S2 EP335 – The Key to Peace on Earth

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul, and today we’re going to explore what is one of the most important truths for creating peace on Earth.

Many people believe that peace will come through political solutions, social movements, education, diplomacy, laws, or economic change. While all of these can play a role, none of them address the deepest cause of violence, cruelty, exploitation, and destruction.

The real cause lies within us, within the self-abandonment that leads to the inability to feel a sense of oneness with all of life. 

When people do their inner work to learn to define their own intrinsic worth, when they know that each of us and all living things are a spark of the Divine, an individual expression of the love that is God, then they are easily able to see the beautiful essence of all people, animals, nature, and the planet. Once you feel an inner sense of oneness and therefore oneness with all of life, you cannot do harm.

The key to peace on Earth is learning how to define your own intrinsic worth, which enables you to easily see and feel the worth of all of life.

This may sound simple, but it has profound implications.

When you do not know your own worth, you might seek to get it from outside yourself.

You might seek it through power, control, approval, wealth, status, success, domination, superiority, and possession. Trying to control others comes from believing that having power over others gives you a sense of worth, but there is a huge difference between power over others and a deep inner sense of personal power. People who have a sense of personal power don’t need to harm others, including animals and the planet, to prove their worth.

When we need external sources to define our worth, we inevitably create harm to ourselves, others, animals, and the planet.

But when we learn to define our worth through our connection with our spiritual source of love and truth, we begin to experience the truth that all of life is connected. We begin to feel the oneness of life.

And when we genuinely experience this oneness, harming others or other expression of life becomes unthinkable.

Today we’ll explore why defining your own worth is not only the key to personal healing but may also be one of the most important contributions you can make to peace on Earth.

People who purposefully harm others, other than in self-defense or during wartime, are operating from their wounded self who feels one down to others and feels an inner emptiness due to self-abandonment. Not knowing your intrinsic worth disconnects you from yourself and from others.

Is your wounded self telling you that you are not good enough, that you are unimportant, inadequate, and unlovable? Because these beliefs cause so much inner pain and emptiness, you might be seeking ways to escape them, such as judging yourself, numbing with addictions, and blaming others. It’s the blaming others that can lead to violence, which is of course the opposite of peace. When people feel worthless, they often attempt to become “more than” others.

All ways of self-abandonment can lead you to seek a sense of superiority over others, or a sense of power and control over others to try to feel better about yourself. Abandoning your inner child and not defining your intrinsic worth can lead to entire systems of oppression, as wounded individuals attempt to prove themselves through power over others.

The wounded self might believe that if you can be superior, then you will finally feel worthy, but this isn’t what creates a sense of self-worth. Power over others can never heal an internal wound.

It might be hard to see that Christian white supremacy comes from feeling inadequate, but these people would not need to feel superior to those of other races, religions, gender, and sexual orientation if they knew and valued the spark of the Divine within them. They can’t see the Divine within all of life when they can’t see it within themselves. The irony of this is that they profess to be followers of Jesus, but research indicates that Jesus was not white. Jesus taught love, not oppression and control over others who they deem to be less than themselves. 

So they continue to pursue more power and control over others, more status and wealth, erroneously believing that will elevate them. But it doesn’t because the emptiness grows deeper and the harm continues. 

The consequences of externally defined worth are visible everywhere. Wars are often driven by greed, power, domination, fear, and control. Political conflicts often stem from the need to be right and feel superior rather than the desire to care and understand. Economic exploitation frequently arises when profit becomes more important than human wellbeing.

Environmental destruction occurs when short-term gain matters more than the wellbeing of future generations. Cruelty toward animals becomes possible when we disconnect from empathy and oneness.

All of these behaviors emerge from the illusion of separation – the illusion that your wellbeing is separate from others, and that your success requires others’ loss, and that your worth depends on having more than others.

The wounded self thrives in separation, while the loving adult wants peace and connection coming from experiencing your oneness with all of life.

When you feel disconnected from yourself, you will inevitably feel disconnected from others. It’s when feeling disconnected and separate that we can act out in ways that are harmful. The inner world affects the outer world.

What were you taught about where genuine self-worth comes from? I was taught that it came from getting good grades and other forms of achievements and success, and from how I look, and how popular I am, and how much approval I get. My intelligence wasn’t valued because “girls shouldn’t be smarted than boys.”

What’s your self-worth tied to? Is it tied to how much money you have or the car you drive, or the house you live in, or whether you are married, or whether you have children, or how many friends you have, or how socially busy you are?

The problem is that all of these are external and anything external isn’t permanent and can be lost. If your worth depends on external factors, then your worth will always feel fragile.

True worth comes from recognizing who you are as a soul – who you are as a child of the Divine, the beautiful essence you were born with. Just as a baby or a puppy or a kitten doesn’t need to earn it’s worth, neither do you.

When you know that you are life expressing itself through your unique form, you know that your worth is inherent. And when you know you are inherently worthy, then you know that all of life is inherently worthy and you wouldn’t do anything to harm any living being or anything that harms the planet – not people, not animals, not trees, not the soil, not the air, not water, not the food. You would have reverence, as indigenous people do, for the planet, rather than greed to extract and use the land for profit, that is now causing climate change and threatening life on the planet. 

