How to Find Real Peace in Life (Without Any BS)

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Finding Peace by Working With Life Instead of Against It

One thing that pops up a lot when I’m talking to people in coaching sessions is that they’re seeking a sense of peace in life:

When I dig a little deeper and ask them exactly what this means to them, it’s almost always the same thing which is basically that they want to reduce their stress, stop caring about things they know don’t really matter but can’t stop caring about, and feel like they can handle whatever happens without losing their minds so they can build flow with life instead of feeling frustrated by it all the time.

In other words, they want to feel like they’re actually living a REAL life rather than constantly fighting their way through existence.

Really, who can blame them?

Life can be a bit of a mission sometimes (to put it lightly):

There are bills to pay, relationships to navigate, responsibilities to honour, difficult decisions to make, and all manner of unexpected tosh and nonsense that can turn an otherwise pleasant Tuesday into an absolute horrorshow.

As the old saying goes, “life is one darned thing after another” and that’s only if it keeps coming (we are all going to be DEAD one day, after all).

The simple truth about life is that “it is what it is” and “we are what we are” and so there are never going to be any magic bullets or panaceas that will make all of this magically disappear:

What this means is that there’ll always be something to deal with, accept, or contend with and – even if you manage to get everything you’ve ever wanted – you’ll eventually have to deal with the reality of having it.

(For example, you finally got the new relationship but now you have somebody else’s dirty dishes and laundry in your house).

Despite all of this, though, there are absolutely positively indubitably things that we can do do to experience more peace, more of the time and it all begins with a simple change of perspective.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You find peace when you accept reality and work with it instead of against it.

What Are You Making Your Life Other Than Your Life?

Here’s a coaching question that can be surprisingly powerful when it comes to understanding why you might lack peace:

“What are you making your life other than your life?“

This might sound a little cryptic at first but bear with me and you’ll see exactly what I mean:

The basic idea to understand first and foremost is that the only ULTIMATE thing in life is our relationship with life itself.

From the perspective of Realness, this means that we’re constantly evolving towards deeper wholeness, learning to accept more of ourselves, integrating the parts we’ve rejected, and taking the real action necessary to keep this process moving.

As we become more whole, we become more integrated which means that we stop fighting ourselves, release the emotional baggage we’ve been dragging around since the dawn of time, and become increasingly capable of responding to reality as it actually is.

This is an ongoing process that continues until the day we die and so there’s no ‘final destination’ where you receive a certificate confirming that you’ve officially become a complete human being and can now spend the rest of eternity lounging about in a hammock or anything like that:

There’s always more to discover, more to accept, and more opportunities to grow – that’s just how it goes because we can always go deeper.

The important thing to remember is that when we make this process of going deeper into life and wholeness our ultimate priority above all others then life tends to take on a different quality that brings us increased purpose, meaning, and flow.

This is simply because – rather than trying to force life to ‘conform’ to some image we’ve created in our heads we’re actually learning to participate in it in alignment with the truth.

This is ‘good’ news because – as I’ve said a bunch of times on this site now – all any of us really need to do is:

Uncover the truth.
Live the truth.

And, really, this is where peace begins because:

We learn to trust ourselves to do what needs to be done and trust life to do the rest.

Or, to put it another way:

Do your best (self-trust) and let go of the rest (life-trust).

(See my book ‘Trust‘ if you want to go much deeper into this).

This doesn’t mean becoming passive, giving up on your ambitions, or sitting cross-legged in your living room waiting for the universe to deliver the winning lottery ticket that will finally solve all your problems – it means recognising the difference between what you can influence and what you can’t, taking responsibility for your side of that equation, and allowing reality to be reality.

In short, you do what you can, learn from whatever happens, adapt when and as necessary, and stop wasting your life and energy trying to control the uncontrollable bits that were never yours to control in the first place.

It’s simple (not always easy) and points us towards something important which peace isn’t something we have to manufacture:

Peace is something that becomes readily available when we stop working against ourselves and life and allow ourselves to receive what’s always being offered to us: reality.

Why We Lose Our Peace in the First Place

This way of being in ourselves and life is our natural state but we lose touch with it because of mental and emotional blocks:

We’re naturally driven towards greater wholeness, integration, and connection with life but the problem is that we pick up shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) along the way which causes us to become fragmented and split from our realness which leads to us to misperceiving ourselves, the world, and reality itself.

This creates a number of issues that keep us from our real lives:

Instead of feeling safe enough to be ourselves, we learn to hide.
Instead of accepting reality, we try to control it.
Instead of trusting ourselves, we become dependent on external circumstances to tell us whether we’re good enough, safe enough, or worthy of being here.
Instead of trusting life we fear the unknown and hold back and hesitate on doing what we know deep down needs to be done.

