Inner Voice
A segment of the weekly newsletter is a weekly theme and this blog post is an enhancement to that section. Each weekly theme is an invitation and encouragement meant to help the reader better connect to themselves. Please note that the selected themes can be reflected upon at any time and are not limited to the week the themes are shared and published.
Theme: Inner Voice
This week’s theme is Inner Voice. Can you remember the last time you gave yourself enough space to quiet down and listen to your thoughts, musings, and mental ramblings without judgment? Perhaps you have a consistent practice of checking in with yourself and the answer to that question comes easily. Perhaps, however, it’s been some time since you’ve truly checked in with yourself. There is no right or wrong answer to that question as there is plenty happening in our lives and the world at large that can make it difficult to take the time to sit with oneself in quiet contemplation. Checking in with yourself to listen to and hear your inner voice might even feel like a luxury, like wasted time, or it might bring up feelings of “What’s the point?” The encouragement this week is to meet yourself by being with yourself. This is an opportunity to be curious as to whether the inner voice is yours or someone else’s; if it’s someone else’s, does the that voice feel alignment with how you want to feel or how you want to experience your life? Don’t be surprised if your inner voice is very talkative; it might be really excited to finally have you listening.
Practices for Reflection
Start by taking a five deep breaths to ground yourself. Then, reflect on any or all of the following questions:
What resistance, if any, comes up when thinking about connecting to your inner voice?
Whose voice do you hear? (For some it’s their own voice and for others it’s the voice of a “higher power”)
What does your inner voice have to say?
What practices do you have to connect to yourself and your inner voice?
What whispers and nudges from your daily life become clear as you give your inner voice the space to speak?
Personal Reflection
Understanding and listening to my inner voice is something that has become especially important to me throughout the pandemic. With all the noise in the world, all the information I’m consuming, and all the opinions and thoughts that are out there, it is important to check in with myself and decipher if the thoughts I’m having are truly my own or if they are the thoughts of someone else. This isn’t always an easy question to answer, but with enough stillness and listening, the answer becomes clear. Finding the stillness to listen, however, is a practice and it is a practice that benefits from being done frequently and regularly. There are periods of time where I do a great job at being consistent with this practice and then there are periods of time where I get caught up in the busyness of life and don’t make time for this practice. Those moments where I am disconnected from my inner voice - I have come to realize - are the moments where I feel overwhelmed and overstimulated. Why? It’s because I have not taken the time to differentiate between my inner voice and all the outer voices.
For me, listening to my inner voice shows up in two ways: meditation and journaling. In meditation, I sit quietly and follow the flow of my thoughts; here I am the observer of my mind. In journaling, I am also following the flow of my thoughts, but this practice feels more like conversation as I write things down and engage in the process of understanding the messages my inner voice is communicating with me. Like I said above, these are practices I know are beneficial for me and helped me connect to me, but these are also practices that I have difficulty being consistent with. It’s not because I don’t desire the consistency, it’s because I let other things take priority. In my personal reflection on this week’s theme, however, I realized that the time I spend scrolling on my phone is the time I could spend checking in with myself. With that awareness, I can ask myself this truthful and honest question:
What better serves me: checking in with myself or checking in with others?
