October Theme - Listening to Our Inner Knowing

This past month, I spent a lot of time turning inward. I do this naturally as someone who’s inner world is quite active - I’m an introvert and a writer with a super imaginative brain, I have a morning meditation and journaling practice, so it’s pretty common for me to direct my focus internally. But what I’ve begun to notice, especially in this past month, is that while it’s easy enough for me to look inward, it’s not so easy for me to actually listen to (and act on) what my own inner voice has to say. 

I am by nature an intuitive person. It’s more or less just how I’m made. I can’t explain it any other way. But we live in a world that tends to discount this type of inner knowing. If it can’t be seen, heard, physically felt/touched, tasted, touched, it’s not considered valid. And in certain instances, this makes sense - i.e. I’m not going to pretend my intuition can tell me more about COVID than the scientists, because knowing how a virus responds and reacts takes years of study and research and specific knowledge, which I do not have.  But when it comes to things that are intrinsic to me, it’s a different story. And it’s in these intrinsic situations that I often tend to discount my inner knowing, to listen to external influences and situations that can’t possibly know my inner landscape than me, who literally lives with it and in it daily. 

On the mat, dismissing our inner knowing can show up in numerous ways. It may be that I know, deep down, that what I really need is something more restful and restorative, but I convince myself or let others convince me that I should do an active flow practice because “I should push through it and move more”. It may be knowing that one pose variation would serve me best, but I see everyone else doing a different variation, so I go for that one. In each of these situations, I’m discounting what I actually know to be best for myself, or trying to convince myself that what I know isn’t actually true. 

Off the mat, this shows up in basically any area of life. It may look like a situation - a job, a house you’re thinking of purchasing, a relationship, an opportunity - that seems ideal “on paper” (i.e. to the external senses), but there’s something that about it that just feels off, or maybe doesn’t feel off but just doesn’t feel completely right. Or it may be the opposite. It may be a situation which you have to preface with “I know this seems ridiculous, but this just feels like the right path/way/decision/etc”. And to be clear, it doesn’t have to always be major decisions or life altering situations. It can be as simple as “For some reason, I really feel like cooking xyz for dinner”, or it could be that something tells you to take a different route to the grocery store and it turns out you missed sitting in a traffic jam on the route you normally take. (I realize this example probably doesn’t happen a ton because of GPS/Google Maps, but you get where I’m going with this). And I get that it might sound silly to try to listen to the inner voice that tells you what to make for dinner, but the reason that I point out these mundane examples is that because they often serve as practice for situations when there’s significantly more at stake. If we’re constantly telling ourselves “I feel like cooking this, or suggesting this activity, but no, that’s going to sound silly, I’ll just go with what I/we usually do”, we get conditioned to ignoring our inner voice, to discrediting it. Then, when bigger decisions come up (or if we’re ever in a situation in which someone else is actively trying to control or manipulate our actions) it becomes increasingly difficult to listen to ourselves, to our inner knowing. And  if we do this enough, it can have a negative impact on areas like our self worth, our self esteem and confidence, which I have experienced first hand. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t add a caution here - it can be super tempting to use the idea of our intuition as an excuse to stay stagnant, to not push ourselves, to not get uncomfortable, to not grow.  This is particularly true when it’s a situation that makes us nervous, uncomfortable, or afraid (in a “fear of rejection” sort of way, not afraid for your health/life/safety - definitely listen to that!). For instance, it would be easy for me to say “Oh, I’m not going to try teaching that new class - I “know” nobody will show up anyway”. But that’s most likely not intuition. That’s fear masking as intuition to keep me comfortable. In this case, I have to dig a bit deeper, to get past that fear and get to the real knowing. And it may be that when I dig deep, I still find that I know it’s not the class to teach. But if I really listen to myself and my body, I’ll know what the right answer is. When I’m listening correctly, I’ll feel almost a peace or calm - even if the outcome itself isn’t what we hoped, there’s a feeling of understanding it’s the right decision. When I’m not listening properly but using it as a buffer, I’ll feel anxious or out of sorts or frustrated or possibly angry or defensive depending on the situation - basically, I’ll feel the way I would if someone was tricking me, because deep down I know I’m tricking myself. This is why practicing with more mundane situations and decisions can be helpful - we get used to what it feels like so that when we really need to rely on our intuition, we are more familiar with how it feels to do so. 

I’ll be exploring more of digging into our inner knowing, our intuition, throughout the month. In yoga, we can find this idea of intuition in the chakras (the third eye chakra specifically) and the Koshas (Vijnanamaya Kosha), and really, throughout all eight limbs of yoga. One of the main goals of yoga, after all, is to reconnect with ourselves not just ourselves in this body, but as part of something bigger. And to me, connecting with this inner knowing is an important part of this journey. If we cannot listen to ourselves, to who we are and what we truly know, how can we fully connect with ourselves as beings, and as part of something larger than ourselves?