Practicing Peace

What if peace isn’t something you find, but something you practice until it feels like home? We open the door to calm by looking at the small, repeatable rhythms that shape our days and, over time, retrain our minds and bodies from hurry to steadiness. Along the way, a remarkable story sets the tone: a group of Buddhist monks walked 2,300 miles for peace, step after deliberate step. Their message echoes across traditions—peace is already within you, and returning to it takes intention.

We move from winter’s density toward spring’s gentler light and ask how habits carve our inner landscape. You’ll hear practical, human-sized ways to build a life that feels grounded: setting phone boundaries that protect attention instead of draining it; a journaling cadence that pairs daily notes with monthly and quarterly check-ins; and a compassionate system for remembering who to pray for and when to reach out. We talk about “praying the saints,” honoring civic and cultural figures like Rosa Parks, Barbara Bush, and Eleanor Roosevelt as we seek wisdom and a deeper respect for one another.

We also share two centering practices that meet you where you are: reading the Bible in a year with grace for detours, and learning a simple chant—think of “om” as a cousin to “amen”—to gather scattered thoughts and settle the breath. For a cozy contemplative ritual, we make the case for a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle by a window, with a notepad nearby. Sorting edges and colors becomes a meditation on order rising from chaos, a quiet reminder that small acts of care assemble a steadier life.

If these rhythms spark something, stay with us. Try one practice today and notice what shifts. Then tell a friend, subscribe for more gentle guidance, and leave a review so others can find their way to everyday peace with us.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

