Sparrow as Teacher

April 15, 2020 ~ Sue Downing

On Saturday morning, as my breakfast was cooking on the stove, I went out onto my front porch to fill the birdfeeder that hangs there. I keep the bird seed on the porch in a big Rubbermaid tub that sits inside a large wicker chest. I call it “the seed vault”. As I stepped outside and turned toward the feeder, I noticed that something was lying on top of the vault, near the front right hand corner. As drew closer, I realized what it was: a dead sparrow.

The poor birdie corpse looked intact, except for its skull, most of which was missing. The sparrow’s feathers were matted and rumpled. Some creature had obviously held and carried the bird in its damp mouth. But what creature? If my cats were outdoor cats, which they’re not, I would have interpreted this as a classic offering of prey. Perhaps this is what it was. But would a random neighborhood cat really present me with its catch, in a display of gratitude for filling the feeder that made the capture possible? Mystified, I picked the dead sparrow up with a paper towel and laid it down gently amongst a pile of dried leaves beneath a big bush at the corner of my porch. I wanted it to have some cover, but I wasn’t up to digging a grave.

Throughout the day, I pondered this dead sparrow’s appearance in my life. That’s because I’m a big fan of looking at the metaphorical meaning of occurrences – as well as of illness, as I’ve written in earlier posts. For whatever reason, I am not the kind of person who sees a dead sparrow on her seed vault, puts it under a bush, and goes on with her life. Instead, I immediately wonder whether there’s a message in it for me. “Is it simply a gift from a cat?” I asked myself now. “Or is the Universe conspiring with my inner self to try to tell me something?”

What came to mind first as I mulled this over, was that my inner self was pointing out my blatant hypocrisy: I profess to adore the birds, and yet, I still eat meat. Was I being directed to go back to being a vegetarian?? This is, in fact, something that I have been considering lately. Even so, this explanation didn’t feel like an “Aha!” moment for me. I carried on with my day, my question still hovering beneath the surface of my awareness…

Then came Sunday morning. Easter morning.

I stepped out onto my porch. There I found the dead sparrow, back in the same corner of the vault. At first I thought it might be a second one, but I looked under the bush and found the tiny, leafy grave empty. When I looked at the little fellow closely, I concluded that it was most likely the same sparrow as the day before: Although this body’s feathers were more mangled and matted, its injuries were the same. “Why is it here again?” I wondered, incredulous. “What cat would do that??” I put it back under the bush, under more leaves, feeling both a bit sad and a bit creeped out.

Later in the afternoon, I had the thought to just go out and take a peek at the vault…

A wing. In the same spot. Splayed out, as if it had been plucked neatly from the body. The rest of the sparrow was now lying under the railing at the corner of the porch, below the spot where the birdfeeder hung from the top of the porch. And yet, other sparrows and finches and blackbirds were happily plucking seeds from the feeder. “How can they,” I wondered, “with their fallen brother lying right down there?” This was just so weird… Without dealing with the disembodied wing in any way – which felt callous to me even as I turned my back on it – I went back into the house. By evening, both the wing and the rest of the corpse had vanished.

Monday morning. By now I was almost apprehensive about going out to the porch. But the birds were already hopping around on the branches of the graveyard bush, waiting for their breakfast, so out I went.

A sparrow tail. In the usual place. No sign of the rest of the body. I moved it off the porch, onto some leaves. Actually, I have to be honest about this: I didn’t gently place it on the leaves, as I’d done with the whole sparrow. I tossed it away, carelessly and hardheartedly.

Back indoors, I ate my breakfast and watched the surviving birds jostle each other for a turn at the feeder. There had to be a message for me here. The way the sparrow kept appearing – whether whole, or in its constituent parts– convinced me of this. But what message? I’d been pondering this for forty-eight hours now. That morning, during my meditation, I’d even sought guidance from my inner self. “What is this all about?” I queried. “Is it really about vegetarianism? Or is there some other meaning?” As had been the case all weekend, no satisfying answer had come to me during meditation. But now, as I was finishing up my breakfast, another possible interpretation suddenly occurred to me: This sparrow was giving me a teaching about the identity of the “self”.

