Mental Health Awareness Month: Promoting Inner & Outer Peace
Over the years, the discussion about mental health has become more and more frequent. Through our everyday use of social media, and being able to connect with many people at once, we have been able to vent our feelings more easily, and also, find others who are feeling a similar way to us. Here at Tea & Tonic, for Mental Health Awareness Month, we thought it would be a great idea to discuss inner and outer peace, in particular, how we can nurture it within ourselves and share it with others.
Why Is Mental Health Awareness Month So Important?
Mental Health Awareness Month came about in 1949, as a way to increase awareness of the importance of general mental health and wellness. But not only that, it’s also a way to celebrate recovery from mental illnesses and looking at how to cope day-to-day with our mental health, in a healthy way. Through mass communication, we are able to discuss our feelings more openly – after all, mental health is essential for our overall well being.
How to Find Inner Peace
This is what everyone strives for, being at peace with themselves and the world around them. But life can be hard with lots of hurdles along the way, some big and some small. It is about finding joy in the little things in life. Hearing birds in the morning or taking five minutes of quiet when you’re the first one awake.
Being at peace with yourself is the first step toward inner peace and fulfillment. Accepting yourself, along with not just the good but accepting the not-so-good, is the first step toward feeling at peace. Only then will you be able to look within yourself and understand what truly makes you happy.
Ensuring you keep your expectations in check is also at the heart of feeling peace on a day-today level. If you expect too much from an event, yourself or someone else even, it will undoubtedly lead to tension and upset within you. Challenge your thoughts on the day ahead to weigh up whether those expectations are realistic and achievable.
Meditation is an amazing way to practice inner peace, it has been linked with increasing empathy which the world needs a lot of and helps us with acceptance and also expectations! Also, through meditation you are able to visualize the life you want to live, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also, working on your physical well-being has been shown to help alleviate depression symptoms and keep them at bay. Physical activity releases endorphins, which can help you cope with many problems that may come your way. Physically moving your body and releasing endorphins, puts you in a positive mindset to tackle the day ahead. This alone will have a great impact on you and those around you.
It is all about finding what works for you, so you can live the best version of yourself to project to the world.
What Does Outer Peace Mean? What Can I Do To Share the Love?
Only when you are at peace with yourself, can you start to share outer peace. Peace is abundant but can easily be forgotten if left unnourished. The age-old saying of you cannot love someone else until you love yourself is true, and it is the same when it comes to peace.
To be able to show grace, patience, and kindness to others you need to show them to yourself, this is how you heal the world…one person at a time.
This could be through smiling at a stranger in the street, buying the person’s morning coffee who is standing behind you, or maybe taking five minutes to talk to the stranger sitting alone on a bench. Spreading peace doesn’t have to come in big and expensive gestures.
The little acts of kindness build up and make people feel seen and heard, it also feels incredibly rewarding to know you made a difference that day. This is how we start to heal ourselves and the world around us, one step at a time. We are all human beings and created equal, sometimes we forget that because life can be so fast-paced.
Take a moment for yourself and discover your peaceful place. How do you find your zen? Let us know.
