Unsettling experiences—we all have them. Sometimes things just don’t go our way or, worse yet, surprise us in ways that might leave us saying “didn’t see that one coming.” You know those times, the ones we replay over and over in our heads, the ones that wake us up in the middle of the night, the ones that call into question the things that we thought we knew. Eventually, those experiences are less a source of pain. They may be a place of learning but, regardless of whether they are eventually useful or not, they live on in memory, a replay available at any time we want to chronicle the rough moments of our life.

My husband likes to talk about an approach he calls “one touch.” It’s like the philosophy of only handling a piece of paper on your desk one time. In that first moment, you make a decision about what to do with it and then you move it forward. Nothing lingers. It’s the same method he advocates for life. Face the experience and let it go. I’m not entirely convinced he can actually do that but I know he is far better at forgetting than I am. I try to forgive but, for good or for ill, I never forget.

In that context, I’ve been thinking about a phrase that a friend of mine uses at the end of every yoga practice she leads. She says “Don’t let anybody steal your peace.” I love that phrase and recognize both the power of those words and the way in which they apply to the disturbing or distressing situations we encounter in our personal and professional lives.

When we let someone upset us, when we let their behaviors or words wound us and cause us pain, we have allowed them to take something that is not theirs to take—our peace. We have, in essence, given them control over our happiness as well as the state of our wellbeing.

It is not at all simple to hold onto our peace. For those of us for whom the sense of “centered” is a hard fought, seldom achieved struggle, peace itself is elusive and easily shattered. But it is exactly at the moments of stress and distress that we must hold on tighter to not just our peace but to no one else’s ability to shake it, upend it or shatter it.

Taking a deep breath, we have to remind ourselves that we are in control of how we feel. We are in control of the choices we make. We are in control as to whether someone can upset us or whether we can let the words, the actions, go and hold onto our sense of self and our sense of peace.

Not letting anybody steal our peace requires us to call upon our inner resources and to believing that we have the resources we need to take that breath, straighten our spines and move forward. It means that we must continually remind ourselves that our feelings and our peace are in our control and our control alone, held tightly in our full hearts.