The loving adult does no harm, while the wounded self is just out for itself. I hope you can begin to see that if people were practicing Inner Bonding, developing their loving adult, defining their own worth through their connection with their higher source of truth, healing the false beliefs of the wounded self about who they are and embracing their oneness with all of life, we would have peace on earth.

This is one of the reasons I created my 30-Day video course, Love Yourself. If you’re looking to become part of the solution to creating peace on Earth, this program is for you. You can learn more in the description below.”

As we heal our wounded beliefs about worth, we become more available to experiencing oneness. This is not just a thought or a spiritual concept. It becomes a lived experience, a way of life. We begin to experience that beneath our differences, we are connected. We develop more empathy and compassion as we learn to see ourselves in others. Kindness becomes our guiding light. We become motivated to let go of our judgments of others and more interested in learning, listening, and understanding others’ experience and points of view. We consciously shift our intention from controlling to learning about loving.

As we define our intrinsic worth through connection with our higher guidance, the sense of separation begins to dissolve and we experience that the same life force that flows me also flows through you and through all living things – that all living things, including the planet, are expressions of the love that is God.

When you know and experience in your heart and soul that the same intelligence that creates forests and mountains and rich soil created you, and the same source that animates all living beings animates you, you move beyond separation to oneness. And this causes a profound change in behavior. It’s as if you have woken up to the truth of life. You no longer have to force yourself to be kind and caring because you want to be kind and caring. Love becomes your natural way of being, and this changes everything.

This reminds me of the first stanza of a song most of us know – Amazing Grace:

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
    That sav’d a wretch like me!
 I once was lost, but now am found,
    Was blind, but now I see.

We are lost when we are operating from our wounded self, disconnected from our soul and our spiritual source of love and truth, and through the Grace of our higher power, we move from the blindness of separation to experiencing the truth of who we are and our oneness with all of life.

When we experience a deep sense oneness, our compassion naturally expands to include people of all races, religions, genders, sexual identity, looks and status. It extends to all animals and to nature and Earth itself. We begin recognizing that animals are not objects but rather conscious beings experiencing life. Killing a magnificent elephant for its tusks would no longer exist. Killing an animal for the trophy would end. Contaminating the ocean with plastic and chemicals would end. Killing animals to the point of extinction, and extracting resources from the Earth to the point ruining the planet would stop. We begin seeing trees not merely as resources but as living expressions of the same life force, and we no longer strip the land of trees to plant food for cows to supply fast food.

We begin understanding that the Earth is not something separate from us – that she is our larger body, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and that everything is connected.

When people feel disconnected from their own soul, they often feel disconnected from nature.

As healing occurs, reverence naturally emerges, and reverence changes behavior. We become more thoughtful, more grateful, more conscious, leading you to know your own soul and define your own intrinsic worth. This leads to the inner sense of oneness, which is the key to peace on earth.

This is a major reason why I believe the practice of Inner Bonding has implications far beyond individual healing. The six steps of Inner Bonding help us move from external definitions of worth toward internal spiritual definitions of worth.

When we learn to care for our inner child, we stop expecting others to define our value. When we open to our higher guidance, we connect with a source of truth that transcends the wounded self. When we take loving action on our own behalf and on behalf of others, we begin creating genuine self-worth. And as self-worth grows, the need for control diminishes. The need for superiority diminishes, as does the need to dominate others. The need to prove ourselves diminishes and what remains is love. The intention to learn to love ourselves and others, which is the foundation of Inner Bonding, naturally creates peace – peace within, peace in our relationships, in our communities, and peace in the world.

Have you ever wondered what one person can do to help create peace on Earth? The answer is what I’ve been talking about. Every time you choose love over control, you contribute to peace. Every time you define your worth internally rather than externally, you contribute to peace. Every time you care for your inner child instead of abandoning yourself, you contribute to peace. Every time you choose compassion over judgment, you contribute to peace. Every time you remember your connection with all life, you contribute to peace.

Your peaceful energy contributes to the peaceful energy of the planet. Peace isn’t just about politics and institutions. It’s also about the energy each of us expresses, so it begins within each of us. From us, it ripples outward, as our loving energy affects our families, and our families affect our communities, and our communities affect nations, and nations affect the world. 

The ripple effects of our own inner work to oneness are immeasurable.

I invite you to reflect on this question: Who or what defines your worth? Is it other people? Your accomplishments? Your appearance? Your income? Your success?

Or is your worth coming from your connection with the truth of who you are?

The more deeply you know your intrinsic worth, the less need you have to control, dominate, judge, exploit, or harm. And the more you experience the beautiful truth that we are all part of one living whole.

Peace on Earth begins with peace within you. It begins with learning to love yourself rather than abandon yourself. It begins with knowing your worth.

And as more of us awaken to our inherent worth and our profound interconnectedness, we help create a world where kindness and compassion naturally replaces fear and love naturally replaces control.

If today’s episode motivated you to contribute to peace on Earth, I invite you to check out my 30-Day video course, Love Yourself. It’s designed to help you learn to define your own intrinsic worth and therefore become a force for peace in our planet. You’ll find the link in the description.

Thank you for joining me today on the Inner Bonding Podcast and I’ll see you in the next episode

Until then, remember that when you truly know your worth, you naturally honor the worth of all life. And that is the deepest foundation of peace on Earth.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings on your healing journey.