The 3 Things You Need to do to Stop Ignoring Your Inner Knowing
The 3 Things You Need to do to Stop Ignoring Your Inner Knowing
How to Remember to Access Your Well of Wisdom
I watched anxiously as a team of nurses rushed my dad to the isolation room of the Intensive Care Unit. He’d recently endured a lung operation that had gone awry. While the biopsy results had (thankfully) confirmed that he didn’t have the lung Cancer that was originally diagnosed, it now meant that the cause of the menacing growth on his lung was officially “unknown”.
Over the next 3 days I watched as surgeons, specialists and nurses scuttled back and forth in the process of taking samples, waiting for lab results and analysing them with furrowed brows. Over the course of the week, he’d also endure another 3 operations to fix the holes in his lung that had caused his body to blow up like the Michelin Man.
It was all a little surreal.
As I watched on, I developed a true appreciation of the wonders of modern medicine and its technological advancements. Yet, strangely, I also found this process arduous and somewhat archaic. To wait hours or even days for test results…to be knee-deep in data and still have no idea what’s wrong…to have a team of people that don’t even talk to each other trying to figure it out separately…
I felt myself acutely aware of just how much we ignore the body’s wisdom.
It’s so easy to forget when you’re in the intellectual pursuit of information – testing, collecting, observing and analysing – that the body already knows the answer. It knows what’s under-functioning, what’s over-working, what’s deficient and what’s excessive. And it has known all along.
It is the intellect that is fumbling in the dark. Playing catch-up.
While the body patiently waits for it to ‘discover’ its inner workings.
Your ignorance is an illusion.
Consider for a moment an outstanding question you have. A conundrum that you’ve been in confusion or deep deliberation with.
And now consider that whatever this question is…you already know the answer.
You know.
Despite the confusion, the indecision, the rationalisations.
The answer is there.
Deep within you there is a profound, powerful and unwavering wisdom that knows.
But instead of owning it, you decide to play this unsatisfying game of binging on a buffet of frenzied over-analysis. Drowning in a sea of impatience, frustration and mental-emotional chaos.
It’s a total game-changer to realise that your ignorance or indecision is an illusion.
To recognise that you are telling yourself that you don’t know, when the truth is, you do know.
Owning your well of wisdom = owning your power.
There’s nothing wrong with the intellectual pursuit of answers. Until you’re aware of your body’s wisdom and know how to access and trust it, that’s often all you have. But once you’re aware of the ‘well of wisdom’ deep within you, it’s worthwhile questioning why you’d forget to access this well and the treasure trove of intuitions and insights that spring from it.
Are you addicted to confusion? Is there something safe about not knowing? What’s the payoff of continuing to perpetuate the illusion that you don’t know? How could clarity be threatening to you? What would it mean to completely trust your own wisdom?
Trusting your own wisdom is a radical act of self-empowerment.
Therefore, forgetting to access your inner wisdom is one of the main ways you sabotage the reclamation of your personal power.
With unflinching clarity comes the impetus to act.
If you’re clear on what you want and what you want to do, the inevitable follow-up question is: then why aren’t you doing it?
And sometimes you’re just not ready to act yet.
Nor are you ready to take full responsibility for your own power.
And that’s OK.
Searching for an answer often takes you on a wonderful and enriching journey that prepares you to take responsibility for your power. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, you need to suffer through the Wicked Witch’s deliberate acts of sabotage and naively seek counsel from a clueless wizard before you’ll trust that you knew the answer all along.
However, this doesn’t mean that every time you want to tap into your inner wisdom that you must go on a frustrating journey of feeling lost, confused and besieged by a troop of winged monkeys on the Wicked Witch’s payroll.
The 3 things you need to do to stop forgetting to access your own wisdom.
1) Cultivate trust in your well of wisdom
Perhaps after a few trips down the yellow brick road, you’ve learned a thing or two. You’re ready to give up the self-sabotaging game of seeking answers outside of yourself. You’re now willing to access your well of wisdom. You have the courage to act on the clarity it provides. You’re ready to own your power. You continue to cultivate an unwavering trust that you 'always know,' even if you feel clouded with doubt and confusion.
2) Keep your well of wisdom free of pollution
Once you ‘know that you always know’ you’re in the position to query any state of indecision or confusion you experience. You’ll identify that your lack of clarity is an ‘access issue.’ Rather than continuing to ‘fight through the fog’ you make keeping your energy field clear the priority:
What energies are polluting my well of wisdom?
What programs, memories or thoughts are clouding the clarity?
Who or what else has infiltrated the well?
How can I clear up this pollution?
How can I better protect my well from further pollution? What boundaries do I need to put in place? What disciplined practices will I use to keep it clean?
3) Be dedicated and disciplined enough to work with your well of wisdom
Once you’re keeping your well of wisdom free of pollution you might expect to have clarity ‘on tap.’ But this is where the metaphor of the ‘well’ serves us well. (😋)
Wisdom resides in the depths; it is acquired through deep exploration. It invites you to ‘drill down’. It demands sacred solitude, patience, and trust. Accessing wisdom is a process of gentle enquiry and quiet allowing. It requires a capacity to ‘sit with’ a question and to tolerate the void, providing enough space for clarity to emerge in its own time and in its own way:
Can I be comfortable in the ‘not knowing’?
Am I placing too much pressure on myself to know the answer?
Can I be patient? Can I trust that the answer will surface when the time is right?
Am I willing to hear the answer? Am I scared of an answer I don’t want to hear?
Do I need to ‘drill deeper’ into the well to extract more clarity?
Ultimately, working with your own wisdom is a heroic form of resilience. It defies your urges and tendencies for quick fixes and short cuts. It flies in the face of many of the ‘hacks’ promoted by the experts.
Contravening the quick fix culture might actually be your biggest challenge.
Having the commitment, patience and determination to clear your own confusion and drill deeper into your own well of wisdom is difficult. Having the courage to trust your own wisdom and act on it, even more so. But finding it difficult doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong or that it isn’t worth doing. Keep going wise one.
And one more thing. The first thing my dad said to me when he got the biopsy results was “I knew all along I didn’t have Cancer.”