Are You Practicing Peace? – Rev. Darrell Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
Peace requires willingness, effort, intention and practice. Are you practicing peace or something else? Join us this week and discover what it means and feels like to practice peace.
SUMMARY
Rev. Darrell Jones spoke about the importance of practicing peace in our lives. He emphasized that peace is not about conforming to a certain belief or opinion, but rather about cultivating a sense of unity and connection with others. He encouraged the audience to be aware of where peace is lacking in their lives and to actively work towards bringing peace into their thoughts, actions, and relationships. He also highlighted the importance of effort, intention, and practice in maintaining inner peace. Rev. Jones challenged the audience to formally practice peace for the next seven days, recognizing that life is not always easy but that we have the power to choose how we respond to challenges. He concluded with a prayer affirming that peace is always present and that we can be catalysts for greater peace in the world.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:02):
Keep it going, keep it going. Hands together for this wonderful duo. I hope someday you’ll join us where the world will live as one. Oh, hi, my name is Daryl Jones. I was about to just jump into it. My name is Daryl Jones. My pronouns are he him, and I’m grateful and honored to be with you all today. So let’s go back where the world can live is one I just felt compelled. Another quote from that amazing book, this Thing called You that Ernest Holmes said is that unity does not mean conformity. And I think as we talk about being peace, as we focus on what it means to be at peace or practicing peace this month, most of us are walking around wanting the world to conform to what we think is right, especially on Tuesday night when two heads are talking at one another.
(01:10):
That’s not it, and it’s not going to happen. So if you find yourself walking around thinking that unity means conformity, that the world living at one means that we all think, act and believe the same thing, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Does everyone understand that? You may not like it, but the reality of the matter is that’s what’s going on and that’s what we’re going to get into today. Last week, Reverend Amy posed the question in her talk, is inner peace possible whether you are here or not? Just chew on that for a minute. Some of you may have talked about that. I know we got into it is inner peace possible and we’re like, well, what’s the definition of peace? Just hold on. Is inner peace possible? The short answer thankfully is yes, it is. But she went on to say and encouraged us to be aware of where peace is not as a way to awaken to where peace is being called for yes, or at least to be humble and kind with ourselves first and foremost, to realize that peace just because it’s a great ideal in the mind that it isn’t magically an instantly going to come onto the scene in our manifested condition.
(02:40):
And one of the ways that she invited us to practice being in this inner peace is to do ano. And if you are not familiar with this ancient wise, deep Pacific Islander practice of forgiveness, it’s simply repeating the phrase over and over. A phrase is over and over again. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. So how many of you were here last week when Reverend Amy brought that up? Okay, how many of you have heard of that practice before? How many of you woke up this morning and before you did anything else said, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. How many started their day with that today? Okay, how many of you all did it yesterday? How many of you did ho poon yesterday? We got one up. Hey, how high? Five. So let’s go back 48 hours Friday. How many of you practiced ho pono? Pono? Okay, so we got a couple more hands up. My talk title. I’m picking the baton. Reverend Amy gave it to me really smooth. Not like that one Olympic thing where they dropped at the US team. The guy was like, oh, I just don’t know what happened. It wasn’t our day. She passed the baton right into my hand. And my question is, are you practicing peace?
(04:13):
Are you practicing peace? And then after I sent the talk title to Reverend Linda, the word as opposed to practice that came in was habituate. Are you habituating? Peace? Take it a little bit deeper, a little bit wider. Habituate means to make or become accustomed that you’re used to it. So are you becoming used to peace in your life? This is not about getting to a destination for you personally. Think about it this way. You are habituating your nervous system to be calm in some way, shape or form. That’s it. Habituating your nervous system to be at peace for maybe 15 seconds consecutively, not forever.
(05:21):
The reading peace comes from a sense of union with the whole, can you put that slide back up? Peace comes from a sense of union with the whole confusion comes from a sense of separation. I love this juxtaposition because it kind of helps us create a little bit of a internal barometer. So there are symptoms for feeling separate. Confusion is one that earn Holmes lists here, but maybe you’ve experienced in terms of like what are you practicing? What are you habituating? See if you’ve experienced any of these in the past week. So a feeling of separation is to be confused, afraid, angry, or maybe you didn’t feel anything at all and you’ve just kind of like numbed and checked out. That’s another symptom of separation. But let’s do a few more overwhelm. Anybody? Anxiety, dread, burnout, shame, hopelessness, despair, loneliness.
