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My Profound Experience with Inner Peace & Consciousness

Mike L
Experience submitted by Mike L

My first experience of true and profound inner peace took place after I had been taking Belsebuub’s online courses for around 9 months or so.

Going for a Walk

I had gone on plenty of walks before to practice awareness, having small glimpses of inner peace, amidst a slew of emotions and mind chatter, but even then, I would mostly be thinking about being aware instead of being aware.

Around the time of the experience, I had recently learned more advanced techniques of self-discovery, and I was understanding better how to use awareness which led me to have a greater capacity to fight off my different thoughts and emotions and to clear them. And with this greater set of tools at my disposal, I went for a walk one evening.

I left the residence hall, where I was staying. It was a Friday night, and many of the students were having parties and enjoying themselves. I took my leave to go out into the night and search for peace.

The walk began as any other, with my battling my mind. All sorts of thoughts were attacking me. I observed them as best I could, working to achieve a clear inner state, not getting caught up with them. Emotions churned within me, some very heavy ones, which I began to break free of. This also lead to a clearer mind. But I still wasn’t really experiencing inner peace.

Each time I observed a negative state and got out of it, I seemed to stay locked in my mind thinking about what might come next, as opposed to “being there” with my five senses as well.

Making an Extra Effort to Experience the Moment

I reached my usual turnaround spot and I could have returned back to my room, having done a little practice and having minor results, but I decided I’d keep going. Instead of turning around, I turned a corner and kept walking.

Public domain image found on Pexels. (Image has been modified)
Public domain image found on Pexels. (Image has been modified)

In this next phase of my walk, I built upon what I had been learning in my walk to that point in observing and clearing emotional states, but I also put in an extra effort to try to experience the world around me with my senses. It was not easy to sustain this effort, but I kept with it, achieving small, perhaps half-second flashes of basic inner peace when I felt perceptive of my environment and didn’t have some sort of inner state taking over me.

I continued my walk, by now having nearly tripled my normal walk time, and I sustained my level of intensity. Although having these flashes, perhaps several per minute, was nice, I knew I could go deeper.

By now I was building a nice momentum and had reached a point where I could catch the thoughts and emotions as they arose and clear them, without being taken away first, and this took me to longer and longer periods of sustained clarity, maybe a second or two at a time. It was towards the end of my walk, as I walked down the final block back to my residence, beside some other apartments, that I had the greatest success.

I took a step, like any other, and cleared an inner state, then my next step was like walking into paradise. As I took that step, a deep wave of peace fell over me, like none I’d ever known before.

My whole body felt light, almost like I was floating a little bit, and I was aware of the movement of every muscle down to how my elbows moved and how I breathed. I could hear sounds off in the distance, but my surroundings were quiet.

My vision was suddenly expanded as I not only saw the lights of the apartments and the parked cars in the street, but I could somehow perceive the stars in the night sky above my head where I wasn’t even looking. Time seemed not to exist, at least that’s the feeling I got.

And even more amazingly was that I felt like I wasn’t “just” a body, but the consciousness manifesting within it, and I felt a strong and profound spiritual strength within… I was truly in ecstasy, just walking.

Shortly before the end of the block, a thought crossed my mind and knocked me out of that blissful paradise. I then came back to fighting for this inner peace, with a much more limited perception.

I crossed the street and walked across a big field to return to my dorm, and the experience began to sink in slowly: how amazing it was to be conscious! And how empty the experience of normal life felt, by comparison. Gone was that amazing clarity and peace. In came emotions and thoughts.

Although it was not as long as I would have liked, the experience was profoundly impactful upon me as I could see there was a lot more depth to awareness than brief bouts of clarity: tapping into consciousness and the feelings of the essence through awareness can bring about highly spiritual perceptions and experiences, the likes of which are scarcely experienced in day-to-day living. Being able to achieve that sort of state permanently, I  believe, is a truly worthy aspiration.

15 comments
  • What a nice experience Mike. What really stood out to me is that you had such a great will to go deeper into awareness. It is amazing how it always works out when we decide to put that extra effort in.

  • I think tripled your normal walk time, made things work better for you Mike. Because I can see to myself when coming back from a walk I don’t have something profound to declare and feeling disappointed, I want the last minutes which left to make a difference, which of course is not possible.
    Your example is another proof how persiviarance is important in order to have an outcome.
    Thanks for sharing!

