
WHERE IS YOUR TRUE NORTH – Locating Your Inner Guidance
We all face decisions in our everyday lives, some small and seemingly insignificant, or some big and potentially life changing. With so many influences in our lives, how do we locate our inner guidance to discover our own true north?
Do we put our intellect to work, listing the pros and cons to rationalise our way to deciding? Or do we let our emotions guide our choices to be dictated by ungrounded desires or unwarranted fears? Perhaps we plead our case to others, presenting our options to friends or family and decide based upon external guidance.
All of the above have their place, but we also have an utterly reliable way to locate our internal guidance. A reliable system that bypasses even our own personal bias. This is where we find our own true north, our own sense of rightness, our internal GPS system. What is it you ask? Its your BODY !
YOUR BODY NEVER LIES
So the main way we can locate our inner guidance is through our Body. To illustrate the statement ‘The body never lies’, I’d like to share an experience I had many years ago. I only recognised the value in the experience through hindsight.
I was working on a creative project for about a year with a guy I knew. Every Monday he’d come over to my flat with his computer and we’d spend the day working together. Our roles were clearly defined and agreed upon at the outset of the project, or so I had thought.
Then one Monday, he knocked on my front door and I went to greet him as usual. As soon as he stepped inside the house, I thought I was going to vomit. I assumed that I had some kind of tummy bug or had eaten something that had disagreed with me. The nausea subsided and we continued our work. The next Monday the same thing occurred, again I put it down to some kind of digestive issue. It continued for weeks while the whole time I continued to dismiss it as nothing more than a dietary reaction.
TRUST YOUR GUT – Locating Your Inner Guidance
Months later, I discovered my so called ‘friend’ had stolen my intellectual property claiming my creative work as his own. It was at that stage I realised that my body had been literally giving me a ‘gut-feeling’, that something wasn’t right for quite some time.
The intellectual property issue never got resolved but I learnt an invaluable lesson through that experience to literally ‘trust my gut’. I’ve also reclaimed my creativity in many other fulfilling ways since then and have simultaneously discovered that creativity is life force energy that cannot in fact be stolen.
My point in explaining this experience is that our BODY is our very own internal guidance system, with it’s own inbuilt GPS if you like. It faithfully lets us know when something is off, and it points us in the direction of what is in alignment with us by how it feels in our body.
YOUR FELT SENSE – Locating Your Inner Guidance
The term “Felt Sense‘ emerged from the work of American Philosopher Dr Eugene T Gendlin who founded the psychotherapeutic technique called “Focussing”.
The example I’ve given is in relation to my own dominant ‘felt sense’, meaning a literally sensation that that is felt in the body. Yours however maybe different to mine. Perhaps you can ‘smell’ when something isn’t right; or you find your jaw clenching; maybe you feel temperature changes or like your energy has been zapped. Maybe you get a visual sign or an auditory cue to guide you; a tingling; a tightness; an ease; a rush of energy. What is it for you? What’s your own dominant felt sense? It could be one, it could be many, I simply invite you to pay attention to your own body and discover for yourself.
SELF ENQUIRY -Locating Your Inner Guidance
In aiding the process of tuning in to discover your own felt sense, there are two questions that I find very useful. You can ask these questions to yourself in relation to another person, and idea, a decision, or a choice between two scenarios/options. It helps to be very still and relaxed when doing this and it’s important to make sure that you’re not disturbed. Then simply ask yourself:
- Does it deplete me or energise me?
- Does it limit or liberate me?
Then pay attention to your body’s response. One option/choice may feel lighter, more energising, expansive or warmer; the other may feel heavier, depleting, contracting or cooler.
Remember this is not an intellectual process as such, nor is it emotional guidance you’re seeking here. It’s your own physical, bodily ‘felt sense’ that you’re tuning into through this process, and that sense gives you another layer of information. You can then that add this new information to the intellectual understanding and emotional feedback you may also receive.
A PERSONAL NOTE
I’ve used this self-enquiry process many times to locate my own inner guidance when faced with the ‘Big Decisions’ that life sometimes asks us to make. More recently though, I’m engaging with my own ‘felt sense’ more frequently and it’s kind of fun, much like a game of ‘choose your own adventure’. Tuning into our felt sense is a skill that we can develop, and like anything that we practise, we can get really good at it!
It’s actually a way of tuning into our subconscious mind, (which is essentially our body). Kinesiology uses this same process during muscle-testing, it’s simply a more direct way of connecting with our subconscious.
So give it a go and have some fun with it, your own true north will never lead you astray!
With Love and Blessings
Chrissy x
Holistic Alignment offers a variety of treatments to suit your unique needs. Our Practitioners Chrissy Diamond and Lorelei Messersmith will be happy to discuss any questions you may have regarding your treatment to assist in putting you at ease. Contact Chrissy or Lorelei to book your first Holistic Alignment.