A Path to Inner Peace

Inspired by "Grill a Christian" June prompt

When I saw the prompt, I wasn't sure if I was suited to speak about inner peace, as I'm riddled with all sorts of anxieties. Still, I wrote a draft and thought I’d finish it later if I had some time. Well, life told me, ‘worry no more, I’ll give you some time to think about it,’ when it sent me to the ER. I’m fine, thankfully. But while lying there, surrounded by pain, agitation, and beeping machines, I found myself thinking about inner peace. That draft turned out to be a personal reminder, as it started with the idea that I could find peace amid the surrounding chaos:

« Inner peace is often described as a destination, freedom from suffering and disturbance. It’s given many faces, all forms of pain management through control: comfort, relief, safety, numbness, denial, pleasure. But if inner peace could only be found in the absence of suffering, then death would be the only path to it, because pain and disturbance are woven into the very fabric of life.
Life is movement, unpredictability, contradiction. Life is a world of opposites, a place people try to shape in their own image.
It's a raging storm, a chaotic sea. To promise inner peace through control of life is to promise an illusion: control is not peace, it's fear in disguise.

***
Inner peace isn’t escape from the storm. It’s the ship that carries you through it: through the noise, the loneliness, the pain, the absurdity. The goal isn’t to avoid suffering but to go through it without capsizing.
Our nervous system is the hypervigilant, reactive crew on deck. It's designed to pick up every signal of chaos: a finely tuned alarm system, sensing the silence after a slammed door, hunger, heartbreak, betrayal, excruciating pain. But without a leader, the crew screams over each other, echoing the surrounding storm. Their voices become noise. The ship cracks from within, steered into walls, jolted by every wave.

***
Too often, we are vessels without captains, adrift in life’s chaos. Our internal alarms blare through the tempest, triggered as the world wires us for doom: negative news, social pressure, comparison, economic instability, disconnection, the grind of work-life imbalance. In response, the same world throws us lifeboats labeled peace: sedation, escapism, algorithmic manipulation, and nature commodified. Repackaged control. Placebos for peace, leaving us with unhealthy coping.
Amid the confusion, neuroscience offers tools to steady the crew: breath regulation, reframing thought, soothing the body. These are real aids, but without deeper anchors, even effective methods risk becoming hollow rituals. Tools without meaning are maintenance without direction.

***
Meaning is the anchor that holds the ship steady through life’s storms. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, understood this deeply and developed ‘logotherapy’ based on one fundamental truth: meaning gives rise to resilience, the strength needed to endure, and together they create the foundation for inner peace. The anchor we root meaning in is deeply personal.

Many of us find an anchor in humanist values. In reason, virtue, love, human nature, or the greater good. But for me, anchoring ourselves to humanity is risky because humanity is defined by constant change. I have seen reason weaponized, love twisted into dominance or perversion and rebranded as freedom, virtue used to justify war, cruelty and silence. Humanity is beautiful, brilliant, and contradictory. We change our minds, betray, lie to ourselves. We seek love one day and call it hate the next. For some, anchoring in humanity brings peace. But for others, like me, any anchor based solely on us is sinking as no universal morality escapes corruption, no absolute ideal remains unfractured. Lately, AI has only strengthened my view that humanity isn't a solid anchor. AI is a mirror that reflects our contradictions, our blind spots, our distortions. It learns from our worst patterns as much as our best—warm on paper, cold in practice. There’s no real understanding behind it, just reflection.
The best anchor for inner peace must offer what humanity can't: it must be immutable, steady, reliable, eternal. It must hold when everything fractures, not collapse under contradiction, not mutate into its opposite, and not depend on conditions to stay true. »

For me, the only anchor that holds is God but I understand that for others, God can feel like the very chaos shaking the vessel of humanity: unanswered prayers, injustice, and despair have left spiritual wounds, raising the question of whether there’s anything left to trust for meaning.

For those shaped by trauma, trust feels like danger. The crew on deck learns to expect threat even in moments of calm. It mistakes chaos for safety and attachment becomes erratic: clinging too tightly or detaching completely. Rebuilding trust after this wiring takes healing and reframing.

The child I was grew up in a world where “trust me” often meant disappointment or worse. Trust felt like consenting to betrayal and I only found peace when I was in control. I learned of God through unreliable teachers and silent judges speaking in His name. Their voices drowned His and gave me fear. Prayer was taught to me like an audition I’d fail unless it ended in bleeding knees. Their silence meant punishment, so God’s silence started to feel like rejection. Soon, God became a source of uncertainty. Like Jeremiah, I'd say “You are to me like a deceptive brook, like waters that fail.” Without an anchor to trust, I was left wandering a man-made hell, echoing David’s lament, “Where is your God?” He had forsaken me. Like many, I turned to other paths, ones that promised meaning without God.