There’s a tale I recall from my Buddhist studies: A monk named Nagasena uses the example of a chariot to explain to a king that nothing exists independently; nothing possesses its own, fixed “self”. “Is the pole on the chariot the chariot?” Nagasena asks the king. “No,” the king replies. “What about the axle?” Nagasena asks. “No,” the king tells him. “What about the wheel?” Nagasena continues. “No.” It goes on like this, until the king grasps this idea: The parts of the chariot on their own do not constitute “chariot”. At the same time, what we call a “chariot” doesn’t exist separately from those parts. Nagasena then tells the king that it’s the same with the human “self”.

The sparrow, I realized, is my chariot. Is the missing skull the sparrow? No. How about its brains? No. The wing? No. The tail? No. How about the little foot that stuck out so stiffly from beneath the body? Or the spare feather that remained wedged between two woven reeds of the wicker chest’s lid? No.

When I thought of the sparrow this way, I suddenly felt that this little creature had appeared – however that happened – to remind me that, like the chariot, what I call a “sparrow” exists only thanks to the constituent parts that make it up. I can say that although I identified the bird as “sparrow” when I first saw it on the wicker chest, once I saw that most of its skull was gone, “sparrow without a skull” felt more accurate than “sparrow”. But when I saw only the wing, and then, the tail, I could no longer call them “sparrow”. My mind could see them only as “sparrow parts”, not as “sparrow”. It occurs to me now that this also explains my decision (but without justifying it!) to either ignore or callously toss aside the wing and tail, those body parts that I could no longer consider “sparrow”.

Interpreting the dear, dead sparrow as a reminder of the story of the chariot resonated with me deeply, given my current focus on the meaning of “self”. In fact, I had done this type of meditation just a few days earlier, in regard to my own “self”. I asked, “Am I my hand? My leg? My blood?” “No.” Finally, I asked, “Am I my mind?” The answer was the same: “No”. But this was a tougher “No” to utter, since it entailed a willingness to let go of the idea that the mind represents who I am. And, in fact, letting go of my attachment to my mind as my “self” is a large part of what I’m working on now. So, it seems fitting that the first thing I noticed about the dead sparrow when I looked at it closely, was that its skull had been crushed, its brain removed. No more thinking. No more sparrow mind. The sparrow is not its mind.

I feel so thankful for this experience, disquieting as it was. I am sad for the death of one of the little creatures I love, but grateful for its very concrete and yet self-less gift. Thank you, dear sparrow-teacher.

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Opening My Voice-Way

March 31, 2020April 2, 2020 ~ Sue Downing

Part 3: Okay, okay. I get it.

After committing to writing my historical novel based solely on guidance from my inner self, I worked on it steadily – and enjoyed the process immensely! In the fall of 2018, I completed the first draft of what I was calling Above the River. Set in post-WWII Germany, it told the tale of three generations of a German family whose members are forced to confront questions of God and faith and free will when the youngest family member, Lina, is paralyzed in an accident on the family’s homestead.

I had, indeed, managed to write the novel just for myself, free of the influence of suggestions or critiques from outside readers. True, early on, I did give the first thirty pages or so to the friend who’d encouraged me to get back to writing in the first place. I asked her simply whether, having read those opening chapters, she would want to read more. I guess I was still feeling the need for some validation of my project. But after that, no one read a word of the novel until after I’d completed the second draft, at the end of 2018. Even then, the friend I spontaneously offered it to, read only the first couple of chapters. Then, her own inner guidance prompted her to set it aside That felt just right to me, too, because, by then, I’d realized that I wanted to make some significant changes to the novel before trying to get it published. That’s when I began working on the third draft, which turned, at the end of 2019, into the fourth draft. Then, in January of this year, I had a big insight: Instead of working to find an agent who could help me get my book published, I needed to totally rework the novel, and make Lina’s mother, Ethel, the central voice of the narrative.

I was less than two weeks into this rewrite when a series of experiences made it abundantly clear to me that suggestion to completely rework the novel had not come from my inner self after all. Rather, what I’d heard – and heeded – was the voice of the deep, insidious fear I talked about in my last post: the fear that if I wrote and published exactly what I wanted, then people would respond negatively and reject me. At some point after I finished the first draft of my novel, this fear had come forth and managed to convincingly disguise itself as the voice of my inner self. “Keep revising,” it told me. “This book isn’t ready to go out into the world yet.”

