive life experience. These five alliterative activities are the best ways of balancing that budget.

So yes, 2020 has sucked. But that’s a perception of reality, a thin veil of lies over the truth.

The questions are: Can you accept the circumstance? Can you be at peace with it? Can you feel how bad it has been, feel it to the max, and then let it go? Can you choose to feel joy and gratitude in that space created? Can you appreciate reality, even if it might not be what you want? Can you attract a more positive future, and take actionable steps towards getting there?

To this life coach, the answer to these questions is a resounding YES.