Peace Comes From Within...and Amazon?

One summer before I began teaching yoga I was very excited about my new status as a yogi. My roommate was out of town for a month and I pushed all of our living room furniture out of the way to make a big yoga space for me. I started recycling, shopping for organic foods, listening to chants and meditation music, and being barefoot at every opportunity. I read about yoga, I talked about yoga, and I shopped for yoga. I know, shopped?

So anyway, I ended up buying this necklace on Amazon that I felt really expressed how I wanted to live. And for just over $50, this is what I got:

Cute, right?

I remember the delivery man trekking up to my apartment to drop it off and me ripping the box apart, I was so excited. It was perfect! I put it on and went to look in the mirror and then... I hated it. The chain was too short, the pendant was too heavy and it hung in the wrong spot. I felt like I was choking and took it off, angry and disappointed. And then I read the necklace again and started laughing at the lesson this little necklace had given me:

PEACE COMES FROM WITHIN

Not from a necklace. Or from anything else you can find on Amazon or E-bay or anywhere else. Inner peace comes from gratitude, taking time to be quiet, living with integrity and finding beauty in everything around you. It comes from acceptance, forgiveness, honesty, connection and joy.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what I spend my time doing and how that affects my inner peace. By inner peace I mean that quiet, calm core that we all have and can tap into. It gives us our best insights and ideas and let's us know when something is wrong. I practice yoga in order to develop inner peace - that's the whole reason - and it keeps me on track.

I think that a lot of the time when we start overdoing it in different areas of our life (eating, shopping, drinking, dieting) we have disconnected from our inner selves and some problem that is affecting us and are searching for some way to found grounding and peace. Sometimes it hurts to slow down, take a breath, figure out what is really happening and what we need to change. But the more we are in tune with ourselves the more we are able to recognize and deal with, and ultimately, the healthier we become - a lesson I learn over and over.