Now, I can say for certain that my inner self was the source of this latest understanding – that I’d been mistaken about the origin of the advice to keep revising. This time, though, my inner self didn’t communicate with me in the way it most often does: by sending along messages when I’m sitting quietly and asking for guidance. Because at this point, I wasn’t sitting down asking it to advise me about the novel. I can see now that my inner self had been trying for a long time to tell me, subtly, to stop revising my novel and do something to actually get it out in the world. But, as I’ve said before, my inner self speaks softly, so I wasn’t hearing it. And precisely because I hadn’t picked up on its quiet messages, my inner self had to get dramatic. This time it chose to speak to me not through a thought, but in a way I couldn’t ignore: in the form of an illness.

I’ve become convinced, over the past ten years or so, that our inner self uses physical illness or mental discomfort to communicate with us when we miss or disregard the subtler communiques it sends us through thoughts and feelings. The way I see it, when an illness crops up, this is often our inner self clueing us in that a current course of action or behavior pattern is not in our best interest, and that we need to be doing something in our life differently.

I believe that when we come down with an illness, we can see it both as a very real illness and as our inner self’s attempt to give us a message. If we can understand what course of action or way of thinking our inner self is trying to warn us about, then we can adjust the way we move through life. This can, in turn, help alleviate the physical or mental or emotional discomfort we’re feeling, i.e., the given illness we’re experiencing.

So, when I get sick, or when a part of my body starts hurting for no identifiable reason, I ask myself what the metaphorical significance might be, of both the illness itself and the part of my body where it has popped up: “What is this illness trying to show me about where I’m going wrong in my life?” This is exactly the type of deep inquiry I had occasion to do at the end of 2019, when my inner self decided I wasn’t hearing what it had to say about my novel writing. The illness it used to get my attention was hypothyroidism.

Underactive thyroid often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed for years, which is exactly what happened with me. I had no idea that anything was amiss until my underactive thyroid started manifesting as anxiety attacks. The first time this happened, in mid-December, I was caught totally unawares. I suddenly felt terrified, for no discernible reason. I just couldn’t manage to calm myself down using any of the tools that generally quiet my mind pretty easily if I become distressed. My heart was racing and pounding, I felt faint, my skin was flushed, and there was a tightness in my chest. As the anxiety flooded through me, I felt a sense of impending doom: “You might just die tonight.” I thought this with a kind of eerie calm alongside the mounting anxiety that felt like it was originating somewhere other than inside me. This simply did not feel like “me” to me.

When these symptoms didn’t abate, and the feeling of doom persisted, I called an ambulance. For the first time in my life, I ended up in the Emergency Room, where the doctor determined that I was not having a heart attack. This was excellent news! (Thankfully, various subsequent tests showed that my heart is in good working order.) But that left the anxiety attacks, which kept occurring, with greater and greater frequency, over the next couple of weeks. Even though the doctors on my two subsequent visits to the ER (!!) told me that I could just ride these episodes out, because there really was no danger to my heart, I was beside myself. The attacks sometimes woke me out of a sound sleep. One day I had four of them. I had no idea what to do. Would they continue to plague me for the rest of my life?

At this point, I was not yet in any shape to engage in spiritual inquiry about what my inner self was trying to tell me. I couldn’t get calm enough to do that. It was all I could do to make it through each day and night without being totally overwhelmed by panic.

The attacks had been going on for nearly three weeks before my primary care doctor discovered, while reviewing my many test results, that my thyroid hormone level was way off. While doing some research, I discovered that anxiety attacks are not at all uncommon for folks with an underactive thyroid. My doctor prescribed a thyroid hormone replacement drug, and once I began taking it, the anxiety attacks lessened dramatically, both in frequency and intensity. Within about ten days, they’d vanished. I was incredibly relieved by this.

At the same time, though, I fully believed that the anxiety attacks were my inner self’s way of communicating something to me. And the terrifying intensity of what I’d experienced during the previous three weeks indicated to me that, whatever this message was, it was urgent. I knew that I needed to understand it and act on it. The fact that the replacement hormone was preventing the attacks was helping me get through each day, but this alone wouldn’t fix whatever it was that my inner self was trying to show me was out of whack. I knew full well that if I didn’t take action now, my inner self would find another, even more dramatic, way to get my attention. The anxiety attacks, although scary, weren’t actually life-threatening. The next message might be, and I certainly didn’t want to have to go through that! So, now that the attacks had faded, thanks to the medication, I was once again able to calm down enough to meditate effectively. I began reflecting on what my inner self was trying to tell me with this hypothyroidism.

