The Truth of the matter seems to be suggesting that we don’t have to “do” anything to find a little peace and contentment. Quite the contrary. Peace and contentment “find us,” effortlessly and spontaneously, the moment we “stop doing” . . . the moment we cease playing the foolish mind games that distracted us in the first place from our natural state of light-hearted serenity . . . our divine inheritance . . . the “image and likeness” of emotional perfection in which we were created.

Each of us is blessed with an inner “Sea of Tranquility” whose basic nature is calm and serene. It represents the natural state of our emotional natures. But it responds to the thinking mind much like a punch bowl responds to movement.

Imagine carrying a large, filled to the brim, punch bowl from your kitchen to the serving table. Notice the agitated surface of the liquid as your movement creates turbulence sending the punch back and forth in waves from one side of the bowl to the other, perhaps even sloshing some of it over the edge. Now, carefully set the bowl down on the serving table and watch what happens. Spontaneously, with no effort on your part, the wave action of the liquid will begin to subside until, eventually, the surface of the punch bowl returns to its natural state of absolute stillness and calm.

Nothing we “do”turns turbulence into serenity. It’s what we “stop doing” that allows the liquid in the bowl to seek and find its “natural state”. And so it is with our human emotional nature. The force that agitates the calm serenity of our emotional “Sea of Tranquility” is our thinking mind lost in dysfunctional patterns of unskillful use spiritually defined as judging, coveting, hankering, clinging and infinite variations on the theme of “bearing false witness.”

–Rev. Chad O’Shea