This all comes down to the ego which is the character we play in the Void we opened up by becoming disconnected from the truth:

In the context of Realness, the ego is the false identity that we construct to protect ourselves from the aspects of reality we’ve learned to fear or reject (including the reality of ourselves which the ego tries to force into the shadows).

For example:

We hide our anger because we’ve been taught that anger makes us ‘unlovable’.
We hide our vulnerability because we believe we must always be ‘strong’.
We suppress our ambitions because we’re afraid of being judged.
We hide our need for connection because we’ve decided that needing anybody makes us ‘weak’.
Etc. etc. etc.

The possibilities are endless but the end result is always the same: fragmentation instead of wholeness.

In other words, we’re no longer living in alignment with the truth of who we are and have chosen to try and maintain an image of who we think we need to be.

Maintaining an unreal image in this way takes energy – A LOT of energy!

You have to monitor yourself constantly, manage other people’s perceptions, suppress uncomfortable feelings so you don’t face that underlying ‘stuff’ that birthed the ego in the first place, defend your unreal decisions and choices, and keep the whole elaborate construction from falling apart.

It’s a bit like running a twenty-four-hour security operation for a building that doesn’t even exist in the first place – and then people wonder why they lack peace?!

When we’re fragmented and disconnected from ourselves and life, we’re living in what I called the Void earlier on which is a state of disconnection from truth that leaves us feeling incomplete, dissatisfied, or somehow separate from the life we’re actually living.

To make matters worse, we usually fall into the trap of mistaking the Void for the human condition itself and so we assume that feeling vaguely empty, anxious, dissatisfied, or restless is simply what being human ‘means’ and there’s just nothing we can do about it.

That’s not true, though:

These feelings can and certainly are a ‘part’ of being human, of course, but the chronic disconnection that keeps us searching for something to make us feel whole isn’t an inevitable prison sentence we have to serve.

In fact, we can do something about it.

Unfortunately, we usually try to solve the problem in precisely the wrong way…

How We Try to Fill the Void

When we’re disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life, we naturally look for something to fill the gap that opens up which means that we look for substitutes for the truth (because we don’t realise that disconnection from the truth is the core problem).

What’s interesting about this is that these ‘substitutes’ don’t necessarily have to be ‘bad’ things – in fact, they’re often things that are genuinely ‘good’.

For some people, the substitute is WORK:

They become so consumed with building a business, climbing the career ladder, or proving themselves professionally that everything else becomes secondary and so their achievements become the source of their identity and every setback feels like a threat to their very existence itself.

For others, it’s RELATIONSHIPS:

They make finding a partner, keeping a partner, or being loved by a particular person the ultimate measure of whether their lives are worthwhile or not and so their peace depends on whether somebody else is behaving exactly as their ego needs them to behave.

For some people, it’s ART whereas others become obsessed with fitness, money, spirituality, personal development, or collecting Lego or something…

The point is that it can literally be anything and – to be clear – none of these things are inherently ‘wrong’ (indeed, like we said, they’re often ‘good’ but they’re being treated as the ULTIMATE).

Work can be meaningful.
Relationships can be beautiful.
Art can be transformative.
Lego can bring joy to the people that collect it.
Etc. etc. etc.

The problems always begin when we stop treating these fragmented things as the whole of our lives and start treating them as our lives themselves.

When we treat a fragment as the whole then we end up putting it on a pedestal and make it the ultimate source of our identity, meaning, security, or worth:

In doing so, we take ourselves out of the natural process of becoming more whole and end up becoming dependent on something outside of that natural process to give us a sense of completeness that it can never permanently provide.

As you might’ve suspected, the cost of this is always the same:

OUR PEACE.

The reason for this is pretty simple:

Anything we make ultimate that isn’t life itself eventually comes into conflict with reality.

Your business might fail, your relationship might change form, your artistic work might receive criticism, and your carefully organised collection of plastic bricks might be knocked off the shelf by a visiting child with absolutely no respect for the architectural integrity of your Millennium Falcon.

Life happens and that’s perhaps all we really know for sure and – if you’ve made any of these things the foundation of your existence -then life ‘happening’ becomes a threat to your entire sense of self:

You can’t relax because there’s always something to protect or defend.
You can’t enjoy what you have because you’re terrified of losing it.
You can’t accept what happens because you’ve decided that things must happen a particular way for you to be ok.
Etc. etc. etc.

You’ve given something that can never offer you complete security the responsibility of making you feel secure in ULTIMATE ways which is just a job description that reality never agreed to and so it’s never gonna work.

