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Cultivating inner peace

Two for You — take two minutes to live and lead with intention

Episode 5.2

What if I told you that as community leaders, we can better prepare for the noise and needs around us by working on our own inner peace? Tune in to find out about these three ways to cultivate your inner peace:

  1. Spend time in nature
  2. Meditate
  3. Practice gratitude

Resources

“Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”

— Dali Lama

Transcript

Note: Two for You written transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before referencing content in print.

[Lori] Hello and welcome to Two for You. This month we're going to talk about peace. But as leaders, we want to focus on not just peace around like in our communities but how we can cultivate more peace by focusing on inner peace.

[Denise] So, when you have inner peace, you are better prepared to deal with all those different things going around you. Right. So, the first thing that's recommended is that you connect to nature and you can do that two different ways. You can do it like Lori and me you can go outside and record. You can have short intervals of time outdoors daily walks but without your electronic devices.

And the second way to connect to nature is to immerse yourself in that. Go for a retreat go for a long camping and really let yourself gather and garner all the benefits of connecting to nature.

[Lori] So the second way is to meditate and I know it may feel uncomfortable to some but we know that meditation is really critical to both our attention and emotion regulation but also to our self-perception. When we meditate it really increases our positive emotions that we're feeling and our perception about ourselves.

[Denise] And it's hard to have inner peace without having good self-perception, right.

[Lori] Yeah totally.

[Denise] And then the third one is gratitude. We hear about gratitude all the time but really really truly practice because they have found that people who are more grateful are more aware of life challenges but choose not to focus on them. And I think that's really key.

They're aware of all these challenges but they choose not to focus on them.

[Lori] Yeah that power of choice again is so great. So this month, as community leaders, you know practice inner peace by making some time to go outside. Maybe carve out a little bit of a time to meditate during your day into your weeks and practice gratitude as you live and lead with intention.

Authors: Lori Rothstein and Denise Stromme, former Extension educators

Reviewed in 2020

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