I started by considering the thyroid gland. It’s located in the throat, and the throat is associated with our voice, and, thus, with self-expression. So, I reasoned, an underactive thyroid could indicate underactive self-expression. This is where the hypothyroidism stumped me for a couple of weeks. How can I not be expressing myself enough? I wondered. For heaven’s sake, I’ve written this whole novel! Isn’t that enough? What’s more – and this was what really didn’t make sense to me – why did the hypothyroidism manifest as anxiety attacks in me? What in the world was I so afraid of?

Then, one evening, during my meditation session, I sensed a lump in my throat. It felt like something inside me was trying to push its way out. I understood that something in me desperately needed to be expressed. I just couldn’t discern what. I felt intuitively that if I could just understand what it was, I’d also grasp what my inner self was seeking to tell me with the hypothyroidism. I voiced a silent wish to understand what was trying to make its way out of me.

The next morning, I went to my favorite coffee shop, as was my habit, and sat down to work on the novel. But I just couldn’t do it. It simply didn’t feel right. So I stopped. I sat there, staring at the computer screen. And within a few minutes, I understood why writing the novel hadn’t been “enough”: Writing this novel couldn’t possibly satisfy my inner self’s need for self-expression precisely because I was writing solely for myself, instead of sharing what I’d created with the world. The hypothyroidism was a hint from my inner self that I was under-expressing myself by keeping my writing to myself.

But what about the anxiety attacks? Why did I need to have those? Why wasn’t simply being diagnosed with – and understanding – the hypothyroidism sufficient? As I sat there in front of the computer, the answer to this mystery began to come into focus for me: This whole process of writing the novel was about changing two deeply-ingrained behavior patterns, not one. By the time the hypothyroidism was diagnosed, I had overcome one of them: the fear of writing what felt right to me, without having anyone else sign off on it. I’d learned to do that as I wrote my novel. However, for the past year, I had remained in the tight grip of a second fear: that if I shared my novel with others, the world would reject my heartfelt, sincere creative work – and me along with it.

It was this, second, fear that had masqueraded as the voice of my inner self. Each time I completed a new draft, each time it seemed that maybe I was done with the novel, this fear sent me a gut feeling that urged me to keep writing. It was stalling for time, to keep me from experiencing the inevitable rejection it believed would come if I shared my honest writing. It succeeded in its quest for more than a year, because it managed to speak to me in a gut feeling that was relatively muted, as gut feelings go. And although I am certain that my inner self was, meanwhile, doing its best to subtly clue me in to what was going on, it was still quieter than the gut feeling, and I just wasn’t hearing what it had to say. So, eventually, my inner self decided, “The whispering isn’t working. I’m gonna have to shout.” This was where the anxiety attacks came in: My inner self was challenging me to a high stakes game of spiritual, physical, and psychological connect-the-dots. It was giving me the chance to recognize just how terrified I was of getting my novel out into the world.

That’s what happened that morning in the coffee shop: I succeeded in connecting the dots that linked my writing process and my fears to the hypothyroidism and the anxiety attacks. Once I saw all these links, my inner self’s message to me also became clear: “You need to not only express yourself honestly on paper, but overcome your fear of putting what you write out into the world. Do you see what this fear is doing to your body and mind? Do you see how it’s been holding you back?” I did see. Finally. And when I did – that’s when I understood that I needed to start writing something that I could actually put out in the world in a timely fashion. As I saw it, this was a matter of life and death for me, because my inner self wasn’t going to mess around anymore. I would ignore its message at my peril.

Once I grasped all of this, that morning in the coffee shop, I experienced a quiet, peaceful awareness, deep inside me. Definitely a message from my inner self, and not a gut feeling. I knew exactly what I needed to do: I closed the document file that contained the latest version of my novel. Then I opened a new file and began writing this series of posts. “Making Our Way” came into being at that moment – the moment when I consciously made the commitment to write exactly what I feel guided by my inner self to write, and to then share my writing with the world – with you. I’m done letting fear call the shots.