(Even though REAL ALWAYS WORKS)

How to Recognise What’s Stealing Your Peace

If you feel like you’re lacking peace right now then a really good starting point is to take a moment to consider what happens when you’re alone with your thoughts.

Here are a few questions to get your noggin-a-joggin’ in that direction:

What do you tend to think about when there’s nothing to distract you?
What occupies your mind when you’re staring at the ceiling at night?
What situations do you keep replaying?
What are you worrying about losing?
What do you believe absolutely has to happen before you can finally allow yourself to relax?

Be absolutely honest with yourself as you reflect on all of this even if it’s painful in the short-term (that ‘pain’ is just emotional discomfort – which we’re all built to handle – and not literal physical danger):

You might discover that you’re preoccupied with getting somebody to love you, proving somebody ‘wrong’, achieving a particular level of ‘success‘, or finally becoming the person you think you ‘should’ have been years ago.

Ultimately, you might find yourself worrying about things that you already know – intellectually, at least – aren’t worth the energy you’re giving them and so the question will really turn to why you’re giving them that energy in the first place.

Often, the answer is that you’ve made something other than your relationship with life itself the ultimate thing – in other words, you’re treating a FRAGMENT as the WHOLE.

If so, this is just a source of unnecessary stress in your life because reality refuses to organise itself around whatever fragments you’re treating as the ‘ULTIMATE’ – no matter how much you attempt to resist the actual truth about things.

Notice that I said unnecessary stress and not all stress:

This is because some stress is just part of life that is necessary and inescapable (and so must be used as fuel for our growth) because some situations are genuinely difficult, life really does hurt sometimes, and there will often be genuine and practical problems that require your full attention.

Realness isn’t about pretending that everything is wonderful or convincing yourself that you should be happy when you’re struggling – it’s about recognising that there’s a difference between the difficulty of a situation and the additional suffering we create by insisting that reality must be different to whatever it is in its ‘is-ness’ before we can engage with it.

For example:

You can be disappointed without deciding that your life is ruined completely.
You can experience uncertainty without treating it as proof that you’re unsafe all the time.
You can lose something you love without losing your entire sense of who you are.
Most importantly, you can care deeply about something without making your entire existence dependent on it.

All of this is what becomes possible when you stop putting fragments on pedestals and tap into the whole of your life first and foremost.

Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

If you’re ready to go deeper into growing real and finding peace then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

How to Find Real Peace: Awareness, Acceptance, Action

So, how do we actually make use of all this ‘stuff’ so we can actually acquire a deeper sense of peace in life?

Well, in my coaching containers, I use a three-part process that helps people reconnect with themselves and life:

Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego).

Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow).

Action (Trust Yourself and Life).

(Really, this process is never linear and always more of a spiral because you can always go deeper into each stage but the general pathway follows these steps overall).

Let’s break down what we’ve said in this article using this framework so you can start moving forward and getting real about things.

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is always to become Aware of the stories, beliefs, and assumptions that are shaping your relationship with yourself and your experience of life as a whole.

One of the best starting points when it comes to uncovering what’s keeping you from more peace is by asking yourself the question we’ve been exploring:

“What am I making my life other than my life?“

Then it’s time to dig a little deeper:

What do you believe you need to achieve, acquire, prove, or experience before you can finally feel at peace?
What are you afraid would happen if you stopped making this thing so important?
What does it supposedly say about you if you fail, lose it, or don’t get what you want?

For example:

-You might discover that your obsession with ‘success’ is really about trying to prove you’re ‘good’ enough because of underlying shame (which is just the internalised assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am”).

-Perhaps your need to control a relationship comes from a fear of abandonment.

-Maybe your endless self-improvement projects are driven by the belief that who you are right now isn’t acceptable in some way (again, because of underlying shame).

These are the kinds of insights worth exploring but the goal is never to judge yourself for having these patterns – it’s just to see them clearly enough that you can stop mistaking them for the truth.

You don’t have to stop caring about your work, relationships, or ambitions – you simply need to stop asking them to make you whole (which is something they can never do).

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Once you become aware of what’s happening, the next step is to cultivate Acceptance of the ‘parts’ of yourself you’ve been trying to avoid or suppress and this is where shadow integration comes in.

Like we said, the shadow contains the aspects of ourselves that we’ve rejected, suppressed, or learned to hide because we believe they’re unacceptable.

