Nature have such a rejuvenating effect on me. The sights, sound and the breath of fresh air contains so much healing energy for the soul.

Sometimes all it takes to realize peace within oneself is to take a walk through nature.

I will immerse myself fully in that space. No mind, no self—just the birds chirping, breeze blowing and the sound of water and leaves rustling.

This picture was taken at the Swan Lake in Singapore Botanical Gardens. This place is like an escape from the bustling city life that is a common sight in Singapore. You can’t really go very far without seeing a building somewhere. Luckily we still have some nature reserves available.

Hopefully we are still able to keep up the reserves as more spaces are needed for housing and commercial and our population continues to grows to extreme proportions with such limited land.

It saddens me sometimes to see trees being pulled down to make way for constructions. Trees that have lived for many years before they can mature to great heights. Trees that provided the oxygen for the air we breathe. Trees that provided shelter for the wildlife that depended on it. It takes but only a short while to uproot and destroy them.

I guess that is the way of life in the city; it is all for economic growth.

So extend your gratitude if you are living close to nature, for it helps to be in a peaceful state surrounded by the love of mother nature.

How important is peace to you? I am not talking about world peace, that is still a bit far-stretched in the current state of society; I am talking about being mentally and spiritually at peace with oneself.

Upon death, most of us wishes for the other so that they could “Rest in Peace”. What does that mean? Does it mean that only death could bestow true peace? In some ways it could be true—when the mind dies in the body, peace is found.

What if there is another way to attain inner peace when we are alive? What good is peace if we can only find it at the end? How differently would we feel if we discover the peace we have in this moment? Only when peace surface within ourselves would life reveal its beauty to us. Imagine we are so centered and strong that any discord, stress and turmoil has no effect on us.

Contrary to popular belief, it is not about finding peace at the end after death, it is about finding peace now so we can begin to live.

It is an irony that we depend so much on our senses. The thing to understand is that senses functions by being mainly outbound. Everything becomes an external-in phenomenon; the tree that you see outside is really not there but as a projection through the lens of your eyes reflected internally in your mind. If we are blind, the vision of the tree disappears and we won’t really know if it’s there.

Looks can be deceiving when all we do is to think and imagine about what we see. From that normal state that everyone dominantly functions in, every external situation has a chance of causing anxiety and turmoil because we are basing our well-being upon something that we have no control over; something that we imagined.

Understand that the senses can only tell us so much. It is said that the conscious mind can only hold 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information in awareness at any one time. What that means is that if we rely on the mind only, the information we think we know is always generalized and distorted from the whole truth.

When we realize that peace cannot be found on the outside, the only natural solution is to turn inwards. Become internal-out and not external-in; what that means is to create from a place of who you are within and project the creation into the world rather than using external circumstances for directing your creation. In that way we are free to be authentic and not let external circumstances pull us in all sorts of directions.

If we create from that place of authenticity, what we create will be of real value to others and not just a carbon copy of the billion things out there.

That is the beginning of the awareness of intention. With deliberate intention comes peace of the mind, since there is no one else who can understand your unique journey thus there is no need for comparison and for the seeking of approval.

When we say,” I am at peace with myself”, what does it really mean? Where does this conversation in the head originate from? Who is this I and who is this myself?

When we see people talking out loud to themselves in the streets, we would think that they are mad but everyone is doing it, they just don’t do it out loud. The talking inside the head is loud enough for one to hear inside themselves and it goes on and on in the form of thoughts; in some ways, we are all mad.

To be conscious is to be able to see this madness going on inside our heads. We are talking to an entity that is not real. When we realize that which is not real then we can finally become aware of what is real.

Imagine that you are walking all alone through a dark forest and you can barely see. Fear creeps in and you start thinking about all the dangers that might lurk in the dark. What if there are venomous snakes, stinging hornets, hungry tigers and crazy bears? What if there are bottomless pits round the corner—then someone pierces you through the stomach with a spear.

You come back to your senses immediately, everything in your mind just falls apart because this is real and you are bleeding. This body, as the only temple that houses your soul, is the most important and will always take precedence over anything else. When the body is hurt, reality takes over and you have no choice but to be conscious because your life is threatened.

The search for inner-peace is what started my own journey towards consciousness. There came a point in my life that the pain was too much to bear that I had to drop everything to find peace.

To be aware is to be able to be rooted in reality. What is real is in front of you this very moment; it is not somewhere deep within the recesses of your thoughts. Picture yourself as the still unwavering depths of the ocean, not the turbulent waves and ripples on the surface.

When the false fades away, the very moment emerges.

The moment brings clarity.

Every decision that you can ever make is in the moment. It is so simple and yet so complex. You do not need to make it more complex than it really is; the amount of inner peace that you feel right now is the gauge to how in the moment you are. Let the rest of the illusions fall aside. They are a distraction and you don’t need them.

Be the watcher, the one who experiences, not the thinker of the experienced—inner peace will arise as a natural result.

Peace is not something you find out there, you already have it, you just need to rediscover it in the depths of your true self.

There is a story: once human beings are as powerful as the creator himself because they are made in his image. Somewhere along the way, the powers of creation in the hands of humans went unchecked and resulted in more destruction than good. The creator thought that this has to stop and so he took away all the powers from human but now he has a new problem.

Where should he hide all the powers? If he hides in the highest peak, man will scale the mountains looking for it. If he hides in the depths of the deepest ocean, man would also be cunning enough to dive into the deepest depths.

Finally the creator had a great idea. He would hide it deep into the hearts of man for that is where they will not look.

Know that the greatest treasures are hidden within you, you just have to stop searching on the outside.