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Opening My Voice-Way

March 24, 2020April 2, 2020 ~ Sue Downing

Part 2: The Non-Disclosure Agreement

About the same time I began writing my historical novel in the summer of 2017, I also – as I mentioned in my previous post – made a firm decision to not share it with anyone during the writing process. I took that step based on a strong feeling that I interpreted as a message from my inner self.

Now, as I wrote earlier, I am wary of my gut feelings, since I’ve learned through trial and error that they often represent the voice of irrational fear, rather than serving as reasonable sources of guidance. That’s why I always consult my inner self, too, when choosing a course of action. But this thought about keeping the novel to myself until it was finished – that wasn’t anything I’d consciously asked my inner self for guidance about. It just came to me once I began to write. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t go into deep inquiry about where that thought had come from. I didn’t check in with my inner self and ask, “Hey, did you send this along to me?” I simply assumed it had because, although the feeling to write basically in secret was strong, it wasn’t “gut feeling strong”. I accepted it without questioning it, because it seemed like just the way my inner self would have my back. Let me explain what I mean by that.

I have always really adored the practice of writing. I’ve consistently found it energizing and joyful to engage in that creative process, whether I was writing fiction, performance pieces, blogs about Reiki and spirituality, or non-fiction. But when I look back on what I created over the years, I can see that in all cases, I tailored what I wrote to meet the expectations of the people I considered my core audience. No matter what I was writing, I’d quickly gain a sense of what folks enjoyed most, and then allow that understanding to strongly influence whatever I wrote next. Even though many people considered some of my performance pieces controversial, the truth is that I rarely wrote anything that would risk alienating my core fans. They came because they enjoyed the outspoken, sex-positive persona I presented in my shows. So, I worked within the guidelines of that persona, never pushing my readers and audience far enough that I would lose them. Losing them was the last thing I wanted.

Cut to about ten years later. At this point, I was putting out weekly blog posts about practicing Reiki, and I also authored a book about Reiki as a spiritual practice. I can say that I truly wrote all of these from the heart, out of a sincere desire to offer something that might benefit those around me. Even so, I was, at the same time, still/once again writing to meet my (new) audience’s expectations. As I’d done in the late 90s, I was presenting a certain persona – just a different one now. Now I was the Reiki practitioner and teacher who had gained some valuable insights and was sharing them.

The point I want to make here is that for me, writing has always been inextricably linked with a lifelong project of doing my utmost to excel at whatever I was engaged in. My overarching goal was to stand out from the crowd, in the hope of gaining others’ approval and affection. So, when it came to writing, it wasn’t enough to just be a performance artist. I had to shock people with what I wrote. Nor was offering a humble little blog about Reiki sufficient. I had to write a whole book about it! (So much for being an advanced spiritual practitioner.)

I’d inaugurated this project early on in life, once I (unconsciously) adopted the false belief that approval and affection are something we humans have to earn. I concluded that you earn these things by 1) being perfect, and 2) expressing only views that others will approve of. There’s a big problem with approaching creative writing – and life, of course – this way: If you’re writing to gain approval, then one thing you avoid writing about at all costs is any of your qualities, thoughts, actions, or beliefs that might reveal to others that you are a regular human, or that you disagree with them about something. Do that, the faulty logic goes, and they will turn on you.

So, naturally, if your writing is undergirded – as mine has been – with the fear that you’ll be rejected if you’re totally honest in what you put out into the world, or if you make yourself vulnerable and show yourself to be, basically, human… If this is how you approach the creative process, then how can your own true inclinations ever manage to consistently make their way into what you’re writing? They can’t. At least this has been true in my case. Certainly, there has been some level of openness in my writing, and a lot of heart, I’d say. But a deep fear of rejection has always held me back from fully and boldly expressing my genuine feelings and thoughts, whether the subject at hand was sexuality or spirituality.

That fear of being spurned for revealing myself as the human I truly am, was so strong in me, that in the writing I did before I began working on my novel, I never trusted myself to make editorial decisions. I always had another person read whatever I was considering performing or posting, someone who knew my audience’s expectations. They could read a piece I’d written, judge whether or not it would fly with that audience, and offer suggestions about how to change it so it’d be most effective – suggestions I nearly always adopted.

