Today, I’ll explore a theme that speaks to the heart of true liberation – Choosing Peace from within.
Inspired by Yogananda, the beloved author of Autobiography of a Yogi, who popularised yoga and meditation in the West, emphasising the oneness of all spiritual and religious paths. With his wisdom, together with the practices of Consciousness Medicine, Holistic NLP and Family Constellation work, I’ll explore how you can move beyond conditioned reactions and into a place of deep, unshakable peace. You’ll learn how to do this by listening to your heart’s wisdom to embody a state of peacefulness that will elevate your energy and help you manifest your desires.
Key Topics include:
- Peace as an Inner State: how Yogananda teaches that peace is not found externally but cultivated within.
- The Illusion of External Peace: true peace is independent of outside conditions – it is a state of being.
- The Power of Choice: How NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) explains how regularly choosing peace rewires the brain, creating new neural pathways that support inner calm.
- How letting go of ancestral entanglements with Family Constellation work allows for the creation of a legacy of peace for future generations.
- How Consciousness Medicine can bring true peace by restoring balance across the Body Matrix: physical, energetic, emotional, ancestral and spiritual bodies.
- Practical exercises for cultivating and integrating peace in your daily life.
In a world that often demands urgency, achievement, and reaction, the invitation to choose peace may seem distant—an ideal reserved for sages and saints. Yet, Yogananda reminds us that peace is not a distant goal but a living presence within us, available in every moment.
“Retire to the centre of your being, which is calmness.”
These words echo a truth that is both simple and radical. Peace is not something we find outside of ourselves; it is cultivated within. Just as the stillness of a lake reflects the sky above, so too does an undisturbed mind reflect the divine.
The Illusion of External Peace
Many of us have been conditioned to believe that peace will come once things fall into place. We tell ourselves: I’ll be at peace when my work slows down. When my family is harmonious. When the world feels safe. But Yogananda reminds us that real peace isn’t dependent on external conditions—it arises from the centre of our being. It is already within us, waiting to be reclaimed.
The Power of Choice
Each day presents us with countless opportunities to react or respond. Reaction arises from the conditioned mind—habits, fears, and past wounds. Response emerges from the soul’s wisdom. Yogananda taught that through meditation and self-awareness, we create space between the external world and our internal state, allowing us to choose peace instead of being pulled into turbulence.
Every moment, we are given a choice: to react from old wounds or to respond from a place of awareness. NLP teaches us that our thoughts shape our reality. When we become conscious of our inner dialogue, we begin to recognize the automatic patterns that pull us into conflict or anxiety.
Try this with me: Bring to mind a recent situation that disrupted your peace. Now ask yourself, Was my reaction truly mine, or a reaction to an emotional trigger from the past? Did you respond from my centre, or were you acting out an old family script?
Now, take a breath and let’s reframe it. Imagine responding to that situation with clarity and calm. Imagine standing in your power, unshaken, rooted in deep presence. If this feels difficult, try dropping into your heart and inviting the mind to quiet down. What is your truth at this moment? What are your needs at this moment? How can you make a choice of action that is aligned with your heart, needs and truth? This takes practice, but the more you pause to reframe your thinking, the sooner you can let go of old conditioned patterning that doesn’t serve your path of peace.
This is because of the neural net pathways that NLP helps to repattern. When you experience something regularly, life throughout your life, for instance, your brain chemistry will become habituated to this way of thinking. So that when you hit an emotional trigger that reminds you of a situation in childhood, your brain will run the automated reaction from your past conditioning.
When you notice this, and take pause to consider another choice while changing your energetic presence and focus, the old habituated ways of thinking are disrupted. And each time you re-focus or reframe your focus to a more peaceful, positive and enriching path your brain begins to build new neural net pathways to support this new way. The more you do this, the stronger these positive pathways will become until they are the automated and habituated pathways your brain chooses to run.
This is the simple, scientific power of NLP. And it is all within your own control, whether you consciously choose it or not.
