Happy Healthy YOU
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Kelly Spencer - Happy Healthy YOU
(A wellness column by Kelly Spencer: writer, life coach, yoga & meditation teacher, holistic healer and a mindful life enthusiast!)
Why do we ignore the inner urgings, the nudging inklings or even the strong shouting voice within?
“We can sometimes stray so far away from our intuition and it's not until something manifests in our face and says, ‘I told you so!’, that we wish we would have listened to ourselves.” - Charely Kielly Yoga, Meditation teacher and Life Coach sharing with her students.
Sometimes it surfaces from a lack of self-importance or self-esteem but can be a message we have been given. The belief stemming from the best intentions from our parents in the past to the ever-expanding consumerism of the now. The message and belief being that the external world is more important than how we actually feel.
Mom: “Go give your aunt a kiss.”
Little Boy: “I don’t want to.”
Mom: “Don’t be rude. Go.”
Dad: “Stop crying, you're fine.”
Little girl: “But it hurts.”
Dad: “It’s nothing, you are making a scene.”
Just as cars have a GPS that helps us get to where we want to go, so do our bodies, minds and souls. Too often, we ignore the life-directional system we were each born with, what author Zen Cryar DeBrucke calls our Internal Guidance System (IGS).
Our holistic being wants us to tune in to this internal guidance, a system that wants us to be happy, successful, and stress-free. Our emotions and feelings are powerful tools that validate our present existence. With the acceptance and validation of what is, as is... we then take an action that is appropriate to bring ourselves back to an alignment state of health and happiness. When we ignore, diminish or stray from the guidance system within each of us, we mis-calibrate or ignore what is truly required of ourselves in this moment.
When we are tuned in and tapped on, we discover how we can leave painful memories behind, abandon destructive relationship patterns, follow the best course of action in every situation, learning to experience the life-changing guidance we were born to follow.
Our emotions, our gut-instinct and visceral reactions are there to let us know the next step, much like the computer voice on our automobile GPS, giving guidance along our way, where to turn and when to turn around and when to re-calibrate. Anger, sadness, happiness are the same with no one better or worse than the other. Obviously we want to all feel happy, but the emotions of fear or hurt are trying to tell us something and therefore all emotions equally important.
The question is, are we listening?
“Our IGS (Internal Guidance System) is the union between the masculine and feminine, the yin and yang, the seek and receive, the heart and the mind, and its role is to seamlessly facilitate direction and guidance as to how we can grow and create harmony and balance that is uniquely tailored to each of us as individuals.” - Lauren Aletta, Inner Hue blogger.
So what can you do to tune-up and turn on your IGS?
1. Notice resistance. What gets in the way of hearing, knowing, feeling Internal Guidance? Resistance is often the energy that is in opposition to receiving guidance. It is when we choose to continue to look at the problem head on, but completely blindly and somehow opposing any other guidance. This blocks the continual and natural messages the higher aspects of You are giving you.
2. Notice fear. Fear is a wonderful guidance system. It tells you a situation is not safe and you should leave. But it is also the first of the F.O.G. (fear, obligation, guilt). I am talking about the resistance fear. The fear that says even though you don’t want this partner, job, relationship, (fill in blank) any longer, you keep it out of fear of not finding something else or something better. Also the avoidance fear where you don’t speak your truth in fear of other’s reactions, placing great importance on the external rather that the internal.
3. Notice obligation. Are you still kissing the proverbial family member that you don’t’ want to? Meaning, are you still doing something that you dread, don’t want, feels completely wrong because it “looks better,” you feel obligated, or you don’t want to upset someone else?
4. Notice guilt. The truth is we decide when we feel guilty and how bad to feel, as we are in charge of our feelings. When it comes to guilt, we become our own judge, jury, and executioner. Guilt keeps us from opening our hearts and allowing self-forgiveness and compassion to enter. It's also important to remember that feeling guilty blinds us to the reality of the situation. We become stuck in ourselves and we can't see the bigger picture and we essentially turn off our inner compass.
5. Turn the volume up. The voice of your soul is your inner guidance system. You were born hearing it clearly. You once believed that anything is possible. But, if you were taught to focus on your five physical senses, logic, and the external perspective, then the intangible source of wisdom may have muted. But it is always speaking to you. When we nurture our magical intuition and turn up the volume of this internal voice, we tap more deeply into our own GPS. So, pause. Close eyes. Deep breaths. Ask internally, “What does this moment ask of me?” Wait. Listen. Feel. Then act appropriately with action from answers received.
“It's never too late to open the pathway back to yourself, question all your beliefs and live, speak and feel your inner truth! The power is right here, right now!” - Charely Kielly.
Our health and happiness is meant to be vibrant. The more we listen to our own inner compass and honor how we feel, the more capable we are of noticing and resolving imbalances in our body, mind and heart before they turn to illness, keeping holistic alignment.
Your inner compass is whispering to you right now. Are you listening?
(If you would like to see an article on a specific topic, please email kelly@indigolounge.ca)