Prioritizing and trusting your own wisdom (3 min read)
Do you ever feel like you are living seven different lives as seven different people?
I live off of the Apple notes app on my phone with labels for all the parts of my life: self-care, kids and home, a business career, book-writing and other creative work, relationship, money, friendships and personal growth. Staying incredibly organized is the only way I can live the big life I want to live (there are currently 1,476 notes in my phone)!
This week, I combined the to-do lists under “Memoir,” my recently finished and first complete book, and “Samansara,” which are the stories I write with my writing partner that include film, TV, and novellas. It sounds simple, but I’ve been digging deep to integrate the many aspects of what often feels like an incredibly complicated life. I need to simplify and integrate. I know there is a golden thread through not just the complexity I live today, but all the past lives I have led from being a wandering nomad living out of a bus to running my own business as a single mom.
What made me drop out of college to follow spiritual teachers? What told me to leave a bad marriage with a nursing baby and start over? To take on the risk of starting my own business from nothing? I heard something. Was it random? No. Was it impulse? No. It was something more consistent, something more protective and wise. A voice. A calling.
Since I was a child, I heard the inner calling. I may not have called it that as I explored the forests and fields behind my upstate New York home, but I trusted the sense of safety I felt in nature. I was not alone. There was something bigger than me that protected me, comforted me, something that was not the mother and father who bore me, something I trusted more. I heard it in the sound of the tree leaves blowing at dusk and saw it in the sherbet-colored sunsets. It was both outside of me and within me, a presence that assured me, in spite of the arguments and severe mental illness happening in my house, I was going to be okay.
The inner voice that told me, You’re safe, has been my guiding light, even through dark times when it was a distant flicker around an unknown corner. Today, I call it an inner calling, and I protect it, and prioritize it, because it allowed me to survive. I encourage it to stay active by making space in my life for quiet and solitude. And although I may lose contact sometimes, I trust that it’s there. Why? Because it has fulfilled its promise. I am okay.
Through all the challenges I have faced, all the loss to my outer sense of safety, including assaults on my physical, emotional and sexual boundaries, I am okay.
How do you listen to your deep inner knowing? If you can’t hear the voice, or feel the comfort of knowing you will survive this too, how do you make space in your life for that to emerge? Isn’t it within all of us, this impulse to live, until the day we don’t? What does yours look like? Sound like? Is it a candle flame or a north star? Or maybe the sound of a wolf’s howl?
