On Seeking Calm

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes,

“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

Lately, I have been thinking about the value of seeking calm. It is essential that I find a way to do this because my volatile nature can hurt others. It also prevents me from seeing intense situations with clarity. When I speak strictly from a place of feeling, my capacity to be rational dwindles.

I think it is really important for human beings to reflect on themselves with both self-compassion and discernment. It is possible to say and do the wrong thing. It is possible for someone who is generally kind and compassionate to display undesirable traits.

Some people connect this to Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow, an archetype that is meant to represent the hidden or repressed aspects of ourselves. It has been proposed that when we are not capable of accepting the darker parts of ourselves, those parts come out in undesirable ways.

It takes courage and resilience to be able to look at one’s self honestly. I think this is because it can be hard to navigate that certain parts of ourselves do need to change, or at the very least, be reconsidered. I know that psychosis encouraged me to acknowledge my repressed ideals and values. It was difficult to accept that I contained that much fear, anger, and intensity. In myself, I saw the capacity to inflict psychological harm on others and myself.

The journey inward is long, but quite evocative in its capacity to invoke change.