A while ago, while reading The Mountain is You, I stumbled upon a great quote that deeply resonated with my daily struggles.
“Finding inner peace isn’t always so much about just sitting in the lotus position until wisdom becomes you; it’s about making the uncomfortable decision to stay with your discomfort and to choose differently.As Gail Brenner explains: “The inner war is perpetuated by resistance - that is, not wanting to feel the way we feel, not wanting people to do what they are doing, not wanting events to occur as they are occurring. Resistance wants to rewrite our personal histories and ensure that our plans materialize.”She argues that inner peace is the only kind that exists because nothing else is in our control. Another really amazing way to find your inner peace is to constantly remind yourself that your worries are a fabrication of your mind’s need to identify potential threats for survival, and that true happiness is being here in the moment.”
I had to reread the last sentence three times. It became obvious that my idea of achieving inner peace was wrong. For years, I’ve been trying to make peace my baseline. I thought that if I could manage to always stay calm and unbothered by external circumstances, I would finally live the life I was aiming for.
Now I see that my assumption was logically flawed from the very beginning. By trying so hard to tweak my life in order to reduce the number of stressors, I made happiness conditional. I tricked myself into believing that if I could control most of the “threats” to my well-being, I would achieve inner peace.
Since my teenage years, I’ve been analyzing my emotions intellectually rather than sitting inside them. I tried to understand why I felt something, but rarely allowed the emotion to exist without investigation. That’s a subtle form of resistance - like saying, “I’ll sit with my discomfort, but only if I can label, dissect, and control it.”
I seek control through systems and insight. I try to domesticate chaos rather than befriend it. Yet the quote suggests peace is reached not by optimizing control, but by releasing it.
I’ve always used productivity and creativity as ways to re-stabilize my identity. When I feel unstable or unmotivated, I try to realign myself through work, reflection, or creation. It often works short-term but reinforces the belief that peace depends on doing rather than being.
My final sin is a tendency to rationalize suffering instead of feeling it raw. I can intellectually grasp discomfort, yet often still reject the emotion itself. That’s exactly what the quote points to as resistance - the attempt to overwrite what is.
The lesson here is quite straightforward, and I hope I can live by it from now on. When you try to tame intrusive thoughts by giving them your undivided attention, they grow larger than they need to be. The better approach is to give them space to resound - and eventually dissolve into thin air. To see these intrusive thoughts for what they really are - fictional threats to survival - is something I’ll strive for.
Your mind plays tricks on you, and it’s up to you whether you let it fool you. Maybe the world isn’t as scary as your thoughts tell you. Maybe you don’t need to hide behind your comfort zone to be safe. Maybe there’s an entire world waiting for you - if you can shed your armor and allow yourself to be hurt, to feel sad, or uncomfortable.
There’s no need to run away anymore. You’ll be fine.