Arriving Home :: How To Trust Your Inner Wisdom
Each day, we are met with choices and decisions. Some are along the lines of the daily minutia. Choosing where to go and when, what to eat, what do and so forth. While other choices and decisions, expected or not, weigh heavier on our hearts and minds and can lead to significant outcomes that change the trajectories of our lives.
As mentioned in a previous ‘Arriving Home’ we can turn the decisions we need to make into a practice. We can greet them with our mindfulness and the ability to take a mindful step back to get some perspective. Yet where does intuition and inner wisdom come into play? What roles do they play when we face daily or life-altering choices? How are intuition and wisdom expressed? And perhaps most importantly, how do we learn to trust our intuition and inner wisdom? Where is the handbook for that?
To begin, let’s simplify. Most plainly, learning to trust your inner wisdom is code for knowing how to trust your whole self, which includes your mind, body, spirit and heart. Trust is built from clear seeing and compassionate understanding. When you can clearly see your thoughts and feelings, causes and conditions, future desires and past lessons learned, and meet them with compassion and love, this gives way to understanding. Understanding then leads to wisdom.
If you need help knowing how to clearly see and recognize your thoughts and feelings, try my Inner-Listening Meditation for self-awareness. The good news is that naturally through a consistent meditation practice, you will be able to identify your thoughts and emotions much more clearly over time. While meditating, you learn to separate yourself from your thoughts and detangle yourself from emotions, so you can see them clearly for what they are - thoughts and energy in motion, coming and going, starting and ending. Not permanent and not something we should let fully persuade us one way or the other when trusting our inner wisdom.
Because inner wisdom also includes the signals we receive from our body, heart and soul when we are faced with choices and decisions. It’s important to understand how to clearly see and understand them. Before any thought manifests in our mind, it first begins as an emotion. Before any emotion manifests, it starts in the body. Before sensations begin in the body, they first must be caused by stimuli or information being perceived through touch, taste, sound, sight, smell or heart consciousness. With each crossroads we face in our lives, there is a plethora of information to sift through in our subconscious that will come through as a signal to us from our body, heart and soul. We only have to clearly be able to see it and then not immediately judge the signals and sensations that are coming through.
When taking into account all of these individual components that make up our inner wisdom, we can meet our thoughts, emotions, and signals from the body and heart with compassion and non-judgement. This is the step where true trust in our inner wisdom is born. From this non-judgmental space, trust is built as we synthesize each signal, thought and choice at hand.
To trust your inner wisdom is to know your inner wisdom and to know yourself. Perceiving what your intuition and inner wisdom are telling you is much like getting to the end of a good book. You know what to do - you know the answer for the decision at hand, yet with the ending comes all of the uncertainties and possibilities of a brand new beginning. But only this time, you meet your decision with the trust that your inner wisdom has lead you to the next right step.