(06:39):
Peace is not the experience of nothingness. Peace is the experience of everythingness. We could say whether that be something that we like or something we don’t like, we still will and effort and intend and practice peace. That is the thing. If you hear and take nothing else away with you today, peace requires willingness first and foremost. And it’s a humbling practice. I’ve been sitting with it the past week and a half as I was preparing for this talk. Am I really, really willing to be a place where peace is realized and not have it conditional upon what other people do or don’t do?
(07:38):
Peace requires willingness. It requires effort. A lot of people are like, oh, I can’t wait for that day of peace when it’s just like nothing uhuh. That’s not peace. Peace is not the result of nothing. Peace is the result of your effort, of your practice, of your intention. Peace requires willingness, intention, effort, and practice. Not just once at a retreat for two days. Although I love going on a peace retreat I’m talking about from now until you take your last breath on this planet. It’s an intense practice, y’all. Who’s up for it? Okay, now let’s not just live in the land of the symptoms of not peace. Let’s talk about what are the symptoms of peace, the things that are emblematic in our life when peace is present. Hopefully you’ve experienced at least one of these this week. Love, connection, trust, a sense of wellbeing and safety. Contentment, just contentment being okay, that’s still a level of peace. Peace has many shades. It’s not highfaluting where nothing is happening. It’s everything. Happiness, self-trust, patience, kindness, compassion, gentleness, a sense of place and purpose on the planet. Joy. Those are just a few symptoms of peace being present in your world.
(09:15):
Let me repeat. Peace is not the experience of nothingness. Peace is the experience of being with everything because of the truth of the matter is you can handle everything. How many of you have ever said that phrase, oh, I just can’t handle this right now. That’s crap. Don’t ever say that again please. Because it’s a way that we start to check ourselves out from the practice. Life is an opportunity for us to be in practice. Life gives us opportunities to be in the effort to be in the willingness. No one ever said it’s going to be easy and sometimes you have to have a little security barrier and bubble. I’m not saying don’t let the world run over you. You got to take care of yourself. Reverend Amy pointed out last week moving into the awareness that peace isn’t present, that that’s the beginning of shifting to willingness. So when we feel that which is not peace, it’s an opportunity for us to go, oh, alright, I’m willing. I’m willing once again to put forth the effort to bring my intention and to practice peace.
(10:39):
Why? Why does peace take effort? Why does anything take effort? Our modern human experience today, we champion ease and effortlessness. We continue to streamline and hack our lives so that we can do less struggle, less and effort less. The truth of the matter is though life and living, truly living life, it requires effort. Lemme say that again. Life and really living life requires effort. We must put forth effort to truly grow, to change and to expand possibility. This is true of peace. It isn’t something that happens as the result of ideal conditions being met. Peace is the result of a willingness to be peaceful. Peace is the result of putting forth the effort to bring peace into a situation that is not holding the intention in your consciousness that you may not know how but you intend that there’s a possibility for peace. And then the practice of that can look like so many different ways, but it is you bringing it into the world.
(12:27):
Take a deep breath in as you exhale. If it feels comfortable for you here in the room, close your eyes. Those of you who are online, you always know. I say don’t multitask. So get present for a minute and be in your body and I just want to read some quotes to you that have been hitting my heart this week. Maybe one of them will speak to you. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. You cannot find peace by avoiding life. It’s not enough to win a war. It is more important to organize the peace.
(13:10):
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level. Peace is not something you wish for. It is something you make, something you are something you do and something you give away. I’ve got like five more, but I’m going to stop there. A little Ralph Waldo, Emerson, some Aristotle, Ecker Tolle, Robert Fulcrum. All you got to do is go online, type in quotes a piece. You’ll get this and probably 9,000 others. So if you’re having a little bit of a hard time getting motivated and getting some direction, try that. That would be a way of actively beginning to practice peace, to look for statements that put you into a place of reflection about what peace is and how you can bring it into the world.
(14:22):
The honorable GE sang Buddhist monk said, without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We all wish for world peace. Yes, we all wish for world peace. He says, but world peace will never be achieved unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called peacekeeping forces into areas of conflict, but peace cannot be opposed from the outside with guns. Only by creating peace within our own mind and helping others to do the same, we can hope to achieve peace in this world. So what all these quotes are saying and all that I am saying is give peace a chance. Hands, right? Give it a chance. Sometimes we don’t even give it a chance. We throw up our hands and nope, it’s not possible.