***
I joined movements that promised salvation through activism. Well-meaning but scattered actions pulling in different directions. It lead me through paths of existentialist atheism, of absurdism, and eventually, teetering on nihilism’s edge: no meaning, no inherent purpose, no point even in pursuit. Amid nothingness, some affirmed that death would be the end but even that anchor was too much for me to trust: what if death wasn't the terminus? I kept walking, until another path led to spiritual detachment. Variations of some call “letting go”—from Chinese Wu Wei to the Law of Attraction. The latter eventually brought me back to God.

It started with voices rising in the digital world, where isolation was called “protecting your peace” and delusion was dressed as “the solution.” Spiritual language sprinkled with science promised never fearing the storm again, urging me to “let go” and give it to the Universe, to energy, to a higher self—to a shapeless, self-serving entity that shifts with each speaker. Soon, self-worship masqueraded as peace as they preach variations of the same mantra: « You are God. »

People clung to spiritual charlatans, indebting themselves to be taught peace of mind through manifesting their desires. Neville Goddard was a mystic who decoded scripture with New Age gloss: to him, it is all metaphor and God is found in human imagination. Amid his biblical references, I heard the phrase that snapped me out of the illusion: “You cannot serve two masters.” Goddard meant to use these words to illustrate the functioning of our God-like power but these words spoke a different truth to me: are you really serving God or humanity cosplaying as Him?

From celebrities like Kanye declaring himself Yeezus to Esther Hicks, who claims to channel a God-like entity named Abraham, the whole world had become sirens with god complex, luring desperate ships with promises of fulfillment and peace, vying for our lost souls.

***
In order to restore my trust in God, I had to restore His image first: He doesn't promise peace through the manifestation of our desires but from surrendering to a will more trustworthy than our own. God does not offer peace through the fulfillment of humanity’s but by calling humanity into His: ‘Not my will but Yours be done’—a cornerstone in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike.

The God I’m talking about is the one revealed through the Abrahamic traditions, but who is not reducible to our theologies, control systems, or cultural projections. Through these revelations, He provided a glimpse of His will although His reasons remain, at times, beyond us.

Surrender is both inevitable and intentional. It doesn’t always look like a noble decision : it can feel more like a brutal collapse of control and peace is less about achieving surrender and more about recognizing it’s already happening and deciding who you’ll hand the wheel to. Trust happens as a quiet, defiant choice: to reach out instead of flinch.

God is an anchor that is infinite, transcendent, and ultimately beyond full comprehension. He is not an anchor I can control, predict, or manipulate into karma-like equations. He is not the God of tidy formulas or transactional blessings. He is the God who answered Job not with explanations, but with presence. The God who does not always prevent suffering but who holds meaning inside it. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

He often meets us amid confusion with an invitation to throw the anchor: not into certainty, but into Him. Ultimately, no one can hand me permission to trust. No institution, no doctrine, no teacher, not even humanity can bypass that leap. At some point, faith is the choice to make Him the guide of my inner peace.

***
To me, Jesus is the clearest picture of what it looks like for humanity to be anchored in God. His peace wasn’t defined by comfort or control, but by contradiction: adored and rejected, powerful and vulnerable, extraordinary and human. Yet he stayed steady even as everything around him collapsed.
If inner peace is the ship that stays afloat: the crew (emotions, nervous system), the captain (conscious direction, trust), and the anchor (a source of meaning) then Jesus held all three in alignment. He wept, grieved, sweat blood, felt anguish and agony, but it didn’t steer the ship. He chose, prayed, and trusted, even when that trust led him into suffering. He never promised calm seas, only presence in the storm. When he slept through it, it wasn’t indifference: it was trust. His peace didn’t come from controlling the sea, but from knowing who holds it.

***
Enduring inner peace is the fruit of alignment. It is a rootedness requiring both spiritual surrender and embodied discipline: when our desires, thoughts, and actions serve the same master, the anchor. It isn’t found outside us but shaped within by what we dwell on, who we trust, and what we orient toward. Peace is the continual reappraisal of reality and reorientation of the heart toward meaning and grace amid life’s contrasts.

This kind of peace is desperately needed today because the modern mental health crisis is a crisis of meaning. We’re wired for connection and purpose, but live in chaos, comparison, and contradiction—chasing counterfeits: comfort, control, distraction. But they’re momentary silences, none of these hold when suffering returns.

Inner peace begins with how we care for the nervous system: the crew must be trained to respond, not react. Overusing distractions and sedatives dulls its ability to self-regulate—offering short-term calm but weakening long-term resilience. Neuroscience backs this with tools that often echo ancient practices: prayer, meditation, and gratitude.

Life is contrast and so are anchors. They’re deeply personal. The paths I've been, though they didn’t hold for me, they weren’t without truth. As Rumi wrote, each of us holds a piece of the truth but only God holds the whole. Even in the systems I eventually left, I found fragments of light. I still wrestle with God’s image through humanity, because for all its chaos and contradiction, it reflects pieces of Him. I’m just one soul, in a world of souls, each seeking ground beneath the waves.

For me, when the storm howls and the crew panics, enduring inner peace is turning toward the steady voice cutting through the noise that says: “Be still, and know that I am God.”