How to Find Peacefulness in the Midst of Chaos Without Escaping

In his post ‘A Life of Peacefulness‘, Leo Babauta makes an extremely interesting point: when faced with chaos and stress, our first reaction may be some kind of escapism (I am myself guilty of it, sometimes). What we should do though is to learn how to remain peaceful in this environment.

I quite like the list all the different types of escapism he mentions, like:

“Try to get our world in order, trying to control everything
Hide from all the things we do, try not to think about it all
Complain about it, about the burden of it all
etc.“

And I could certainly add more to the list. Whether real escape and flight, or only in our mind, it is true that we tend to escape difficult situation in one way or the other.

The revolutionary approach he mentions of instead trying to be internally peaceful in the midst of the storm is an interesting one, although certainly quite tough to achieve. He proposes 3 steps:

Face the difficulty
Open & Relax
Take the next step, in peace

How about trying to apply this framework to your current chaos?