(15:23):
How many things did you walk into this week? Whether it was a meeting, a difficult conversation, or maybe just driving down the street and you’re like these people, that’s how you walked out the door. Give peace a chance. Alright, I have a quote for you that may push some buttons. So a little trigger warning here. It came up in my social media feed and it’s interesting, I just love things that kind of are evocative that give me some pause that make me a little uncomfortable. Squeamish. You ready? Everyone’s like, alright. It’s not that heavy. There were so many things in the string of comments of frustration and even anger and hatred towards this reading, but it’s all about context. Most of the time we don’t have full context for what’s happening in anything, especially someone else’s life. Half the time we don’t have full context for our own life because we check out. So let’s just bring a little bit of grace into the room and then I will contextualize this as it speaks into being peace in our word. Are we practicing peace? Deep breath in exhale. Marriage is hard. Anyone seen this? Anyone know it yet?
(16:41):
Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. Choose your heart. Obesity is hard. Being fit is hard. Choose your hard. Being in debt is really hard. Being financially disciplined is really hard. Choose your hard life will never be easy. It will often be hard, but we can choose our hard, choose wisely. So take a deep breath around. That one person put in there is like, how can you say I chose hard when I had cancer? That’s not what this is saying, right? It’s not fat shaming. I’m overweight in terms of obesity or living a fit. Life is not hard. The point of this thing is that life is not easy. No in life is EZ ever. It all requires effort, willingness, intention, and practice. So what are you practicing? What is the out picturing in your life? If it isn’t peace, you’re practicing something else. You dig?
(18:01):
What if this was less about we have to choose our heart. That doesn’t feel good, right? It’s like, oh, life is just so hard. We got to choose the right heart. No, that’s not what it’s saying. But to recognize and honor that life requires us to effort into it. That’s what I took away from it. That life isn’t necessarily easy for anyone. We’ve got stories of who life is easy for, right? The 1% they got it all. No, they ain’t got nothing but just a bunch of money. I guarantee your life is richer than a lot of people that are rich. If you’ve ever read Lynn twists the Soul of Money. She talks about this relationship of going around the world, doing the hunger project, meeting some of the poorest people in Calcutta and some of the richest people with millions and billions of dollars, and they’re all walking around with heavy shit on their hearts regardless of how much money is there.
(19:07):
And actually she said some of the people that had less of the actual resources had a better way of relating to the heart in their life than those that had billions of dollars. So let us not tell ourselves a story that there’s some place, some other life that we need to live in order for it to be easier. No matter where you live, you’re going to have some challenges. But what if we met those challenges with kindness? What if we met those challenges with an intention of possibility? My question to you today is are you willing to discover peace within yourself in any relationship regardless of what the outer world is doing? Are you really willing to explore peace within yourself?
(19:56):
I thought I’d get at least one yes. Okay, just contemplate that. So, okay, let’s check this out. Are you willing to explore peace right now? Yes. Are you willing to explore peace right now? Okay. Are you willing to explore peace right now? Sometimes that’s what it takes. We don’t get to shift into neutral and just coast. You may get moments here and there may be some momentum in your life and that’s what we’re all striving for, where we can coast a little bit. But sometimes it is a moment by moment by moment practice. Sometimes you can’t do it by yourself. I find most times I can’t do it by myself. I need help. I call up a friend, I go to therapy, I pray, I meditate. This is why we talk about these practices, the tools in our life that support us to come back to some semblance of what we call center, which I’ve been looking for center. I’m at this center and I’m glad this center is here. By the way, you belong here. If you haven’t seen these shirts, you belong here. I’m glad you’re here. You’re here for a reason, not just to hear something, but to connect with all of these people, those of you online, even though you can’t do a fist bump or a high five or a hug, the fact that you can chat with someone somewhere else on the planet, it’s pretty awesome.
(21:37):
Oh my god, there’s so much more I want to talk about. All right, let’s wrap this up. Here’s one of the big things that I think could help us shift out of a state that does not promote peace. Anyone interested in shifting out of that? Okay, take this in. You’re ready. Your life is not an emergency. Your life is not an emergency. I didn’t say it’s not important, but we walk around regardless of whether or not someone just said your house is on fire or someone called you ugly. It’s the same thing. We’re like, what? And it becomes an emergency that we have to rectify in the moment. I was driving down the road with my wife. We were going somewhere and it was like rush hour time, so it was congested. And we’re listening to some tunes. It was like a couple of days ago when it was like 75, 80.
(22:55):
We were just trying to get that last minute summer vibe going on and stuff. And all of a sudden we hear, and I turn around and there’s this car behind us and this other car is trying to merge in. We were in a right turn lane and this guy is like, he’d rolled down his window and you can see the spit flying out of his mouth. He’s like, what the fuck? And he’s pointing fingers. And then the other dude gets out of his car and walks over to the window and he’s like, you come out here and the guy’s like, I’ve got you on camera. I’ve got you on camera.
