Peace Under All Circumstances

A Conversation with Nilay from India

Nilay joined one of our recent webinars from India with an experience that many people on this path will recognise. Some months earlier, after bringing his years of intense meditation practice to an end, he had tasted a profound recognition of his true nature. His sense of a separate self dissolved, he felt connected with everyone and everything, and for the first time he understood what is meant by the word ‘love’. But he is now a young doctor, working twenty-four-hour hospital shifts amidst the pressures of hierarchy, exams and an application for residency abroad, and the sense of separation has returned with force. The understanding that had dawned in him seems to be slipping away. How, he asked, can it be held on to?

I suggested to Nilay that he think of his current circumstance as a test that has not been sent to thwart him. On the contrary, it is on his side. It is an opportunity to establish himself in his true nature, not only in easy, peaceful, benign situations, but in more challenging ones. The real test is to be at peace under all circumstances.

Consider such circumstances a practice that one has been given, whose purpose is to establish us in the peace of our true nature whatever the conditions. So when going into work, do not think, ‘Oh no, I have to deal with the hierarchy, with my boss.’ Think instead, ‘Good. What is the hospital going to throw at me today? I want to test my establishment in the peace of my true nature.’ Look forward to it. Thank your boss for being so difficult and unreasonable. They do not know that they are helping you establish yourself in the peace of your true nature.

And there is a further possibility here, one that touches the very heart of Nilay’s vocation. One’s patients will come, as they usually do, for physical healing. But if, as a doctor, one is established in the peace of one’s true nature, they will receive something so much more than they were expecting. Without a word being said about it, by one’s kindness, one’s openness, one’s own peace and presence, one gives one’s patients a taste of their own true nature when they enter the consulting room. They go away feeling relieved of a burden, feeling at peace, often without knowing why. It gives depth to the healing. One is not just healing people physically; one is taking them towards the true healing, which is the wholeness of their being.

So this demanding time is not an obstacle to the recognition that dawned in Nilay. On the contrary, it is helping him. Embrace such a time; use it to your advantage.

Nilay then asked about the active, cathartic meditations he has been practising, and how to reconcile them with the pathless approach of simply being. There is no conflict. Continue with such practices if they help; that is fine. But alongside them, spend time not doing anything that could be called meditation: sinking deeply into being and abiding there. That, in a way, is the ultimate meditation. That is what really gives you the taste of the peace of your true nature. And it is that peace which then comes through you and communicates itself, non-verbally, to everyone with whom you come in contact: your patients, your colleagues, your family, strangers.

Most of us find that the peace we glimpse in favourable conditions seems to desert us just when circumstances become demanding. Nilay’s question opens up the recognition that our circumstances, however turbulent, are not the enemy of that peace but the very field in which it is discovered to be unconditional.

This is what I explore in Living in Peace, Living as Peace. It is an invitation to discover, beneath the changing circumstances of our lives, a presence that is already whole, already complete and already at peace, a peace that no circumstance, however difficult, has ever truly disturbed.

You’ll find the meditation here.

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