Peace from self-suppression or the peace of relaxation -- a world of difference.
Self-suppression is an effort, a drain on our energy. It's more a strategy than a relief. Peace from self-suppression is no peace.
Relaxing is a cessation of effort. It's relief without strategy.
Imagine a cat luxuriating in an armchair. No self-suppression, there, is there? No strategy. It's natural, for a cat.
Now, the human condition. Imagine you’ve come home after a difficult day and you’re feeling a mite irritable. Many of us use alcohol, other substances, or pleasurable distractions to escape our feelings -- or we just try to push those feelings down. This might look like peace, to others, but it doesn't feel like peace; it’s self-suppression. How do we know? We're emotionally loaded and it doesn't take much to set us off.
A cat doesn't have that problem -- have you noticed? The cat's peaceableness is effortless and soft.
What's the difference? A cat has no agenda, no worries. A cat releases her stress as soon as the need for it is over.
The difference is a matter of mind -- or the absence, of it. We humans value our mind as the source of solutions to problems. We seem to have an unending agenda of problem-solving. So, we rehash memories of problems -- and the worse the memory, the more we rehash. That's the meaning of the word, suffering, by the way. It's not the pain; it's the rehashing, the revisiting of disturbing memories again and again, seeking relief through approaches that can't bring relief.
Well, with humans, this behavior is common. In fact, it's regarded as normal, so normal that it has names: stress and its big brother -- overwhelm.
We humans may carry our stress into sleep -- and wake up tired or, if we use sleeping aids, groggy.
Unless we have found how to release (rather than suppress) stress, it tends to accumulate (as unpleasant memories tend to accumulate). Then, we might experience situations where our emotional state seems too extreme for the thing that triggered it: seemingly irrational (unrelated) emotional reactions and personality characteristics. Suppression doesn't work.
Some people mistakenly use the word, "release", to signify acting out emotions in an exaggerated way (catharsis), as if "to get the bad emotion out". That also doesn't work. While it may temporarily discharge the force of an emotion, it reinforces the pattern -- and then the charge rebuilds in the reinforced pattern, which ends up being suppressed for social or psychological reasons -- or indulged. It's a vestige of a failed psychological approach.
One habit that builds stress is to persist in frustrating activities -- such as work tasks that are not going well. By our insistent persisting in those activities ("I'll just finish this."), stress gets driven into us and reinforced -- whatever our good intentions or sense of necessity. It's self-inflicted pain -- and self-inflicted pain takes longer to ease up than pain when we stop sooner, than later. With self-inflicted pain, we're particulary tempted to use methods of escape, like alcohol.
In difficult situations, there's another reason it's wiser to walk away (temporarily) than to persist: Our state of mind carries over into the results we produce. Think of an angry argument versus an easy going discussion: what's the aftermath likely to be? Self-suppression doesn't work. It's self-defeating.
Have you ever tried to imagine or remember peace? It's a bit of a strain, isn't it? That's because stress lurks beneath appearances and resists being "overwritten" by good thoughts or whatnot.
True peace isn’t a state we can imagine or remember; that kind of "peace" is superficial. Peace comes from releasing.
Releasing doesn’t come from pressuring ourself to "feel peaceful", avoiding emotions, avoiding disturbing others -- or anaesthetizing ourselves. It's a matter of stopping inflicting pain on ourselves.
Cats don't need to learn that. Humans do.
So, the next time you seek peace, stop for a moment and notice: Are you using a suppression strategy? If it feels like effort, it's suppression; if it involves a cover-up, it's suppression; if it feels like relief, it's release.
How do we learn to release? There are faster ways and slower ways, more direct ways and more roundabout ways.
Next stop: mental clarity.
Next expostulation in three days.
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