Listening for inner guidance

Do you listen to your inner self for guidance? Do you receive messages, hints or intuitions from inside that tell you what to do? To go to a certain place? To pick up a certain book? To call that person who just popped into your mind a few seconds ago? And more to the point. Do you then act on it or dismiss it?

I hear guidance all the time and I hear the negative messages that negate action as well I would call this second voice the one of dismissal or discounting, its purpose is to undermine the spontaneous thought or intuition, (often!).

I actually met my ex husband when I listened to guidance late one night on the way home stopping at a late night bookshop and being told to go back to a certain hotel bar, there lo and behold I met my husband, on the 6th of June, 1993 and even though our marriage did not last I am so very very grateful I met Jonathan. We had an amazing 11 years together. His support and the foundation he supplied for me in the world made me make the decision to get sober in December 1993. And before things fell apart we had some very happy years, especially in early sobriety. I lost my job very soon afterwards and then I got sober a few weeks later and later on the next year I found a new job and then another and then another all by guidance and dreaming of things, or by connections I made in an earlier job where I was working with several recovering alcoholics.

Eventually as some of you know who follow my blog for a while we moved to the UK and we ended up going on a holiday very close the village where my ancestors were from. I did not know my ancestors were from Cornwall in the UK until a few years after we had separated. The information came to light from a family relation of my grandmother who presented mum with her ancestral investigative information and that too was another boon as it explained why alcoholism had run in our family, it made sense of my older sister’s marriage to a New Zealander (my great great grandfather and his wife Eliza Solomon immigrated to New Zealand in 1974/5) and her breakdown and incarceration in an institution. Many years later a spiritual healer had informed me my sister’s ‘illness’ had a very strong multi-generation trauma repeat theme and later years have proved this to be true. The connections to both the UK and New Zealand have featured strongly too in the lives of my two sister’s children and their partners. Everything seemingly interconnected.

Sometimes we look at life as a chain of random coincidences and I am sure there is some randomness to life, but my experience since getting sober is that there is also something else working out. There are forces or threads that can guide us if we start to tune in and stop letting the negating messages of outer society steer us too strongly off track. I have just started reading a book on the power of dissent and the author quotes experiments where personal influence gets people to do things that are misguided (for example face the wrong way in an elevator) and she argues for the need in society for rebels, those who are strong enough to follow their inner knowing and challenge collective ‘truths’ and influences in society.

Anyway I have been getting guidance to read two pages in a book that I love lately and today I picked up the book and the two excerpts from it really spoke to me. The book in question is called When Love Meets Fear and I really recommend it for those of you who have confronted the void on the path of awakening or the dark night of the soul. David Richo addresses in one chapter the void many of us have to face on the path of ego breakdown and breakthrough. Often these kind of breakdowns are pathologized rather than seen as awakening experiences. The upshot of what he writes is that things falling apart or failing may actually be a positive thing if we can surrender and re attune our guidance to another force within, letting our ego drives of control and entitlement be uprooted.

I will share some of it from the chapter in question later, as its what I was guided to do today on my blog. I love it when I follow my own intuitions, inner voice or hunches. Over years I have been led to the right book or right person and often I have been helped when I most needed especially if at a very low point I prayed. Each day we have the opportunity to make hundreds of choices and these choices really do influence the trajectory of our day. A lot of life is out of our control. A the Indian text the Bahagavad Gita reminds us we have control over our actions but not the fruit of our actions. Never the less at times things just work out right or we find the next right step on our path when we listen to and follow our inner guidance.