As I sat in meditation this morning attempting to wrangle in inner peace, my thoughts seemed to be in over drive.
Inner wisdom: Watch your thoughts and feel your breath. Build your attentional muscle.
Judgy: Yes. Stop paying attention to the others. Focus on your breath.
Control lover: Okay, but after that let’s discuss what we are going to do today.
Inner child: Don’t forget play time. I don’t want to just work.
The Pessimist: Is this ever going to work? Really? We do this every day and I don’t see much progress.
The Optimist: I respectfully disagree. We haven’t had a migraine in months and our stress less has dropped a ton. Our coping skills are also strengthening.
Judgy: It is pretty slow though. And who really wants to listen to all this chatter?
The Random Interruptor: What should we have for breakfast? What are we in the mood for?
Inner child. I want scrambled eggs.
Control lover: Ok, but let’s add vegetables. We need vegetables.
Inner wisdom: This is a chatty bunch today.
Pessimist: This is EVERY DAY.
Meditation. The Stillness Practice. Creating space to let our Inner Wisdom, our Intuition’s voice become louder.
It is one of the very first practices I suggest to my clients. And one I encourage allll the time. It’s also the one I hear the most resistance to.
Why? Because of the script above. Most of us have a script that plays out during meditation. It’s a thing. And then people think they suck at it.
The good news is, you can’t suck at it. If you are creating space to give yourself the opportunity to be still, you’re halfway there. If you give it 3-5 minutes daily commitment, you are on you’re way.
We all have the chatty voices in our head. This is normal. Our brain is an organ, just like our heart. Our heart continues beating without our control, just as our brain continues thinking even when we ask it not to.
Our heart pumps blood. Our brain fires off neurons. All important.
Since we are not ready for our hearts to stop beating, it may also be unfair to ask our brain to stop firing neurons. Until we are done with this life, both are needed for us to thrive.
With this in mind, what we can do is start to pay attention to the patterns those thoughts throw off or even just acknowledge they are just thoughts. And most of our thoughts are just conditioned habits trained to fire off a certain way. They are the voices we learned from our caregivers, our teachers, our peers: basically all the people we’ve been exposed to and all their neurons firing too.
When we practice stillness and intentionally practice slowing down, those habits begin to naturally reveal themselves and have an interesting way of slowing down too. Just enough that we can let our inner widom/intution, our true selves, have a few words to add to the mix. You’ll begin to recognize this voice as the calm one. The one who doesn’t judge or critique. The one who really just says it the way it is without drama or concern.
The one which feels like peace. The wise voice in the crowd.
It’s the same voice you use when you are talking to children who are upset. Or the one who is supporting a hurting friend. The same one who forgives and re-invites those who were once cast out, back in to your heart. It’s the one who sees through eyes of compassion and who knows that love is all you really are craving at the end of the day.
Which is why giving yourself small clips of time to calm the inner party of voices and let your intuition strengthen it’s social positioning is a really helpful practice.
Bonus- the more prominent that inner wisdom voice becomes, the more likely you are able to hear and trust it. And the more you trust it, the more you trust you. And since that inner wisdom is your direct connection to Life (God, the Universe, Spirit, the Divine), it helps you trust the Serendipities that Life is setting up for you all the time. And know you really can let go and trust the flow of your path.
Win win!
For today, consider giving yourself a little space to let that inner wisdom be heard. Create room for it. Let it know you are paying attention. If you hear nothing, no worries. I often don’t during meditation. But by creating the space for it, it gives it room to come through when it’s not on demand or when you really could use an extra boost.
What have your experiences of mediation been like? Have you found it helpful? Do you find it hard to commit?