You know the moment just before you fall asleep? When, if you’re lucky, and still conscious enough, you can catch yourself falling, slipping… You feel your body and mind passing over. It’s out of your control. One minute you’re thinking about the day and your consciousness wanders, and the next, everything goes still. Lifting a hand feels impossible. It feels like peace, you might think, but there is so much more to this simple word than drifting off in your hammock.
“Peace is not being asleep or being numb. It’s the opposite,” says Eckhart Tolle. Peace, he says, is “a state of heightened aliveness, when we become more conscious rather than less, and this requires an awareness of the kinds of thoughts that habitually go through your mind.”
Peace is not unconsciousness.
[Above image by our guest: @elevatorfashionblogger]
Living beside the calmness of the gentle upper Zambezi, surrounded by a natural world that is still wild and free, we find ourselves thinking about peace, what it is, what it is not, and how to hold onto it, a lot. What we see is that peace is not simply the feeling of a slow Zambezi morning cruise or late afternoon amble in the golden light of a river island sunset. It’s the state we’re in when on that cruise or amble. Peace can find you even in the action of the day – on a microlight flight over the Victoria Falls or cheering for the Royal Chundu soccer team on the sidelines. Peace comes, Eckhart says, “from being aligned with the present moment. Wherever you are, you feel that you are home – because you are home.”
There’s a way to bring yourself back to this sense of peace, when you feel it slipping. It’s called self-care and it lasts longer than the pink G&T and deep tissue massage from caring hands. Although those things play their role in helping to settle you, temporarily. Below are 22 pillars of self-care, a guide to peace, you could say.
These are the things we remind ourselves about each day, the concepts that bring us back to ourselves and make us more present. For our community, for guests, for nature, and for life.
Community, mindfulness, kindness, exploration, pleasure, curiosity, acceptance, support… These are the things that make us whole, that carry us and let us carry each other. We invite you to practice a little self-care on your next Zambezi experience with us, to encounter the true meaning of peace.
