Trusting Your Inner Guidance

Entering a new year often means it is a time to take stock of ourselves, our beliefs and the truths we hold dear.  We all know about and likely engage in the age-old tradition of making New Year’s resolutions.  Typically these resolutions focus on the negative:  I will not eat as much. I will not laze around but will get up and go to the gym…and on and on ad infinitum. Yet year after year we find ourselves engaging in the same behavior, likely even resolving to do the same things we resolved to do the year before and the year before that.

With the dawning of 2013, it’s time to break old patterns and habits and to engage in new, fresh behaviors.  It is time to look at what life hands us from the half-full not the half-empty perspective.  In doing so, we will not only recognize the blessings we are reaping but will also learn to recognize and revel in our own power allowing us to live our individual authentic life.

Recognizing life’s blessings
Life’s blessings are many and varied.  Some are obvious, some not so obvious.  Some come to us as what we perceive to be challenges, and others are blatantly presented as gifts or pleasures. Whatever their packaging, each blessing is just what we need at that precise moment in time.

Our greatest challenge as human beings is to discern between true gifts of Spirit and empty promises and temptations presented by our egos.  How do we do this?  We learn to listen, look, feel, know and above all trust!

Learning to trust your intuition
Each one of us possesses the gift of intuition.  As children, we relied on our intuition to guide us in all aspects of our lives. We believed in our intuition when it came to picking friends, participating in activities, or shying away from situations and/or people.  As adults, however, we second guess ourselves constantly.  We instinctively know or feel things in our “gut,” yet we intellectually convince ourselves that the gut feelings we are experiencing are not accurate or that they are not real. We consciously ignore or dismiss our feelings, rejecting them in favor of our so-called intellect.  All too late, we learn that the gut feeling we chose to ignore was actually the right course of action.

As we learned in a recent article by Marla Steele, we are all healers.  Likewise, we are all intuitives capable of tapping into a deep unconscious inner wisdom.  We are all capable of seeing, feeling, hearing, or knowing what we (and sometimes others) need at any given time. These other senses are known as being clairvoyant, clairsentient, clairaudient or claircognizant. We may find that we are stronger in one of these areas over the others, but with practice we can develop all of these senses.

We must only trust that what we are seeing, feeling, hearing or just knowing is real and needs to be heeded. 

While I am not suggesting that we all throw intellect to the wind and ignore it 100% of the time, what I am suggesting is that we begin to trust our gut instincts, those voices we hear, those feelings that envelope us, or those visions that come to us.  The more we trust that we are hearing true guidance from within, or feeling innately what is right, or seeing the correct path in our mind’s eye, the more we can develop these inborn skills and increase our intuitive powers.

Discerning true guidance from ego
How do we know that the voice we are hearing is trustworthy, something other than our own imagination or ego guiding us in a path that we egotistically want to pursue?  We know because the voice of true guidance is not judgmental.  It is not a voice that seeks to mislead or trick.  Rather, it is one that soundly and clearly guides us without judgment or criticism. The true voice of Spirit is informative, supportive, loving and kind in its guidance. 

Despite our innate abilities, we as human beings are prone to allow our egos to guide us in directions that cause us nothing but sorrow, grief, pain or untold trouble.  By focusing more on the gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, claircognizance and clairsentience, we can begin to trust ourselves and the world around us more than we ever thought possible.

So, when you are feeling doubtful of your path, reach into your pouch of Joyful Life Tools and dust off your movie screen to see and trust what you are seeing.  Shake the cobwebs from your mind and trust that what you just know is the true path and not simply ego whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

 Best wishes for a highly intuitive new year infused with a heavy dose of trust and true believing!