Formula for Finding Peace

One afernoon in Tikal, I was sitting in the shade. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. No one was around. In the quiet stillness, I felt deeply peaceful, and I found myself contemplating the word peace. Suddenly, I saw how the letters of the word peace revealed the essence of true peace:

P-peace, E-equals, A-acceptance, C-compassion, and E-empathy.

Often, when we get angry, it is because we believe someone could have done differently. You can find peace when you are upset by someone who is behaving badly by repeating what I have come to call the mantra of compassion. (Mantra is a Sanskrit word meaning mental device.) Take a deep breath and silently tell the person:

I know in my heart that you would have done differently if you could have done differently but you couldn’t so you didn’t.

We don’t let people off the hook; we hold them accountable. At the same time, we recognize they can’t undo what they did. Peace comes along with insight into how to prevent further tragedy as we apply the formula: peace equals acceptance, compassion, and empathy.
This formula holds for the suffering we experience from beating ourselves up with guilt. We need to realize we cannot change the past no matter how much we suffer with guilt. I have always loved how beautifully the futility of trying to correct the past is depicted in the following verse from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam.

The Moving Finger writes
And having writ moves on,
Not all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

With this verse, I have always pictured words appearing in the sands of time as the invisible moving finger of fate writes and then inexorably moves on. The past is gone. And yet, in the future, with firm resolve, we can choose to do differently. As for the present, in order to relieve yourself of paralyzing and unproductive guilt, you can direct the mantra of compassion toward yourself:

I know in my heart that I would have done differently if I could have done differently but I couldn’t so I didn’t.

ª This weekend, practice the mantra of compassion so that you can ACE the tests of anger and guilt.