Transcript

Shifting From Winter To Spring

Autopilot Habits And The Nervous System

Peace As A Practice We Choose

Monks’ 2,300-Mile Peace Walk

Everyone Has Peace Within

Phones, Tools, And Intentional Use

Journaling For Connection And Prayer

Praying The Saints For Guidance

Reading The Bible In A Year

Chanting As A Centering Practice

Cozy Contemplation And Puzzles

Blessing From Numbers And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome back to the Create Harmony Podcast. And this is a space that we settle into an intentional rhythm. We slow our minds down, we soften our bodies, and we try to remember that peace isn't something you find, it's something that you practice. And that practice comes not just when life is calm, but right in the middle of full schedules and loud thoughts and busy minds. Here we save our life's blessings and we practice stillness and gratitude. We like to use our imagination as a way of listening to God, and we like to create space to notice what's gentle and good and guiding right within us. So if you're longing to bring more calm into your everyday life, you are going to find a lot here that you love. And if you enjoy being creative and playful along the way, you've found your place here too. In these next few minutes, together, we're gonna celebrate everyday joys, we're gonna notice goodness that's all around us and return to the practice of peace. So this is episode 161, and I'm your host, Sally Burlington. So last week we wrapped up our winter well-being series. This is what we do every winter. We've talked about the fact that winter is not my favorite season, and during cold, dark days, it's good to really shift your focus towards ways to be cozy and feel shorter up and cared for during the winter season. So even though we still experience some winter days where I live, I live in North Carolina, we are gonna set our sights on springtime. We're ready for some spring conversations and spring thoughts. And we're starting to have some slightly longer days. Some days the temperature even gets a little warmer. And as we begin to make these transitions, I just thought it would be a good idea for us to talk about how our rhythms and routines affect our lives. So so much of my life, a lot of my days, if I am not careful, I will live on autopilot. I wake up, I move through the day, I do my things, here we go, I do the same habits. I don't even realize that they're habits, and then I repeat the next day. But those rhythms and routines do shape the life that I live. It's shaping how I feel, how I think, how I move through the world. And when my days are really rushed, then my nervous system learns how to feel rushed and hurried and gets used to that as being the norm. And when my days make a little bit more room for stillness, a little bit more room for gratitude and for calming down, then my body can learn how to rest. My body learns that pattern as well. So this is an invitation. This conversation is just an invitation for us to all gently look at the patterns that we live with all the time and to try to be intentional about those patterns and maybe choose a rhythm or add a rhythm that creates more peace that creates a little bit more presence and really focuses on what really matters. So this winter, one of the reasons we're doing this, one of the things that sort of sparked me revisiting the idea that peace is a practice is that this winter there was a group of monks that walked from Fort Worth, Texas all the way to Washington, D.C. And that is a distance of 2,300 miles. And yes, I said they walked. They walked day after day after day over the course of several months. And the reason that they walked was for peace. It was not a protest walk, it was a peace walk. And all along the way, people began to follow them and kind of walk alongside. I was fortunate that they came through our town. I did talk about it in a bonus episode a few weeks ago. I got to go and see them when they came through. And I found that the energy of the monks, it's really stayed with me. Like that experience of seeing them being so dedicated to this practice, to choose this practice. I'm sure that they had things on their calendar during the many, many days that they were walking to DC, but they decided to elevate the practice of peace to the very top of their list and just stay at it. But they walked through blizzards. They walked through ice. So there this group of months, they had a leader who was the kind of the speaker when they got to all of their stops. And I was able to see him when they came through our town. And I also was able to see him. We I watched it on TV when they went to the National Cathedral in DC. And his message was essentially the same both times. And it's what has stayed with me. It's the message that they carried across all of those miles. And here's what they said everyone has peace within themselves. And it is important to practice and be intentional about rediscovering that peace. So these monks were Buddhists, and I am not a Buddhist, I'm a Christian. But what these monks and I have in common is that our habits and our patterns are the way we connect to peace. Peace is a practice, not a destination. And I felt like we needed to dwell on that just a little bit more here today. It's not something you can buy, it's not something you accomplish. It's not something you take from someone else. No one else gets to truly control your peace without your permission. So as I said earlier, your life is shaped by rhythms, not big moments, not those major celebrations, but the small repeated habits that you do all the time. And your practice becomes a pattern. What you repeat every day becomes your lived reality. And so we have to be intentional about making those choices and we create more space for peace if we factor those habits in and make peace a practice. So most for most of us, if you are like me at all, our daily rhythms all involve a lot of time on our phones. And that's okay. It's fine. It's great to have our phones. Our phones have a lot of advantages and and invite us into a world that is wonderful. However, we have to also be intentional about using this tool and not letting that tool use us. So for myself, I'm trying to be more intentional and focus more on my own practices of peace this year. So I thought that now that we've had this sort of overarching discussion about peace being a practice, I thought I might share some of my favorite peace practices, the things that I'm using right now that are bringing me more peace. And maybe that'll spark an idea for you and you can factor in one of those rhythms into your day. Now, if you've listened for a while, you know that I like to journal quite a bit. I'm a journal person. I have several different versions of a journal. I have one that allows for sort of a monthly and quarterly check-in in addition to a daily journal. And I do not write in that journal every day. I mean, please do not think that I'm writing in it every single day, but I like to have that option available because I like to be able to have those touch points. I've been writing a little something almost every day for most of this year. The past couple of days, I've been a little busier, but I like to kind of jazz up this process, make it a little bit more creative by getting some stickers and things that make it pretty because that just brings me a little spark of joy and it sort of brings me back. And I also like to write things and people that I'm praying for in there, things that I need to check in about. Like if someone tells me that they have something big coming up, they're going to have a big interview or a surgery or something important that's coming up. I try to write it ahead in my journal so that when that day rolls around, I can check in with them and say, oh gosh, how was that big interview or that big celebration you have? And it helps me stay connected to the people that I love. So journaling is a big piece practice for me. And so if that's something that you think might work for you, just think about how it folds into your life naturally. For me, it's natural for me to want to check in and look at my big view of my life on a monthly and quarterly basis, sort of the big hits, and then have something that I can write day to day to day and get a little more granular if I choose to