Life is a chain.
Depending on how you look at it, it may feel like a chain that binds and restricts you, or it may feel like a chain of connected experiences and moments that hold purpose, meaning, and possibility. I believe the difference between which type of chain you experience life as lies within where you are guided from.
Are you guided from within or from without?
The thing about internal guidance is that you have to be present to receive it—present to yourself in the ever-changing sequence of life. That’s what vinyasa yoga in particular is all about—practicing staying present to your experience in each pose and each transition within a chain of interconnected postures. Through staying present, you are able to feel in your body how to respond to each pose. The feeling in your body of how to respond is internal guidance.
But most often we default to the external guidance—in the case of a yoga class, it’s the voice of the teacher who conducts the sequence of poses. We might get the cue from our body that this doesn’t feel right but we keep going because that’s what the teacher says to do and it would be too awkward or rude or embarrassing to not do that. Or we simply don’t know what we would do instead.
But as what our internal guidance says is best for us in the moment goes further out of alignment with what the external guidance is, we can feel like we’re getting dragged around on the end of a chain, and we can begin to lose a sense of connection and meaning in something that once brought us joy and inspiration.
(And I don’t know about you, but a yoga class is not the only place that this happens for me, and certainly not the most crucial!)
I don’t think the question is “how do we get supported in hearing our guidance when we’re present to ourselves?” as I think most of us actually do hear that voice, if quietly: “this pose hurts my knee;” “living in this town no longer serves me;” “eat the ice cream.” The chain of guidance usually breaks once we’ve heard it because we don’t want to hear it, don’t know what to do about it, or don’t trust it.
The question is: how do we learn to listen, discern what to do, and trust acting on it??
Well,:
1. Start with the small stuff! When we’re first learning to listen internally, it’s best to start with the small stuff—most of us wouldn’t run a marathon without slowly building our jogging distance, and yet we usually only turn to our guidance with the BIG questions. Erich Schiffman talks about using guidance to decide what shirt to wear in the morning, whether to buy apples or oranges at the store, what yoga pose to do. Start with the small stuff so you start to know how you know when it’s guidance rather than your “should voice.” If you start with things that are inconsequential, you build trust with the inner wisdom.
2. Know that it won’t necessarily make sense to your rational thinking mind. Guidance is active engagement with the Mystery. It is rarely what your mind would suggest, and it doesn’t always tell you why. The best thing you can do is to play the game and be curious to the why after the fact. “Oh, maybe it felt right to go the long way home because it allowed me to run into this person who I’ve been meaning to connect with.”
3. Ask for support from the people in your life, but also from Spirit. When you do come upon one of the heavy duty subjects, you can ask guidance for more information; sometimes it may have it to offer, other times not. When you need more support, tell your trusted friends and family. “Hey, I keep getting this feeling like I should do this thing, but I don’t really know how and it scares me.” I find that people are always hugely supportive of helping you come into alignment with your own knowing.
Remember this: the voice of guidance is always compassionate, AND it doesn’t care if you don’t listen, it will keep offering itself to you unconditionally.
And know that when you do listen and then dare to act on what you’re guided to do, your life will feel less like a binding chain and more like an inspiring chain of interconnected events. Your life.