This editing process most certainly did result in pieces that ended up more aligned with audience expectations than they started out. But it also resulted in pieces whose final drafts were less aligned with my true inner voice than the first drafts – first drafts which I had already self-censored, out of fear. Ugh. So, to sum up, here’s how I’d describe my creative writing process over the years: I consistently heeded others’ voices about what and how to write, instead of fearlessly consulting and honoring the voice of my own inner self.

This is exactly the pattern I was looking to break by writing my novel alone, in consultation with only my inner self. I did not want to fall under the sway of others’ views and advice and opinions as I worked on this new project. I wanted, finally, to write freely, free of all that outside influence. I wanted to be able to pour my whole heart into this novel, without worrying about the response. And so I began.

Right from the beginning, I fully believed that my inner self was guiding me. So, when the thought occurred to me early on in the process – again, I stress that it arrived unsolicited – that I should write the novel “just for myself”, I immediately accepted it as coming from my inner self. As I saw it, my inner self, which I knew always had my own best interests at heart, was offering me a gift. It was helping me protect myself from the impulse to cede control over my writing to others, and from the fear that had caused me to censor what I truly wanted to write.

So, I continued working on the novel, honoring this non-disclosure agreement. I discovered very quickly that, yes, indeed, I was able to write absolutely what I felt guided to write. Not asking anyone else to approve what was coming out onto the page – that felt glorious! There was one problem with this, however. Simply denying the fear inside me the conditions that had always allowed it to thrive in the past didn’t meant that it just shrugged its shoulders and slunk away. Oh, no. It just sat quietly in the background, biding its time. In my next post, I’ll tell you how this fear managed to reassert its hold on me, and how I finally realized what it was up to and gave it its walking papers.

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Opening My Voice-Way

March 18, 2020April 2, 2020 ~ Sue Downing

Part One: A novel? Really?

Hi, all. Before I get into my actual post, I just want to say that, during this very unpredictable time, I send you much love, and wish for each of you to be safe and healthy and peaceful. I wish for you to feel connected to your friends and neighbors and loved ones through your hearts, despite the physical distances that may separate you. We will get through this on the strength of our love and affection for each other. Take good care.

One benefit of self-isolating is that I have unlimited free time! So, today I’m going to start telling you the story of how I came to launch this blog. What’s most unexpected for me in this story is that I had to spend nearly 3 years writing a novel before I realized that it wasn’t a novel I needed to be writing at all, but a blog. “Don’t Let the Coronavirus Drive Us Apart” didn’t make it onto the page until after I’d written nearly 400 pages of fiction. That’s one heck of a first draft, especially when you end up setting aside the whole thing and starting an entirely new and unrelated project.

I started working on the novel back in the spring of 2017. I had recently stepped back from some very time- and energy-intensive volunteering in a group devoted to healing on the spiritual path. At this point, I had also retired from teaching Russian, and from the translating work I’d done for a number of years. On this sunny April day, I was talking over coffee with a close friend. In the course of our chat, she said to me, “Now that you have more time for yourself, you should start writing again.”

At first, her suggestion seemed to have come out of nowhere. But then I realized that it hadn’t: The very same thought had occurred to me in recent weeks. I’d even toyed for a brief moment with the idea of writing an historical novel. Maybe my friend had picked up on my own desire to write, and reflected it back to me? This would not have surprised me, because she is not only very intuitive, but also knows me well. She’s read pretty much everything I’ve written over the years, and she knows that I have always enjoyed writing, whether or not the piece in question gets published. So, the confluence of her encouragement and my own quiet thoughts intrigued me. I told her I would give the idea serious consideration. She knew what I meant by this: I would consult my inner self about it.

What do I mean when I say “my inner self”, and what does it mean to “consult” it?

First, a bit about what I think my inner self is not. It is not the same as my “gut feelings”. People talk a lot about gut feelings. I do believe they exist, and that we all have them. I think of my gut feelings as the voice of all the worries, fears, trauma responses, anger, and other emotions (whether pleasant or unpleasant) that have accumulated inside me.

