Hear Your Inner Voice

“Everyone who wills can hear their inner voice. It is within everyone.”
  ~ Mahatma Gandhi

There are other voices in our heads that can tend to speak more loudly. Those are typically the voices of childhood conditioning, stemming from our parents, teachers, extended family, and church communities. Sometimes those voices are wise, other times they stop us from knowing who we truly are, and they bind us to a series of beliefs we may or may no longer hold. Meditation can assist in calming the other voices, the ones that keep us in our past, to break free from the conditioning, to step more fully into who we are outside of our childhood, family of origin and our past. Those voices are not helpful when they stop us from feeling free to be who we really are. We are excellent at listening to the voices inside of us that speak the loudest.

 In my house, with two active middle school children (and one in college), it often is that my attention goes towards the one who is the loudest. That is also the way our inner voice works. When we are motivated to calm the competing voices inside for our attention, we actually can clear a space and hear something new and more authentic. Distinguishing the differences between your ego voices and your own inner voice will take some time, but once you get the difference, you will likely feel energized and more at peace.

Through meditation, you can start to quiet the mind and move beneath the surface of the mind where the noise of the voices that belong to your past all try to have their say in your life. Once you go beneath the surface of the mind, suddenly things start to quiet down and a stillness arises. In that stillness, the opportunity arises for you to become aware of a deeper connection within yourself. As you connect to your inner being the only true voice that belongs to you becomes crystal clear. In this space, clarity, and focus happen naturally and the answers to many of your more pressing questions become apparent.

Your inner voice may not always be logical or make sense to you but doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of following. When you begin to follow the guidance of your own inner voice, you will start to differentiate that voice from the voices of others and from the world’s expectations of you. Listen to the conversations of your mind. Much of the time, your inner voice is in conflict with external motives. You imagine what society thinks or what your parents, friends, or partner might think. Your inner voice has conversations with these people as if a real discussion takes place. This is not to say that your initial impressions are more correct or accurate than the opinions of others. The goal is not to evaluate the information being presented–just to focus on what your own unique contribution is to a situation.

During exercises like this one, to connect with the inner voice, sometimes we have both an immediate feeling and counter-feeling. The immediate feeling is your initial impression. The counter-feeling is a cognitive (i.e., thought) response based on ideas such as “What ‘should’ I think or feel?” or “What would other people do?” That initial impression is your inner voice. It is in the space of ongoing practice that you will learn to distinguish both the difference between these voices and also how to quiet the counter-feeling and voice testing your initial impression. There is much to be gained in the initial impression, it is in that subtle space that the most accurate insights come. As I tell most of my intuition/psychic mentoring clients: if they are working hard and struggling, they aren’t doing it right. When our psychic gifts are naturally allowed to open, insights and information may come with so much ease, we at times tend to doubt it, especially if it comes with ease.

Here’s an entry point into the inner voice meditation: think of a question, something relevant to what’s going on in your life. Frame the question in an open-ended fashion such as: “How can I improve ________?” or “What can I do with ________?” Then when you silence your egoic mind, and find that sweet spot of calm and openness, you can rest assured what comes in will be from a deeper place of clarity. The key to these exercises is often in trusting something you may not initially really trust. I find it helpful to stay present in the feelings, knowings, words, and insights and just be with them for a period of time without making any final decisions. However, I also find it the most helpful to resist the urge to instantly discredit the thoughts, feelings, and insights simply because it’s something that is unfamiliar to me.

A common trap amidst beginning seekers is the belief that if the inner voice is followed that there will be no further problems, in other words, intuition is a safety net keeping us from all harm. I am here to tell you after years of developing my own intuition, inner voice, and psychic gifts, there is absolutely nothing about this practice that is fool proof. Refrain from presuming that you are immediately insulated from life also naturally happening as a result of following your own inner voice. Instead, expect to feel stronger in your choices, and more confident as you navigate all the ups and downs of life. This is the ultimate aim and goal of developing the ability to clearly hear, sense, or feel your inner voice.

The inner voice surfaces in a gentle, often slower current of clarity. When you hear or sense something and it gives you a surge of hope, inspiration, and feelings of peace, that is likely your own inner voice doing the guiding. What feels good when you ponder a course of action is more than likely your inner guide, rather than what feels bad, which is likely to be associated with your ego and fear. It is easy for our body to respond to guidance in a positive way that actually is a right action, then for our body to give us warning and anxious feelings, signaling a path that isn’t right action. The more you become aware of your own emotional responses to the insights, the more you will perfect the ability to recognize your own inner voice.

Remember to keep a light heart on this journey and a sense of healthy discernment, and by all means take your time, especially if it seems daunting at first. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon practice of unfolding over the course of your entire life. You have the answers within, though sometimes you may not want to listen. It’s not easy being human, but it’s good to know you are not alone. Though the voices of fear and doubt seem the strongest within you at times, remember you have the choice to single out the lone voice that remains steady and strong and will always remind you of who you are and what you want. 

From the osho.com talk #13 From Ignorance to Innocence: “Once you identify whose voice it is, thank the person, ask to be left alone and say good-bye to it. The person who had given that voice to you was not your enemy. His intention was not bad, but it is not a question of his intention. The question is that he imposed something on you that is not coming from your inner source; and anything that comes from outside makes you a psychological slave. Once you have told a certain voice clearly, ‘Leave me alone,’ your connection with it, your identity with it, is broken. It was capable of controlling you because you were thinking it was your voice. The whole strategy was the identity. Now you know it is not your thoughts, not your voice; it is something foreign to your nature. Recognizing it is enough. Get rid of the voices that are within you and soon you will be surprised to hear a still, small voice, which you have never heard before...then a sudden recognition that it is your voice. It has been there always, but it is a very still, small voice because it was suppressed when you were a very small child, and the voice was very small, just a sprout, and it was covered with all kinds of crap. And now you go on carrying that crap and you have forgotten the plant that is your life, which is still alive, waiting for you to discover it. Discover your voice and then follow it with no fear. Wherever it leads, there is the goal of your life, there is your destiny. It is only there that you will find fulfillment, contentment. It is only there that you will blossom – and in that blossoming, knowing happens.”