Here are some common examples:

Perhaps you have anger you’ve never allowed yourself to express honestly (even though anger is a powerful emotion that protects our dignity and boundaries).
Perhaps you feel envy towards people who have what you want but you’re ashamed to admit it.
Perhaps you’re lonely, frightened, or uncertain, and you’ve spent years pretending to be completely self-sufficient.
Perhaps it’s your joy, love, or sense of abundance that’s been sent into exile because they got you in ‘trouble’ somewhere along the line.

Whatever it is – both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities that are nevertheless REAL – the more you fight these experiences, the more energy you spend maintaining your fragmented identity and destroying your own peace.

Acceptance means being willing to acknowledge what’s actually happening inside you without automatically condemning yourself for it so that you can actually feel your feelings and not become emotionally and mentally stagnant.

Again, some examples:

You can recognise jealousy without becoming a jealous person in every situation.
You can acknowledge anger without acting destructively.
You can admit that you’re frightened without making fear the final boss of your life.
Etc. etc. etc.

Ultimately, you can begin to recognise that some of the things you’ve been desperately trying to obtain were never going to resolve the underlying disconnection that led to you living your life in the Void in the first place.

The more of yourself you can bring into Awareness and Acceptance, the less you need to rely on external things to compensate for what you’ve rejected internally:

In other words, you become more integrated and so you have less to hide, less to defend, and less to prove.

And that’s a pretty good starting point for peace.

3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life

Finally, you have to put what you’ve learned into practice by taking real Action (which is the highest form of expression):

Realness isn’t just about understanding yourself but about taking the actions necessary to live in greater alignment with the truth.

Sometimes, this means having a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.
Sometimes, it means setting a boundary, admitting a mistake, changing direction, or accepting that something you’ve been chasing no longer makes sense for you.
Sometimes, it means continuing to work towards a goal while letting go of the belief that achieving it will finally make you worthy of being alive.

The important thing is to act on what you know to be true rather than allowing fear, shame, or the need for control to make your decisions for you.

This is how you develop self-trust because you learn that you can handle uncomfortable feelings, make difficult decisions, and respond to unexpected circumstances without needing to control every possible outcome in advance.

As you develop this self-trust (which is basically a ‘muscle’ you can train) then you can begin to trust life a little more, too:

You don’t need to know exactly how everything will turn out – you just need to know that you’ll keep responding to what happens as truthfully and effectively as you can.

Do your best and let go of the rest.

That doesn’t mean abandoning your responsibilities or expecting everything to work out in your favour but it does mean recognising that your responsibility is to participate in life without trying to control everything.

You’re NOT the centre of the universe (which is a peaceful thing to embrace):

You do your part.

Life does its part.

And you stop confusing the two.

Peace is found when you turn inwards and overcome the Void.

The Final Word: Peace Is What Happens When You Stop Fighting Life

Ultimately, finding peace isn’t about eliminating every uncomfortable feeling that pops up, escaping difficult responsibilities, or reaching some permanent state of bliss where nothing ever bothers you again.

Peace is about becoming more whole and learning to participate in life without constantly fighting yourself or reality.

This means that you can have peace overall whilst still experiencing still experience stress, grief, frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty.

These are part of being alive.

You don’t have to turn every difficult experience into a crisis of identity, though, or to make every outcome a verdict on your worth because you’ve put something on a pedestal that doesn’t belong there.

You don’t have to spend your entire life trying to fill a Void that ‘exists’, in large part, because you’ve become disconnected from the very thing you’re trying to find:

Indeed, the way out is to return to the truth about yourself and life which you can do by becoming Aware of the ego structures that keep you disconnected, by cultivating Acceptance and integrating the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding, and taking the real Action that allow you to trust yourself and life a little more deeply every day.

You’ll never reach a point where there’s nothing left to learn, but you can reach a point where you no longer need everything to be perfect before you allow yourself to live.

I guess all of this is to say that if you’re seeking more peace in your life then don’t immediately rush off to download another meditation app, book a retreat in Bali, or buy a £400 crystal ball that supposedly harmonises your nervous system with the frequency of the moon.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with meditation, retreats, or crystals and so if something helps you relax then enjoy it but don’t mistake the tool for the truth.

Instead, start with our question:

“What are you making your life other than your life?“

Whatever your answer is, try taking it off the pedestal and learn to let it be something you care about rather than something you need to be whole.

And get on with living.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to take your unreal life off of the pedestal and to start building something real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to build some real flow.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.

It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.

Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.

This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).

Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.

The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.

Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.

Real Always Works

Finding Peace by Working With Life Instead of Against It

Finding Peace in Life: What We'll Cover In This Article

What Are You Making Your Life Other Than Your Life?

Why We Lose Our Peace in the First Place

How We Try to Fill the Void

How to Recognise What’s Stealing Your Peace