The Mountain Is You

particular way. When your goal is happiness, you will always find just
behind it a lingering sense of unhappiness—that’s how balance and duality
works. Inner peace, however?
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That’s the state in between the scales. When it’s your goal, there’s no way
to lose.
This is difficult for most people, and often, people will continue to create
stress, problems, and drama for themselves because their egos are still very
much attached to thinking they need something external to make them feel
good. This is the quintessential sign of someone who has not yet found their
inner peace: They are searching, often frantically, for a sense of satisfaction,
belonging, or worthiness outside of themselves.
So really, it’s not that happiness isn’t a virtuous thing to which you should
aspire, or that happiness isn’t something you’re ever allowed to feel. The
reality is that inner peace is the true happiness, and everything else is just a
false means of trying to convince yourself that you are “okay.”
Think about it this way: What do you typically imagine will bring you
happiness? Money, a relationship, a promotion? What happens when you
achieve those things?
Consistently, throughout all of humankind, the answer is the same: You
return to your baseline. This is because this kind of happiness is not real. It
is only being completely at peace with whenever you are in any given day
that you will find a genuine sense of wonder, presence, and joy.

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WHAT DRIVES US AWAY FROM INNER PEACE IN THE FIRST
PLACE?
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THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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With all this talk of how we have to “come back” to our place of inner
peace, it brings up the question of why we ever got disconnected from it in
the first place. This is important because understanding why we lose it is
fundamental to finding it again.
When we grow up, we adapt to our environments. We adopt the beliefs and
ideas of those around us. We alter our personalities so that we become safer;
we believe the world can’t hurt us. When we are children, we are more
vulnerable than ever, and it’s during this time that we pick up what can
easily become lifelong coping mechanisms.
If we are not instructed from a young age to connect with our inner sense of
peace, we will instinctively begin to trust the voice in our head. This is
where we really get lost, because the thoughts that we have on any given
day are largely the product of what the Buddhists would call the
“monkey mind,” or as a neurologist could explain it, the process of different
receptors firing off and making associations with things that may or may
not have anything to do with reality.
When we begin to trust our thoughts, we let them inform our feelings. This
becomes a cycle and ultimately traps most people who aren’t aware that it’s
happening. They have a weird or scary thought, have a subsequent strong
feeling, and the combination of the two makes the situation feel real when
it’s actually a misunderstanding of your neurological process.
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THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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Of course, that doesn’t mean that our thoughts are use-less. It just means
that they are not always reflective of reality and should be used as more of
suggestions than anything else.