By Peggie Arvidson

Tis the season for Peace on Earth, right?

Yet things are feeling anything but peaceful in the world lately. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the only way to create peace is to be peace, but what if it’s true?

I know we live in a world that ‘rewards’ action and doing, but my experience shows me that everything that happens in the world around us is a reflection of us.

This does not mean that I believe that anyone ‘deserves’ anything bad to happen to them. Which means that I don’t believe some people deserve good things and other people deserve bad things, because who am I to judge what’s really going on in the Universal perspective.

If we’re going to have a spiritual renaissance I say let’s just do it. There’s a new year barreling down on us and there’s no time like right now to start focusing on our spiritual real estate. This is NOT me preaching to you about saving your soul from fire and brimstone. In fact, I’m not even saying I believe in fire and brimstone (because I don’t). What I am advocating from my sort of comfortable seat at my messy desk is that we each set an intention to get clear with our true selves. When we clean up our own house and check our foundation it’s an infinitely better use of our time than worrying about what our neighbor (or the fellow across the world) is doing with their own house, isn’t it?

Take that to the next level and I can guarantee you that if you spend your time diligently pursuing yourself – at your truest and deepest level you will see an uptick in each area of your life that is ailing you now.

How do I know?

It worked for me.

Many years ago I was newly divorced, broke (I ended up losing the house – THAT broke) and suffering some serious health challenges without having health insurance. The only area of my life that felt positive was my relationship with my dogs and my closest friends.

No matter what I tried I couldn’t seem to get out of the hole I’d landed in. I was angry at the people who had money and I was angry at the people who were worse off than I was because I knew my own situation could not be compared to theirs. If you can believe it, I was angry that people didn’t realize how awful things were and I was also constantly afraid of what would happen if anyone found out how bad things were.

This was not a great place to be.

You can imagine how easy it was to blame everyone and everything outside of me. I constantly blamed – my ex-husband, my ex-husband’s girlfriend, the client that changed her mind right when her payment was due, the coach that I hired that I couldn’t afford for telling me to do things that weren’t helping me and on and on.

And at the end of the day I was always blaming myself.

I tried everything from mantras and affirmations to coaches and meditation. While some days seemed to be a step forward there would be twenty days in a row of screening calls for collections agents and avoiding invitations from friends because I couldn’t afford to join them in their outings.

The good thing about this period was that it brought home the fact that I can’t change anyone who doesn’t want to start changing themselves. Whether or not I agree, or even like the stance they have on guns, drugs (legal or prescription) or God doesn’t make a bit of difference to them. They will not change their opinion and I respect that now.

Once I started thinking about why I wanted to change other people’s opinions or beliefs, I realized that in every way my life was in the crapper, I had made a choice (or a series of them) to get me there. I had a set of beliefs that were holding me in place! And I recognized that I’d been busy arguing beliefs with other people because that seemed clearly more logical than trying to dig in and clean up some of my own beliefs.

You see, I was looking outside of myself for beliefs to eliminate in other people, when really, that energy could be better spent toppling down beliefs that I was carrying that were destroying my quality of life.

Within the year from that ‘aha’ moment, my business was stabilizing, I was falling in love with the man I now share my life with and I was a reformed “right vs. wrong” debater.

The process of going within and spelunking for your light is pretty involved. It’s not very pretty and it takes the time it takes – day by day. But at the end of the day, it’s worthwhile to live a life that’s focused on joy and happiness, because when you do that, you become the role model and the beacon for someone else. When you do that, you tip the scales in favor of the light and nothing can beat that for igniting your Spiritual Renaissance!