  • Hi Mike, thanks for the reminder of the little glimpses of the truly spiritual we can tap into when we make the effort. Like you described, it can sometimes only last a split second, but it’s so worth it. The warmth and the connection with everything around us that comes with those experiences is really amazing. I have had similar results when I managed to keep a reasonable level of awareness throughout the day and later went for a walk. The sustained effort seems to be key in having breakthroughs. If that’s not the case and I’ve let my mind wonder all day, then those walks almost feel like an uphill battle with my mind and emotions. Hopefully the weather warms up a little over here, so it’s not too cold to go for a walk. After reading your experience, I too look forward to my next outing 🙂

  • It was really nice and inspiring to read your experience Mike. How you continued without expectations or without getting frustrated, just trying your best to feel the consciousness and not fall into thoughts or emotions, and then getting this beautiful surprise gift 🙂 What you felt sounds amazing.

    It makes me think back to the times when I was taking the courses and going for lots of walks and trying my best to explore awareness and consciousness. Like you, it was also a problem for me for a long time to detach from my mind, stop thinking about awareness or my inner states but just make the pure effort to be clear and perceive. I want to get back to the level of effort I had then. To forget about my past disappointments, expectations, beliefs about whether or not I can do this etc. but just make that pure effort, because that is what it comes down to.

    You took another step and there was paradise… This makes me remember how the divine is with us all the time, knows what we are doing and thinking, and are ready to offer these glimpses of a more spiritual way of life as soon as we get there by our work.

    • Thank you for sharing that perspective, Laura, a perspective that I, too, feel: on the need to forget about past disappointments and expectations, and to make a pure effort.

      Why, I wonder, is it so hard to practice hard and be open to the new, like all of us were able to do at one point when we were just learning the basics for the first time?

      It’s so sad that a mechanical approach to the inner work takes over and that the mind, with all its ideas, limits our experiences. Maybe it is just a matter of effort, in which case I guess that says a lot…

  • I just went for a walk earlier today. Going for a walk for the purpose of being aware is just so important. I found that it was very revealing in measuring my actual inner level. Every day life always gives us something that’s going on, that needs to be done etc. It’ll supply it endlessly (or till its end at least) so it’s up to us to make sure to put being aware, being alive, ‘to be’, first. Not losing track of ourselves. And an awareness walk is such a terrific way to do this.

    Thanks again for sharing your story Mike, I was thinking of it a few times during my walk, looking to keep going until I felt some breakthourgh moments. Looking forward to my next walk as well!

    • Sometimes I notice my mind being like, ok tonight we have all these things to do that have to be done now, tomorrow night there will be extra time to spend on spiritual activities. But the thing is that there is always something that comes to mind that has to be done to fill any free time there might be (at least in terms of housework 😉 ). So then it isn’t about waiting for free time to be able to focus on spirituality but to make it a priority in everything, like you said. Thanks for sharing Karim.

    • Thanks for the very solemn reminder, Karim, that it is up to us to put an end to the relentless mind chatter and worries of what needs to be done next, etc.

      And going for a walk is great way to take a step back from everything and detach.

  • Hi Mike, thank you for sharing this beautiful experience. I feel inspired to try and bring more clarity into my day. It always amazes me how such a different internal state can be a step away if we do our best and make an effort. It’s like we need to make that decision that we want to lift ourselves and do whatever we feel we need in that direction, and we can be ‘cheered’ through these experiences.

  • ”I took a step, like any other, and cleared an inner state, then my next step was like walking into paradise.”

    🙂 Thanks Mike. It seems this magical world is all around all the time, we need to get to that inner state internally though to perceive it.

    • Thanks for the comment, Karim. I really like how you summarized it with, “this magical world is all around all the time.”

  • This was wonderful to read, thanks for sharing Mike! How beautiful it must be to live in this state of connectedness to everything all the time! How great it would be if all people on the planet were like that – I can’t even imagine what a society we would build then.

    Your experience also makes me wonder why we are not trying for these more often… maybe because its so difficult and the “result” only lasts a short time? What would it take to lift the level of our perception on a more permanent basis – even if not in such a great clarity, but more permanently? These are the questions I sometimes ask myself and hope i will find a way to somehow make it a reality. It seems like it may have a lot to do with self-remembrance. Keep lifting ourselves out of the mind chatter very often, and make it our way of life.

    Wishing you more breakthroughs!

    • I think you’re right that self-remembrance has a lot to do with it. When we go for a walk to be aware, the self-remembrance is heightened because that’s the sole purpose of our walk. On the other hand, when in the office, or buying groceries, etc., our mind is less focused upon awareness and more upon the mundane tasks.

      Thanks for your comment!

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Prior to withdrawing from public life in 2010, author Belsebuub had written several books and many articles on the topic of self-discovery. Read more

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