When we look around us, we see a world that is full of opposites and apparent contradictions. These opposites are evident throughout our existence. Male and female, positive and negative, light and dark, hot and cold, up and down, peace and war, birth and death, attraction and repulsion, north and south, hard and soft, yes and no, black and white, night and day, sound and silence are but a few examples of these opposing factors. It is the yin and yang of life.

The interesting thing is that all the opposing forces are complimentary. They are in fact one thing, not two. Could there be male without female or female without male? Could there be birth without death or death without birth? Both are required in order for physical life to exist. The two opposing forces arise simultaneously. One implies the other and one inevitably leads to the other. They are in reality just two sides of one coin.

While we are experiencing life, we are guaranteed to encounter both the bright and dark sides of nature. However, we have a tendency to pursue pleasure and try to avoid pain at all costs. We seek to experience the positive without the negative, happiness without sadness, success without failure. But is this searching really bringing us any closer to the truth or is it just leading us off on another illusive quest?

The fact is that we will always experience both pleasure and pain, positive and negative for as long as we live. It is simply not possible to eliminate the negative side of life. Light cannot exist without darkness. Hatred would not exist without love. In the same way, positive does not exist without negative and pleasure is not possible without pain. So expecting to only experience one side of the equation, to live a life of pleasure without pain, positive without negative, happiness without sadness will only lead to disappointment, frustration and suffering.

Life is just not design that way. The more we resist the nature of life with its ups and downs, the more suffering we create for ourselves and those around us. The only way to have lasting peace and fulfilment in life is to accept, love and embrace both sides. When we learn to embrace all our life experiences and love all that we perceive as negative, we attain a new level of wisdom and understanding about life and experience a new quantum of peace and joy. When we stop trying to change the outside world and eliminate the negative side of life and instead shift our focus to learning to accept and embrace what is going on in the outer world we access a state of inner peace, joy and love which persists regardless of our outer circumstances.

If we are ever going to experience greater levels of peace in life, we need to accept that the outer world is going to continue to be made up of positive and negative, pleasurable and painful, peaceful and violent events because it is designed that way. All these opposites are part of the perfection. They are necessary for the evolution of the individual. So if you are waiting for the outer world to change before you can be at peace, you will be waiting for eternity. The outer world doesn’t need to change for you to have peace. You only need to change yourself. It is by loving what it is, as it is, that we attain a state of inner peace

In fact, the inner peace you are seeking is already present; it is in your heart, waiting to be discovered. The only thing that stands between you and that inner peace is your choice to embrace only the pleasurable, positive sides of life and not to recognise the imperfections that come with it. Recognise that life will always be two-sided and peace shall be with you always.