Staying Centered

"Peace comes from within, do not seek it without." (Buddha) I just have a couple of questions for you. Are you calm and centered inside of yourself? Do you feel like internal peace is impossible and unattainable except for yogi's and monks? Many people have chaos spinning in their heads like rush hour traffic in New York City. If your head is constantly thinking, worrying, second guessing and obsessing...then you are not calm within. What does it take to be calm within? It takes time and discipline to slow down the traffic in your head until the traffic becomes a country road and you are walking, not running, driving or rushing. Yeah, you speed up a bit when you need to meet a deadline but the most centered people can accomplish a lot because they can tell the difference between the distractions and what is really important. People living with chaos in their minds have endless distractions. Slowing down is also a process of filling yourself up with clean fuel instead of polluted gasoline. Clean fuel has to do with the quality of your thoughts as well as tapping into a god consciousness. God awareness is a higher energy and having a spiritual connection is a higher fuel source. Racing thoughts filled with fear, doubt, and worry is lower energy and fills your tank with fuel that feels empty. People also fill their tanks with other distractions. They fill it with obsessing over money, excess consumption of food, sex, drugs, purchases, image, addictions and more. All of these things are serious distractions and direct your time and energy away from going within. A spiritually fed person is filled with higher fuel and then in turn produces higher return. Money is a necessity but has money ever made anyone happy? Why is it that so many music and movie stars, who have ample money, prestige and power are often miserable or addicted to substances? Money and fame don't make them happy because they need to find that inside of themselves, not in the world around them. Staying centered and being more attentive to the energy that feeds you takes awareness. You have to be incredibly aware daily of what you allow in as fuel. If you are producing self defeating thoughts, letting other people's opinions pull you down, looking for validation outside of yourself or letting wounds from your past keep you in pain then you are not running on clean fuel. Clean fuel means letting go of the past, reversing thoughts to be self improving not self defeating and it means trusting in god instead of fearing the world. People who are filled with a higher purpose have been wounded, understand the pitfalls of greed and power and they have often faced many challenges but they refuse to let those things own them. Instead they carry peace internally and have learned from their past instead of repeating it, they help others instead of only focusing on themselves and they trust in god instead of trying to control everything. The choice is simple...clean fuel or toxic fuel. What is your tank running on?