How do you hear your inner voice more clearly?
People often ask me, how do you recognise inner guidance? I am sure this enquiry is as old as time, and that there are a great many answers to this rich and important question.
In my experience, the soul speaks to us pretty consistently and is always there as a background hum. The ‘voice’ is not audible in the usual sense, so much as it is an awareness of inner sentient presence. It arises from a deep well of understanding and is in tune with the emerging ‘is’ of a situation.
Faint echoes of the IS-NESS of the soul can be ‘heard’ in one’s mind. But it is a different sound to the usual thoughts in the head. I would say it is more refined, perhaps more distant, you have to be paying attention to hear it.
How do we know that we are hearing the voice of the higher soul arising from within? Well, for starters we will not be left in any doubt about how things should be. There is clarity, even if we are not all that keen on the ideas that are emerging from an egoic standpoint. We nevertheless can feel the deep truth of whatever it is. It just IS.
I have had that deep feeling of guidance come up at times when I’m called to attend a spiritual retreat, maybe here in Australia or overseas. I remember that pull once when booking a retreat to the Philippines, despite there being civil insurrection in the country at the time and a travel advisory saying: don’t go. Yet my soul was insistent, not bossy, but just not something that could be denied. It would have been ridiculous not going on that retreat. As it turned out, we were perfectly safe and had some profound experiences which had an evolutionary impact upon my consciousness. We also met some absolutely lovely new spiritual seekers.
Sometimes that inner feeling of soul guiding can come up around where we live, or where we work. It is a feeling of needing to make a change, something hard to deny.
It is a gut feeling, but it is also more than that. It goes deeper. The mind sits inside this feeling like a boat in the sea. Hearing the internal voice is important because when we ignore it our spirit starts to get a bit saggy. Less energy flows through us and we tend to stagnate. The energy of stagnation can happen when we stay at something long after the inner knowing is that we should move on. Eventually it can lead to feelings of depression, or a feeling of being trapped.
If that happens, then it is possible that one of the causal factors may be that we have ignored an inner calling. Start a gentle meditation practice, spend time contemplating without your phone, without music, or other distraction. Just be with you. And over a few days, see what emerges.
We are all on a journey of some kind. Boxing ourselves in too tightly into routines, even though that might feel safe, is not how our soul wants to live. The soul thrives on experience, flow, change and new interactions, balanced with time to digest and integrate them.
This week, see if you can listen more to your ever present inner knowing.
Pssst… if you want to know more about how to turn up the volume of your inner voice, register for our Developing Intuition course – and be the first to be advised when the course is scheduled to run again.
