The 5 Keys To Inner Peace

~ Prologue ~ Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. ~ Mary Oliver It’s back in the year 2000. I’m driving in my white Holden Commodore. It’s raining hard and I’ve cranked the windshield wipers up as fast as they’ll go. My eyes are filled with tears. That was the night I decided I couldn’t go on with life; I’d given up. As I was driving, I kept thinking, How can I make this look like an accident so that people don’t know I purposefully killed myself? I thought about driving off a cliff and making it looks like I lost control but when I fast-forwarded to my funeral and seeing my mother heartbroken, I couldn’t go through with it. It was the night I also realised that I had to swallow my pride. Up until that day, I had been someone who seemed to always think that he could solve everything himself. I didn’t realise at the time that the problem was my mind and that I wasn’t in control of it. So I made the decision that night: perhaps I didn’t know everything and that I should and would seek assistance. A close friend of mine suggested a psychologist whom she had seen and highly recommended. At this point, I had nothing to lose so I decided to make the phone call. Within six months, I was completely transformed and had come out of my depression. Things had become a lot clearer and I started to realise that I wanted to become a teacher. After twelve months, I finished the counselling. However, I was left with a feeling that there was still so much more to life. I wanted to feel truly happy and completely at peace and I wanted to know exactly what it would take to get there. So for the next thirteen years, I went on a special journey. I researched, I read books, I attended seminars and workshops but it wasn’t until about five years ago that a permanent shift happened. My family noticed and said to me, “John, you’ve changed! You are so much calmer these days. You don’t seem to react to things the way you used to. How did you do it? Can you teach us?” At first, I wasn’t really sure what exactly had happened so it was difficult to explain, let alone share my ‘secret’. At the time leading up to this transformation, I had been listening, repeatedly, to the audio book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle in my car. Now while I admit that this had a role in influencing how I felt about my life, and myself to bring about the transformation in me, I knew that there was more to it. I decided I had to take a step back to observe what had happened and to take a look at the bigger picture. One of my life mentors explained in a seminar how humans have ultimate strategies for most things in life such as finding the right partner: to learn to love yourself first, and succeeding in business: to focus on servicing and helping others. However, there isn’t yet any ultimate strategy for finding and maintaining inner peace. It was then that something inside me said, Well, you’ve found inner peace and experienced it for yourself so there must be some special sequence of events that occurred or is occurring on a daily basis for you to feel this way. This became the second reason that set me out on my mission to determine how I had discovered inner peace. As I went on this reflective journey, I realised that there were a few things I had originally thought that might bring me inner peace. I had looked at money but then I noticed some wealthy people were still out there killing themselves from a lack of fulfilment in their lives. I looked at work and career as well but I noticed that while some people may manage to secure a job they like, the rest of their lives still is a disaster. Then there are some people who spent years and thousands of dollars on education, pursuing a career they thought they would like only to find a few years later that they have stopped enjoying it and no longer find fulfilment in it. So I crossed that one off too. I also thought that perhaps it comes down to finding your soul mate and the ‘happily ever after’. However, I can tell you now that it didn’t seem to matter who my partner was, I still had never found myself completely at peace with my life. You may know of people who have wonderful partners but are still not at peace; they still seem to be missing something. Once I ruled out those three things, I asked myself the most important questions I have asked myself. The question was, “when DON’T I feel at peace?” I noticed every thing that knocked me off balance fell into five categories, which became the five keys to inner peace. I realised that I had balanced all five simultaneously for me to feel at peace. After coaching adults and teenagers on the simple science, I got a gentle tap from several people suggesting I write a book, so I could help more people who were ready to apply the simple action steps. My life has gone on an amazing journey: from depression to not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, to becoming a teacher, a motivational speaker and a life coach. Everything in my teachings has come out of that dark place I once found myself in. I now know that it all happened for a reason so I have no regrets or resentment whatsoever against myself or anyone else. In this book, I’m going to outline a step-by-step system of action steps that will help you find balance and inner peace if you commit to taking the actions. The fact that you are reading this book means you have reached a point in your life where you’ve decided you want balance and an end to drama. This book will show you exactly how to achieve that. It won’t involve actions that get you way out of your comfort zone. It is, in fact, quite simple. The universe was created from silence, from a place of calm. Everything came from that void, that invisible field of energy. By tapping into your own inner peace, you will be entering that state of calm where all true creativity and abundance originates. Therefore, rather than striving to make things happen and struggling through life, you must first realise that you won’t find peace by having enough money or the right job or chasing achievements. It’s the other way around. You must find peace first and then everything else will flow to you. Every area of your life will start to improve and you will only see abundance in your life because you won’t feel a lack or shortage of anything. As I outline the Five Keys to Inner Peace, I’m going to describe for you some very simple strategies to achieving the most fulfilment in all areas of your life. You will get to the point where you are able to realise that you are already amazing, you are divine and that you can truly create endlessly from that special place of peace. So my question to you is “What have you got to lose?” Enjoy your journey towards inner peace and the abundance that flows naturally from it.