Depressed In Paradise – What It Taught Me About Inner Peace

What if the place you thought would make you happy... didn’t?

In this short personal reflection, I share a strange lesson I learned from two very different periods of my life - one spent living somewhere noisy, polluted, hot and chaotic, where I felt genuinely peaceful and happy, and another spent somewhere close to paradise, where I felt completely miserable.

It taught me something I’ve never forgotten: our circumstances matter, but they don’t have as much control over our inner world as we sometimes imagine.

This short wisdom talk explores inner peace, happiness, mindfulness, meditation, self-reflection and the search for a deeper sense of calm that doesn’t depend on everything around us being perfect.

A simple reminder that the peace we keep looking for outside ourselves may be something we need to cultivate within. Let me know if this resonates with you and if you'd like to hear more of my personal discoveries.

Shared in my natural British male voice.

Transcript

I once lived somewhere that was really noisy, Polluted, Ridiculously hot and full of mosquitoes. I was sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor in the lounge. There was no air conditioning. You could say I was living in hell. But at the time I was really peaceful. And I was really happy. Sometime after that I found myself in what you might call paradise. It had the whole white sandy beach, Blue sky, Crystal clear ocean and. . . And I was miserable. I was really down. And it made no sense to me at the time. I kept thinking, Look where you are. You should be happy. How can you be depressed in paradise? But now, As we do in retrospect, I see it all really clearly. And it's taught me something I'll never forget. Looking back, What was different wasn't really where I was. It was what was going on inside me. When I was living in hell, I was spending time every day meditating, Introspecting, Reading, Meditating more. And it makes sense now that it was all of that that was giving me a real strength and an inner peace in the midst of all the mayhem around me. And of course our external circumstances matter, But they don't have nearly as much control over our inner world as I always used to imagine. You can spend your whole life trying to arrange everything outside yourself perfectly, So that you'll finally feel that deep lasting peace inside. But I'm increasingly convinced that it works the other way round. The more peace you can find inside yourself, The less you need everything outside of you to be perfect.

Reviews

Agree, Agree ••••> 💯percent!

[Kindly pardon the length of this response.] I found myself in this same sort of counterintuitive upside down. It hit me in the wild bushland of the North Island of mighty New Zealand, as found myself spending days of solitude tramping up and down the hilly region, cleaning out rat traps in a 50,000-acre kiwi nature preserve.
Yes. Dead invasive Norwegian rat carcasses.
In an *actual* race against the rats(!).

But somehow, a peace came over me for a period of time there, doing that menial job, a peace that I am still attempting to realize internally, by targeting the inner beginner’s mind—regardless of outer conditions, amenities, income, situations, and locales.

During the vollie expedition, I had just come from being intensively trained and then working as a professional, erm, let’s say, “master paper custodian,” sitting behind a massive desk, reviewing and crafting and consulting and canvassing for new clients. But after just five years of that well-paying, higher-status career, I slammed on the brakes, tossed all possessions into storage, zipped overseas with a large backpack, and committed myself to a half-year of doing paid volunteer environmental restoration work.

Towards the end of my self-imposed overseas tour of duty, I recall how much I wanted to continue that nearly thankless, admittedly sometimes gross, labor-intensive work—yes; instead of returning to the States and having to jump back onto the ol’ hamster wheel, as was expected, joining the *actual* rat race once more. Would I continue to experience that nagging feeling of being empty, unfulfilled, and uninspired? Time would tell…

Like you, I too gradually came to understand that it’s about getting the inner workings sorted towards equanimity, and not trying to be the general manager of the universe—demanding, grasping, straining because the outside world just had to be arranged to such a point that, only then, could one experience contentment and peace after seeking it •outside• of the self.

Kudos! Appreciated your story—and, more importantly, your sharing the very sagest of life lessons learned! 🙏🏼☮️✌🏼