do that. Another piece practice that I have is what I call praying the saints. So I've formed a list of people who have helped the creation of our nation into the wonderful country it is today. And these are all people who've passed away, but they're all people who made a significant contribution to our nation's heritage. And I've tried to include people from both political parties, from both genders, and from as many different ethnic backgrounds as I could think of. So I've tried to compile this list. They're not all, some of them are politicians, they're not all politicians, some of them are people that were famous for other reasons. So I've compiled the list and I printed it out on a sheet and I put it at the front of my journal. So then I take time and put in my calendar some time for me to sit down and sort of connect back to those people, call to them and help them intercede and guide us, sort of the energy that they brought forth when they were on this earth. I want them to intercede and help us make choices for our future. I call to them to help us understand each other better. I ask them to help us learn how to respect one another more deeply. And I just connect with the energy that they imparted when they lived on this earth. And now these are people like Rosa Parks and Barbara Bush and Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, all different kinds of people, but I just feel like each of them made a significant contribution. And I try to reconnect ourselves and our national psyche to that energy. So that's what that's a peace practice for me. Pray, what I call praying the saints. And my next peace practice is just something that I've been trying this year, and it is an initiative that our church is doing on the whole, and it's reading the whole Bible. I've never read the whole Bible all the way through, certainly participated in lots of different Bible studies. But the Bible is not something that I'm an expert on. And I so I decided to accept this challenge, and I was doing really well. I was sticking with it and reading every single day. I got a little behind last week as I had an extra busy week and I did some traveling. And so I'm a few days behind where everybody else isn't reading it. But that's okay. I'm gonna catch myself up. I'm gonna stick with it. There have been some books of the Bible. I mean, we we started at the beginning, started in Genesis. Let me tell you, when I got into Numbers and Leviticus, it was it was a discipline. That's what I can say about that. It was, you know, really having to dig deep because there were lots of parts of that that I felt like I'm not sure how to relate to all these different descriptions of personal discharge and war and all the different things. But I don't have to answer all my questions about the Bible in the year for me to read it in a year. So the initiative is for me to read it and to try to let God speak to me through that through the word. And so I am doing that. And I would challenge you to do the same. You can find an app or a book or all sorts of different things to give you the chance to read the Bible in a year. So my next peace practice is that I have a very dear friend who is also a Buddhist, like the monks, and one of her peace practices is chanting. And now, before you tune me out, that might not be something that's comfortable to you. That might seem a little woo-woo, but let me remind you that there are lots of Christians that also chant. Chanting is basically just repetitive prayers that usually have some sort of melody that go with them. And so she's created some videos. Um, she's done these videos on YouTube that really are invitational and share tips and instructions on how to chant. So if you're not familiar with it, let me tell you a little bit about what she says in her video. And I'm going to be including some of her videos in my upcoming newsletters and talking about this a little bit more because I think she does a great job of inviting everyone into the experience. So she teaches you how to chant the own sound, like A-U-M-OM. And ohm in Eastern traditions is used as a vibrational practice. It's a way to settle your body and kind of focus your mind. It's most similar, we as Christians or Jewish people can relate to it in our most similar way by thinking about the word amen. Amen is a spoken word of trust. It's a way of saying, this is true, or so be it, may it be so, which is something that I like to say a lot. So she does an excellent job of making this practice accessible as a way of connecting to what she calls your heart of hearts. So I've been listening to her videos and chanting the um sound with her as a way of centering myself and bringing my energy back to a more centered and calm place. And it has really been a very deep peace practice and helped me um connect with God, the God that is within me, and the God that lies within everyone else. So if you want to learn more about that, then I'm gonna include at least one of her videos in an upcoming newsletter. So if you're not already a subscriber to our newsletter, you can go to mycreateharmony.com and subscribe, and you can be looking for that. Maybe you want to add that into your peace practices. Now, if you've been around for a while, you've heard me talk about the fact that I like meditation and contemplative practices. I'm really into cozy habits, and especially those, my favorite kinds of cozy habits is something that combines beauty and creativity with some time to think and process. That's how it becomes a contemplative practice. And I'm not going to go through all of my cozy habits here, but I will mention that I am a super big fan of a jigsaw puzzle. And this winter I've been going all out on my puzzling. I love to put together a puzzle. I've gotten myself some new ones, and we've had several big snowstorms, and just being inside and doing my puzzles during the snow has been great. This is how it works for me. I've said before, I have a puzzle table. It has a view of out a window, and I'm able to just sit there and I sort my puzzle pieces into colors. Like when at the beginning of when I open a new puzzle, I sort into a tray of edge pieces, and then I have a tray of, you know, pink or purple or yellow or whatever the colors that are in the puzzle predominantly, I sort them into different things. I prefer a 500-piece puzzle, one that is in the category of medium hard, so it's not like super, super challenging, so that it allows me the head space to also think and process things. I keep a notepad and a pen right beside where I do my puzzle. So I can jot down a note, make a drawing, whatever I want to do. If I'm thinking through things, it just sort of gives my mind just enough to do to distract it from the spin, the, you know, getting into a spiral, but not so much to do that I can't process my life, come up with new ideas, think through things. And it really helps me reinforce the idea that I can find order from chaos. That's what I love the most about puzzles, is that when life fills of really, really chaotic puzzles are a reminder that there is some order that can be found, and that is calming to me. So you might give that a try if that works for you, or some other kind of creative endeavor like that, it will make you be able to calm your mind and find more peace. So those are an overview of my current favorite peace practices, and maybe something I said triggered an idea for you, or something you want more of in your life. As inspired by the monks, you can say to yourself, today will be my peaceful day. So for our closing today, I'm gonna give you a blessing. And this blessing is from the book of Numbers. So it's part of the Bible reading that I've been doing. And to me, it's the very best part about numbers, because a lot of what's in numbers is very a lot of numbers, actually. It's a lot of shekels and whatnot. But this blessing resides within there, and I think it's very beautiful. It's probably gonna be familiar to a lot of you, and the blessing goes. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. May it be so. Thanks so much for joining us today as we discussed all these different practices of peace and the importance of practicing peace. Hope you'll come back next week as we continue on our discussions about calming, peaceful, joyful living. And until next time, peace.