Family Constellations help us see how inherited patterns of worry, struggle, or hyper-vigilance shape our nervous system’s responses. If we come from a lineage where survival was difficult, where struggle was the norm, peace can feel unfamiliar—maybe even unsafe.
But what if we could shift that? What if we could recognize the inherited stories we carry and choose a new path?
Take a moment to think back on your ancestral lineage and the challenges they faced. From a place of wanting to bring more peace to your life, ancestral stories that involved war, theft, imprisonment, emigration or other scenarios that literally disturbed the peace of your family soul, causing feelings of fear from exclusion or victimization and the perpetrator’s anger, for example.
Recall these familial stories with deep honour and gratitude for those who came before you and the hardships they faced. At the same time, recognise deep within your soul that there is nothing you can do, feel or react to in this life that will make the past be different. The past happened as it did, so bring your full awareness to honour the facts of your lineage. While setting down any burden, you might be carrying for them out of unconscious love, loyalty and the primal need to belong. Honour yourself and accept the gift of your life force energy given to you at birth to create a lifetime of peace, harmony and love that will become the emotions inherited by your future family members. By letting go of the old family stories and the part you play in them, we allow our ancestors to come to peace for all of eternity. And this will be reflected in our inner presence of being.
By understanding how ancestral entanglements influence our emotions and behaviours, we gain the freedom to choose a new path—one rooted in presence, alignment, and inner harmony.
Consciousness Medicine shows us that the balance of all aspects of being is essential for creating a sense of peace and harmony within us that will create a ripple effect of peace in all areas of our lives.
Yogananda taught that our inner state radiates outward, influencing the world more than we realise. When we access a place of balance across our body matrix by we allow authentic states of harmony and peace to be present throughout all aspects of being. For example:
- Use a healthy diet, regular exercise and sound sleep to support your physical body.
- Keeping the energy body in balance through chakra balancing, strengthing our auric layer and clearing energy disturbances from our field on a daily basis.
- Honouring our ancestors with great respect and love while being open to receiving their wisdom.
- Supporting our emotional body by staying consciously aware of what we are feeling and needing so we can take responsibility for our emotional states and let go of being responsible for other’s emotions.
- Supporting our spiritual body with a daily practice that fills our life force energy tank in ways like self-care, laughter, nourishing relationships and a regular spiritual practice.
With regular practice, our inner peace will become stronger and stronger which will create peaceful experiences in our external reality.
This is the work of Consciousness Medicine: becoming aware of the unconscious programs running in the background and choosing to shift them. When we choose peace, we are not denying life’s challenges—we are meeting them from a place of strength and inner alignment. Trusting that all is in divine order and each challenge you face is an opportunity to grow.
Here are some simple practices you can weave into your daily life to cultivate and integrate inner and outer peace:
- Breath Awareness– The breath is the bridge between the nervous system and the soul. When tension arises, pause and take three conscious breaths. Feel the shift.
- Releasing Inherited Patterns– Using Family Constellations, visualise your ancestors behind you. Acknowledge their struggles, honour their strength, and gently affirm, I am the little one, you are the big ones. I leave the suffering with you and embrace my life fully by choosing a new path of peace, love and connection.
- Reframing with NLP– When faced with a stressful situation, ask: What’s another way to see this? Reframing opens the door to new possibilities. It is like putting a new frame on an old picture. Or changing the lenses of your glasses. When we can consider a new way of looking at something, it allows our system to know there are other choices we can make. This is essential for forging a new path.
Yogananda taught: Be calmly active and actively calm. True peace is not withdrawal from life, but a deep presence within it. It’s a state we cultivate daily, a choice we make moment by moment.
As you move through your day, I invite you to become aware of when you contract, and when tension arises. And in those moments, pause… breathe… and choose peace.
If this blog resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it. As always, take a deep breath, return to your centre, and trust the peace that already lives within you. Until next time, be well and stay present.
You can enjoy listening to this blog on a Healing Codes Podcast episode by clicking on the link below.
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