IF NOT YOUR GUIDANCE SYSTEM

… What decides it?

Blurry image of confused person from Klugzy Wugzy on Unsplash

Let me just say a few words about your marvelous guidance system (which you can amend as you like to fit what rings true for you) and then I’d like to look with you at what on earth you would let decide your life for you if not that. Head straight for that bullet list below if you just want to consider what else could lead what you do and don’t do, what you choose, what you do or don’t admit to your experience, your heart, your life. And just after the bullet points is a doozy that needed its own paragraph, so maybe read that too.

You have so much freedom to create your life from the inside. You get to notice everything out there that gets your attention and run it by how it makes you feel, whether it feels aligned or off to you, whether it sparks an expansive, excited sense of creating the next thing you want (in all realms of life), or whether it feels defeating or depleting or fraught with obligation, guilt, old stories and decisions made in the past, and so on.

You get to keep it fresh if you want to. That’s true even if you can’t instantly change current conditions. You can always change how you feel. You can always change what you say yes or no or how much to right now. And your guidance system is always calling you to what feels better and more aligned. With zero judgment, coercion, or manipulation. Just letting you know. Now and now and now.

Your job for living at the highest level you’re capable of RIGHT NOW is to respond to your own guidance system.

It’s never out there—it’s inside you. But the out-there stuff is part of your dance with consciousness. It’s full of symbols, signals, suggestions—all kinds of stuff you can respond to. More important, you can notice how you ARE responding—how anything registers for you in body, heart, head. What happens when that comes into your field?

Does it make you feel expansive, more on-course, more curious about life, more authentically you? Does it feel full of new possibility, growth, more fun, more freedom, more ease? MORE OF THAT.

Does it make you feel bad, like you’re doing it wrong and won’t ever get it right, like you have to bite some bullet or put in a bunch of time where nothing remotely matches what you want and who you know yourself to be (or, if. you’ve gotten away from yourself, from what you suspect and still get glimmers of)? To anything that just feels NOT HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL, please, LESS OF THAT.

And if you don’t follow your marvelous guidance system--that originates in you, that comes up from inside you; that has alllll the facts and stats about what’s going on now, what has been, and where you’d actually like to go next; that knows exactly what your obstacles and fears and limited beliefs are, AND IS EQUIPPED TO MOVE YOU THROUGH AND AROUND THOSE—if not that amazing guidance system, then what?

I asked a client that question rhetorically the other day, and then all of these answers wanted to pour in. So I wrote them down.
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You could let yourself choose any one thing and another and another and your whole entire life out of any of the following (instead of in response to your own guidance) (and of course, this is not an exhaustive list, so do open to what else wants to come to you):

• someone else's desires and expectations
• making others comfortable or sparing them some discomfort you predict (that may have no basis in current reality or that they’ll experience anyway)
• saying yes to others whatever they ask
• pandering to their egos, anger, sorrow, manipulations
• your fears and your declarations about what you can’t do or what isn’t accessible or available to you
• some image you're cultivating
• some fixed identity you’re sticking to
• some old concept that doesn't fit anymore (and how you know is that it makes you feel squeezed and out of sorts, like the clothes that chafe and pinch and don't allow freedom of movement and don’t even fall right or flow right)
• some clan mentality you’ve adopted and still operate out of (from family, a friend group, a work culture, any culture or subculture)
• concepts like what it means to be nice, what makes you a good person [or fill in roles--sibling, boss, spouse, etc], what someone your age should or can or can’t do
• obligation
• guilt
• shame
• safety
• habit (this is what I've been doing and always do, so this is what I'll do now despite the tug or impulse or spark to do something else)

To be clear, those things could be choosing your life.

And then there’s this crazy thing: what you promised or committed to before. You SAID, so you’re sticking to it. Never mind that by now, life has brought in a whole bunch of new information (and keeps persistently trying to bring it to your notice, because our guidance system NEVER gives up on us), information that you COULD hold up to the old promise in order to take in that it practically begs and screams for you to appropriately renegotiate and/or revise it—but you’re letting your past self and what they knew and decided and said decide today, against what your guidance system is bringing in today.

Against the fresh dynamic-NOW wisdom of your own marvelous guidance system, that’s actually tapped in to the evolution, to your becoming, to all that you keep stretching into (or at least would like to, at least at the soul level).

But let’s go back to that parenthetical in the above paragraph. Your guidance system is like an adoring dog whose loyalty will not budge. It will not give up on you. It will not punish you for ignoring it or talking back. It will not stop coming up with creative ways to get your attention.

And it will not stop using your EMOTIONS to help you really get and viscerally know: this is what I love and what feels good; this is what makes me feel terrible and what I need to adjust and/or move away from. Heart guidance will be the topic of a future mailing.

In the meantime, my work here is finished: consider what decides it for you if not your guidance system. And whatever you do or don’t see right now, consider more responding to and flowing with the nudges, tugs, flashes, zingy attention-getters, inspired ideas, impulses to act, random people dropping into your field or mind, dreams, persistent desires, and all the magic, synchronicity, and repeating echoing themes that keep coming in from the outside and bumping into your deep inner knowing and the truth of who you really are.

Love & blessings, Jaya