Today, I want to talk about you about something that has been so important and pivotal in my life and my spiritual path. I will start by sharing a story. What I want to bring you into is how to listen to your inner voice. So, I want to share with you that when my son died in 2001, what happened for me in the months following is that I started to hear a voice – and just your inner voice, it’s usually a very still, small voice, that speaking in the background of everything. Because it is still and it’s small, and it’s mostly silent, we don’t pay attention to it. Indeed, we’re so used to listening to our thoughts. We are so used to listening to the critical voice, the judgmental one, the one that says there’s something wrong with us, the one that is always telling us that we won’t make it, that we’re not good enough, that this is not for us, etc, etc, Whatever story yours may be telling you. But that is not the truth about you. There is still, small voice that is speaking behind this one. And in order for you to start to be able to pay attention to it and to listen to it, you have to still yourself, you have to learn to be a little bit with silence. You have to slow down and quiet your mind so that you can start to pay attention and listen to what your inner voice – your still small voice – has to say about you about how to live your life. It can give you plenty of tips and advice and we could even call it true guidance about how to live your life in a more flowing and effortless way than what you’re used to do.
Indeed, when I started to hear my inner voice in 2001, I didn’t even know I had one. Nobody ever spoke to me about an inner voice. I would even call it an inner GPS, something that is guiding us and leading us into what’s always best for us. I didn’t know it was possible. So, what’s important is that you start to slow down and start to differentiate the thoughts that are very loud, judgmental, and critical. They are based on fear and doubts and that are leading you into more of the same. It’s important that you start to differentiate these voices. You can also call it intuition. Sometimes you hear something different, you feel for something different. You have a sense of going another direction or doing something else than what you’re used to. And most of the time, because nobody told us to listen to this, to pay attention to our intuition or gut feelings, we don’t do it. We don’t do it because all that we want is making sure we are feeling safe, and having our life to be the way we wanted to be. And so we’ve been trained to think and to believe that if we only follow our thoughts will be safe. The purpose of thought is to keep you safe and survive.
So stop is always telling yourself that in order to survive, you have to follow that. That’s why we create all these defense mechanisms, which are now shutting us down from the life that we want to create. They prevent us from having the absolutely fabulous relationships that we want to happen in our life, or to earn the amount of money that we would like to have so that we can contribute to things that are dear to our hearts.
When you stop listening to that voice, and you start paying attention to what is still in the background, you start to discover that maybe there is another way. Maybe there is another way to look at things – to live your life – to see what you see. Maybe what you see is not really there and not really true. Maybe what you experience is not really true. Sometimes there are consequences of believing what you believe. And it’s become such a deep filter in your experience that you really believe it’s true. But it’s only a filter based on your conditioning, past experiences, past wounds and hurts, that is keeping you into more of the same.
Starting to listen to your inner voice is going to lead you into another way of living and being. It’s going to lead you into being you – truly you – truly who you really are. That’s a very important part of what your spiritual path or your spiritual self is. Listening to your inner voice is leading you into more of you and expressing the fullness of who you are. Your full potential, living at the edge of yourself at the edge of your comfort zone.
Constantly challenge your fears and your limiting beliefs and realize that they are not real. They are a product of your past experience, but they are not who you are. And today, keeping believing and following these thoughts and living the same way, is like a 10 year old that is trying to still wear his pajamas from when he was five. It’s really uncomfortable. It’s too tight. And it also doesn’t allow the blood to flow through. That’s exactly what keeping believing these limiting beliefs or thoughts are for you today.
At some point in your life, those limiting beliefs helped you, and they created a safety net so that you can survive today. If you keep going with them, you’re only going to die with them. And it’s not going to allow the energy of life to flow through you. That is what creates depression, burnout, sometimes also the desire to die, as well as suffering, because most of the time suffering is in your thoughts, nowhere else.
I really encourage you to start to pay attention to how your body feels when you do something. When I started to follow my inner voice, it was scary. It was scary because nobody ever told me that I had one, and I didn’t know if I could trust it. But what happened is that when my son died…after two, three months, I started to hear it. And I heard three things. It completely changed my life. It painted another picture.
I heard, the life you’re living today is not your life. There is something else for you. I had no clue what it meant. And then I heard there was a woman that stays deep within you that only wants to emerge and I had no clue what it meant. And I heard a third thought and it said if you stay, you will die. And that’s what made me leave everything I had build until then and start to live completely differently.
At first I just outgrew my comfort zone in a very easy, flowing, effortless way. Just changing jobs. Leaving my partner, the father of my son back then, leaving my apartment, going back to living with my parents. It was all about coming back to: What was important for me? Who was I? Where did I want my life to be? And where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do with pain and the depth of suffering that I was going through? How would I make it? Because I had these thoughts. You can imagine that after my son died, I didn’t know how I would survive his death. How would I keep living?
I feel that by following my inner voice, and trusting something that I didn’t even know existed two months earlier…it actually gave me life again, and much more than the life that I had before. It gave me a life of happiness, joy, and peace, that I didn’t even know could exist before. So that’s what listening to your inner voice can do for you. How can you differentiate it from your critical voice? Well, that’s very easy in some ways. It’s easy because it’s speaks less loud than the critical one.
When it guides you, it’s giving you a sense of certainty, a softness in your heart, or jaw. You can feel afraid, but deep down you know it’s right. You will also feel aligned within yourself. As if everything is actually clicking in yourself. Or you may feel excitement because you know you’re going towards something that is calling you. Even though you might know how it’s going to turn out or how it’s going to be, somewhere within you you know that it’s where you are to go. I can tell you a bit more about that. For example, for me it’s been several months now that I have this deep sense of going back to living in the States. And I didn’t have any more clues other than that. Several months ago, I had a strong sense now is the time. And so I made the decision. I made the decision, but I knew it would take a few months before I could go. And now is the time I’m preparing. Renting my house again, leaving it, preparing my move, and it’s coming soon. And still, I don’t have all the information. I just have a sense to go somewhere. And I don’t know more. But I know that once I’ll be there, I will be guided and I will receive the next steps. Often, we still want to feel safe and control every experience that sometimes we don’t allow it for the fear of not knowing.
But what if not knowing was the way to discover a new way of being and a new path for you? What if it was the answer to a prayer that you have had for so long? Because when you’re guided by your inner voice, by spirit, by God, by love, however you want to call it, you have to take the first step. But often you don’t know the second, the third or the fourth or the 10th step until you take the first.
So you have to be courageous.
You have to trust that there is something greater at play here for you.
It’s answering your prayers, and that if you take the first step, all the other ones will be given to you. So pay close attention to how your body feels. Making the choice to start to see things differently than how you’ve been looking at life until now. And you’re going to see the changes in your life are going to come very fast. You’re going to start to be rewarded very fast from you daring to listen to this inner voice.
So I hope this is helpful for you. And that you see how you have this inner GPS within you, that’s actually leading you into the life that you’ve always been asking for. And that you know that is within you.
If you have more questions, if you want to ask anything about what you’re going through, and how can you make sure that you feel the need to be reassured in some way, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or ask any question at askarmelle.com.
It would be my greatest pleasure to be there for you, to guide you, and to answer any questions you might have. I look forward to being with you again. And I wish you an absolutely joyful time with learning to listen to your inner voice.