Then there’s what I think of as my inner self. Some people call this their soul, or their higher self. I see my inner self as the part of my consciousness that is free of all those worries, etc., that fuel my gut feelings.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that both my inner self and my gut feelings can communicate with me. In fact, they are constantly competing for my attention. And they have different communication styles. My gut feelings are always screaming at the top of their lungs. Sometimes they call out a warning. “Run! Run! Run!” Other times, it’s, “Oh my gosh! This is a sign from the Universe! You should TOTALLY do this!” All this yelling means that I easily pick up on messages from my gut feelings.

My inner self, though – it speaks softly. It never shouts. It will sometimes share a thought in the moments of silence when my gut feelings have paused to take a big breath before issuing their next edict. But my inner self offers its wisdom so quietly that I may not notice that it’s spoken up, or may not heed it, even when I do hear it.

For decades, precisely because I generally only ever heard my gut feelings loud and clear, I blindly accepted them as the best source of guidance about how to make my way through life. This was problematic, though, because – as I’ve learned, the hard way – our gut feelings can be very unreliable judges of whether an action we’re contemplating is actually a good idea. For example, if we’ve experienced trauma – as so, so many of us have – our gut feelings might hoist a red fear-flag even when we’re not really in a dangerous situation. Or, they might start waving a big, bold flag of elation or enthusiasm about taking some step that makes no good sense at all. No matter what our gut feelings are suggesting we do, if we listen to them without taking the time to also consult our inner self, their advice can easily lead us down a path we’ll regret later on. I see this consultation as crucial, because I’ve also come to realize, that my inner self can see the world and my life with clarity. That means it can help me make choices that will benefit me down the line.

In recent years, through lots of practice, I’ve come to understand how my inner self communicates with me and shares what it knows. I’ve found that I’m most likely to pick up on what my inner self is trying to say to me when I’m in a calm and quiet spot – meditating, for example, or simply sitting still on my own for a while. At these times, for whatever reason, my gut feelings are less intrusive (maybe they occasionally just take a break?), and that’s when I’m able to hear my inner self’s voice. Then I can mentally pose questions to it about how to proceed in regard to a given matter. When I do that, a word or two – rarely a whole phrase or sentence – will usually come to mind. Or I’ll have a wordless feeling about the best course of action. I take this as my inner self’s response. After several years of using this method of inquiry, I’ve learned that life plays out in a way that feels positive to me when I do heed what my inner self suggests to me. Based on this experience, I’ve come to see my inner self as the very best source of ideas, insight, and guidance about how to move through life.

So, by the time my friend encouraged me to begin writing again, I’d gotten pretty good at accessing my inner self’s quiet voice beneath the loud gut feelings, and at discerning and trusting what it was telling me. That doesn’t mean, however, that I absolutely always heed its voice. If I’m not actively seeking out advice, or if a message I happen to hear doesn’t totally appeal to me, I might disregard it. Only when my friend encouraged me to start writing again did I admit to myself that I had, in fact, been hearing soft messages coming from inside, about writing a novel. I’d just been ignoring them, mostly because they were suggesting I write an historical novel. “Nope,” I told myself. “Way too much work.” But now, since my friend’s words actually dovetailed with what I, myself, had heard, I decided to sit down and consciously consult my inner self about this idea.

What happened then, when I got calm and quiet, was that the prospect of writing a novel actually felt very good to me. It felt right – but not with the intensity of fireworks or a sense of jumping up and down with joy. Rather, I experienced a soft, tranquil feeling in my body, a peaceful, relaxed sensation, and a happiness in my heart. Over the years, I’ve learned, through trial and error, that these sensations indicate that my inner self is giving me an affirmative answer to my question. So, I concluded that yes, writing an historical novel would be a good idea. A few hours later, an idea for a plot came to mind! This felt like a good sign, too, a sign from my inner self.

Over the next week or so, I explored the plot idea, did a bit of preliminary research, and, finally, decided to move forward. As I began working on the novel in earnest, I also had the strong feeling that I should keep the project to myself as I wrote, and that I shouldn’t share the novel with anyone until I had completely finished it. It seemed to me that approaching the writing this way would allow me to practice discerning what I felt was right to write, guided only by my inner self, without being influenced by others’ views. As I saw it, I had the chance here to break some ingrained behavior patterns that had worked against me in the past.

In my next post, I’ll explain why I so easily accepted that this guidance was coming from my inner self, and not from my gut feelings.