Listening To Your Inner Knowing
Listening To Your Inner Knowing EXERCISE
Developing a practice to quiet the noise in your mind is an important part of being able to hear, recognize and listen to your own inner knowing. Inner knowing is a soft voice. It’s your intuition. It’s your gut sense of what you should do or who you are. When you find it, you usually feel a sense of clarity.
Step 1: Clear the distractions
Glennon Doyle, the author of NYTimes Best Seller “Untamed” sat in her closet to find hers. Developing a mediation practice is a common tool for this, but anything you do just for yourself, and where you clear other distractions (i.e., phone, tv, news, other people) and have time to open your mind and listen to yourself works.
One of my clients takes “News Fasts”, where she doesn’t take in any inputs from the outside world, to let her own knowing come through. Some people find they hear their own voice when they run, take walks outside or in nature, or write in a journal. One of my spiritual teachers calls her time alone to connect with her inner knowing, “watching trees.” This process requires a lot of patience. You have to find what works for you, and keep returning, and returning and returning.
Step 1: Discernment
Many people tell me when they start listening to themselves, they hear lots of things, and they aren’t always sure what they are hearing is their own voice, or a voice they’ve taken in from the outside. That’s completely normal. You’ve got a lot of committee members kicking around in there. It’s going to take some time to get clear about who’s who.
Pay attention to how you feel about the different things you’re hearing and noticing. When you hit your authentic voice, your deep sense of knowing, there’s an inner sense of clarity you’ll experience. On the way there, there might be a lot of anxiety and fear. That’s also completely normal. Anxiety is often pointing to some truth that’s difficult to know. You’re also hitting your inner knowing if something keeps coming back and back, no matter how inconvenient it is and how much you try to push it away.