Seeing Your Inner Guidance

One thing that I've seen many people struggle with is getting a sense for the overall meaning of their life.  I've seen many people turn away from spirituality when, despite all their efforts, they find they have no sense of a purpose for their life, much less a connection with a higher power.  I've heard a couple of people tell tragic tales of believing what they've been taught, that they could have a personal connection with God, only to become disillusioned as they discovered that no one ever called back to them, and their prayers consistently went unanswered.  I've never been one to try to push spirituality on people who didn't want it, but I have an exorbitant amount of empathy for people who really hungered for spirituality but could sense no trace of it.

In my experience, getting in touch with my inner guidance has been a gradual process, one based in seeing consistent patterns in my experience.  It's a mindfulness through self-observation, a focus on being aware of how I react to the world.  I've seen people write articles about how to hear your inner guidance, and they usually tell you to meditate or visualize until you get the results you want.  Where I ran into problems with this advice is that I soon found meditation just stabilized me where I was.  As if I threw out an anchor to ground myself where I was in that moment.  That was great for giving me a sense of where I was already, but not so much for seeing which way to go next.

Listening for your inner guidance is a great start, but if you aren't hearing anything, the next step is to try to see it, through observing yourself.  The more you observe yourself, the more you'll see patterns in your behavior, your thoughts, and the feelings that result from your behaviors and thoughts.  If you've told yourself that you'll start getting up early and exercising, but you've told yourself you'd do this three times before and only lasted for at most a week before sliding off the routine, chances are you'll continue doing that in the future.  It's a very disheartening realization to have, but what it means is that you need to invest an overwhelming amount of attention and energy in order to break that pattern.  Once you realize this, you're in a better decision to decide whether the amount of work it takes to meet your goals is really worth it.   Similarly, if you see that you're consistently worrying about something bad happening to you, but it never does, chances are this pattern will continue.  Conversely, you can watch for the patterns that make you feel good and that you enjoy.

The key to seeing your inner guidance is to cultivate an active mindfulness of your day to day experience.  If you've already been meditating, and it's not helping you get anywhere, the next step is to bring that presence of mind with you into the rest of your life.  The more you're able to step back and watch yourself react, the more you'll be able to see where you want to go next.  It's a gradual process, and requires a great deal of presence of mind, but by really watching yourself and the patterns you create, eventually you'll get a feel for what you're really about and what life really means to you.