Salut (hello in French) Happy Peeps!!! guess what??? i’m going to tell you a secret…. today i’m going to reveal to you my secret to maintaining an ongoing state of peace. the secret is actually no secret though. it’s merely neutrality. you can literally protect your peace with neutrality. let’s discuss how….
since my life’s work, even as a yogi, does not lend me the luxury of sitting in lotus all day in blissful meditation and i have to actually come out and mingle from time to time i’ve devised a way to maintain such a state even during those times 
i’ll give you an example. i used to experience life as an emotional roller coaster. i mean everything was just so tragic. LOL. so my state of being was always contingent on what was going on around me. from the injustices of the world, significant others, the weather, the dog to someone walking on the cracks on the sidewalk. people and things just made life suck! then i realized that there were way too many external variables controlling my life and that had to stop! so i put my foot down and came up with a solution. i began to take a posture of neutrality and here’s an example of what it looks like.
say my beau comes over and we’re all lovey dovey, enjoying eachother’s company, laughing, joking and having a good ole time. but then moments later in response to something that i say he instantly becomes this irritable, snappy, grouchy ball of mood gone wild. LOL. now i have a choice, i can fuel this mood machine by doing something that pushes him further into the abyss of grouchland or i can safeguard my peace and give him the space that he needs to finish acting out his drama. so i choose the latter and i don’t react at all.
now i get that for many this may come off as cold, indifferent, and maybe even insensitive, but actually this response is a more caring response. showing that i am loving, warm and caring doesn’t mean that i have to get emotionally caught up in his life’s drama.
i can be these things more effectively by being neutral. maintaining my neutrality serves many beneficial purposes. for one thing it helps to balance out the energy. it avoids an unnecessary argument. it also, defuses the situation rather than fueling it. most importantly, it enables me to keep my energy and now some of his since he has so willingly given it to me LOL. i know that sounds mean but remember that we’re all operating under free will here and this was his choice.
the thing is we’re all responsible for safeguarding our own inner peace. after all no one else can experience your peace but you. if i pinch you the person standing next to you won’t feel it. that said, we don’t have to be on this train ride of emotion where someone else is the conductor.
we’ve been so programmed to believe that the favorable, natural reaction to life’s soap opera is anger, rage, dissonance and chaos. in fact, we’ve been trained to expect that responding in this manner will bring about some sort of desired resolution. but does that really make sense? nonetheless, this is the expected response and when i don’t respond according to the programming of those around me i’m perceived as a malfunctioning device. LOL.
yet, i can happily watch the news from my drivers seat. i can sit near someone in their world wind of emotion blissfully unaffected. in fact, i can stand free in the middle of a group’s torrential winds of emotion and maintain my footing because neutrality provides me an unshakeable foundation.
now i’m not saying that i have arrived to this eternal state nirvana. heck, i’m still working on maintaining neutrality in traffic and around idiot drivers LOL! but what i am saying is that neutrality has been a great starting point as i am, like you, a work in progress. there are so many layers to us and our programming that it seems we may never get to the middle.
yet, what gets me closer and closer is simply asking myself why??? why am i getting so upset just because someone else is upset? why does everyday life have to be such a tragic event that causes me so much distress? why does the slightest thing get me so imbalanced? why? why? why? it’s the why that keeps me grounded and it’s neutrality that keeps me sane.
so give it a try the next time the opportunity presents itself, which will likely be in less than 5 minutes or so since this machine that we live in is constantly manufacturing those opportunities and just thriving on the energy of doing so.
try staying in the driver’s seat rather than going along for the ride and let me know how it goes.
how do you protect your peace with neutrality? what strategies do you use?
Sunflower Smooches!!!
