Finding Inner Peace: Words for a Noisy Mind
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Dorothy Hunt's line is only six words long, and I think that's part of why it works. There's no technique in it, nothing to get right. Most of us assume peace is somewhere further on, once the list is done and the worry has been dealt with. Hunt puts it right here, in whatever this moment happens to be, and asks only that you stop marking it out of ten.
This literary prescription comes from Book Quote Therapy, where I gather books and poems for the states of mind that are hardest to sit with. A noisy head is one of the most common.
For: finding a little stillness in a noisy mind
The Quote
'Peace is this moment without judgement.'
Dorothy Hunt
The Poem
The Silence by Wendell Berry.
Berry stands beside a golden beech tree and admits he can't simply look at it. He has to say something, even as the leaves fall with a sound that isn't a name. It's a poem about how loud our own heads can be, even in the quietest places, and about the stillness waiting underneath once the words run out.
'Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.'
The Book
The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
A quiet, practical exploration of the space between you and your thoughts, the same space that makes it possible to notice a feeling instead of being swept away by it. It's one of the clearest explanations of what it actually means to find inner peace, rather than simply feeling calm for an afternoon.
The Reflection
I used to think inner peace meant never feeling anxious, sad or overwhelmed again. I don't think that anymore.
Peace isn't the absence of difficult emotions. It's knowing they won't last forever.
Feelings rise, stay a while, and pass, like weather, like seasons.
The moment I stopped fighting mine and simply let myself feel them without judging myself for feeling them, they seemed to loosen their grip a little.
That doesn't mean difficult days disappear. It means they stop convincing you that your whole life is falling apart.
I wrote a longer piece on this, on what meditation actually gave me, and it wasn't the silence I expected.
Read: Meditation Didn't Take My Pain Away. It Changed My Relationship With It.
The Question to Sit With
What would change if I stopped fighting this feeling and just let it pass through instead?
Quote Therapy, My Book
Quote Therapy, my book pairing timeless quotes with honest, human stories, is now out in a fully rewritten second edition. Forty-nine stories, set across the French villages and countryside I call home, about ordinary people who didn't just read a beautiful line and feel moved by it, they let it change something.
A Gentle Pause
If you'd like to sit with this for a few minutes rather than just read about it, I recorded a meditation for exactly this.
Listen: Inner Peace Meditation
There's also a fuller literary prescription for inner peace waiting at Book Quote Therapy.
Words for the Wall
For a little stillness on the wall, the Go Placidly print carries Max Ehrmann's words about peace and silence, and St Thérèse's May Today There Be Peace Within is a gentle one to wake up to. There are more in the Calm & Stillness collection.
If you'd like a literary prescription like this one in your inbox each week, you can sign up here, and you'll get my free Literary First Aid Kit as a welcome.
The book links are Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.