(23:31):
Your life is not an emergency. All my man was trying to do was merge in. Was he maybe a little jerky in trying to cut the guy off? Okay, yeah. He forgot to merge soon enough. But if we were not in a state where everything has to be like right now, life has to be some other way. People need to behave, think, and do the things that I think are right. That’s that state of emergency. We talk about states of emergency around the world. I don’t really think any of us in this room, our life is really in a state of emergency. If it was, you wouldn’t be in this room. If you weren’t watching this, you would not be able to watch this. A true state of emergency is where basic needs are not being met in your life where you cannot function.
(24:17):
And I’m not saying there is a single level of emergency, but I’m just trying to click us back from that kind of default space of letting everything be a reason for us to explode. Your life is not an emergency. Peace is not conditional on what other people do as much as you want it to be. Reverend Amy asked last week, is inner peace possible? It is. But you got to let those people go, especially on Tuesday night. Come on. She said, oh, are you willing to practice peace? Even in the face of people that don’t believe the way you believe?
(25:06):
It’s not easy. It takes effort and willingness and intention and practice over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It is nonstop people. Alright, to wrap it up, I have a challenge for you. Anyone up for it? It’s just seven days between now and next Sunday. Every single day you are to formally practice peace. And the reason I use the word formal is that we like to be passive in what we do. We want it to be easy.
(25:57):
I’m inviting you to get disciplined, not because of anything other than your choosing to say every single day for the next seven days, I’m going to practice peace in some way. You can come back to Reverend Amy’s invitation to the wholeo. I’m sorry, I love you. Please forgive me. Thank you saying that over and over and over again. But if nothing else, we’re going to do it. We’re going to start day one right now. You ready? Breathing in. I’m at peace and I practice peace. Breathing out, I practice peace. Breathing in, I practice peace. Breathing out I practice. Say that out loud right now regardless of who hears you three times in a row, breathing in, I practice peace. Breathing out, I practice peace. Do it on your own. Two more times simple, but it requires effort, intention and a willingness. You had to be willing to get over yourself. I’m like, I don’t know all these people hearing me saying I practice peace. It’s kind of weird. Whatever, Daryl, what are you asking me to do? But you were willing. Then you put forth the effort. You took a deep breath in, a deep breath out. You said the words because you had an intention and then you did the thing. You did the thing. That was the practice.
(27:45):
And the truth of the matter is, is that practicing peace is not ideally conditional. It’s something you just do. Why? So that you develop and cultivate or to go back to that first word of habituate, you become accustomed to peace. So that when you run into a situation where peace is obviously not present, it doesn’t become an emergency. You see what I’m doing here and you all of a sudden go, oh, I do have, have a gear of peace. Let me shift into that gear. Y’all are driving me crazy. But right now I practice peace. And you stay in the room, you stay in the conversation. You don’t shut down. You don’t walk around for five more days upset at what someone did or didn’t do. You don’t have to like it. It’s one other little disconnect. We think that in order for us to be at peace, we have to like everything that’s in our world. That’s not true. And it’s not being passive and it’s not being apathetic. It’s learning to be with. Yes. Alright, let’s take this in the prayer. Take a deep breath in. Bring your hand to your peaceful heart. If that feels good to you and quietly within yourself. Go within say, I am willing, I willing to be a place where peace is realized. Today I am willing to be a champion for peace as my life.
(29:28):
I’m willing to be an activist for peace in the world. I’m willing to ask for peace not only of myself, but of all the beloveds that I walk around with in this room and my family and my friends. There is only one life happening and that is the life that we are living. There is only one life happening and that is the life that we are living and that life, it is the life of wholeness. It is a life of peace. It is not conditional. It is not sometimes spiritual and then other times not the spirit of peace is always present. Sometimes we just need to work to find it. And what I affirm today is that we are workers of peace. We bring peace into the world. We share it. It is not something to hold or to hoard. It can’t be kept in a jar or a bank account. It is something that we bring into the world. So may we all leave today’s experience filled up and overflowing with peace. A peace that truly demands of our leaders. A peace that truly asks for things of our representatives, regardless of whether or not we voted for them. We can still be active. People in this world demanding that peace be the truth and the possibility.
(31:23):
What I affirm and know is that this is not easy, but we can handle it. We can be it. We can do it. We can have it, we can share it. And I’m so grateful to know this truth. I’m so grateful to affirm this as a possibility to hold the intention high, to raise the bar of possibility for in doing so, I know it not only impacts this room and the people watching online, but it is something that sprinkles and shatters out into the world and impacts life because there is only one life and we are all sharing it. It is the life of the divine and it is our life. Now, may we all be catalysts for greater peace. May we all practice peace. And so it is.
(32:27):
Thank you Rev. Darrell.