Yesterday, while returning from visiting my family in Michigan, I listened to an audiotape of Joan Borysenko’s book, Inner Peace for Busy Women: Balancing Work, Family and Your Inner Life.

For those of you not familiar with Joan, she’s an internationally known speaker and consultant in women’s health and spirituality, integrative medicine and the mind/body connection.  Her website is www.joanborysenko.com.

Early in the book, Joan shares a poem she wrote called, “I Am a Woman Telling the Truth.”

She describes having lofty goals in her younger years to be a woman who has it all and does it all in terms of herself, family and career.  And, she shares the process of becoming a 50-something woman who accepts herself as having done the best she could to make wise choices among competing priorities. I resonated with much of the poem, which is poignant and funny.

Joan suggests that it’s unlikely we’ll ever find a stable balance among external demands while we “make a life and a living in a world that never sleeps”. Our failure to achieve that illusive goal increases that chance that we’ll find ourselves worshipping at the altar of “Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt.”

Instead, she counsels us to make inner peace our topmost priority. This peace can be gained by cultivating “powerful hearts and strong minds” that enable us escape entanglements with THOUGHTS about our lives that can lead us astray. Joan encourages us to learn “Mindfulness” as a way of staying calm and wise in the face of the cyclone of our lives and thoughts.

Let’s talk more in coming days about mindfulness and other ideas about living from wisdom and peace....

Add Your Comment