The words go with your gut, trust your instincts and go with your intuition all refer to one thing–listen to your inner voice. That all sounds awesome, but in practice, you find that there are a lot of internal conflicts and external noises and distractions that will play with your inner voice. Suppose you were to go with your inner voice and cultivate it to become a strong part of your life. You wouldn’t need to do a lot to get spiritual guidance and spiritual strength. Your days of carrying a crystal on you or waving a pendulum will all be over if you tap into the immense power of your inner voice.
But what’s an inner voice? Why is it so important? What ways are there for listening to it? If crickets and gibberish are all you ever hear, stick around till the end to find out how you can do all of that. That said, even if you are already working with your inner voice, we are confident the points below can add value to you and make it easier and more natural for you.
What Is An Inner Voice?
Your inner voice is that still small voice of calm within you that allows you to understand things immediately without conscious reasoning. You know that something is true without knowing why. It is always there at the back of your mind, guiding you, telling you where you have gone wrong, and even sometimes preemptively warns you about some things—even before you actually experience them. Some call it gut feeling, insight, knowledge, or innate wisdom, and it all stems from having an inkling, a hunch, sense, or feeling about something.
If you have observed yourself, you will notice that somehow without a hunch, needing evidence on some things, you made a decision, and it turned out to be right. It felt good, it felt easy. Likewise, you will have plenty of examples of the times you ignored your gut and ended regrettably. The inner voice is a powerful tool for decision-making because 95% of our brain’s activity is subconscious. So, if you go for the small 5% cognitive active that comes from the conscious mind, you are not relying on aggregated experience and wisdom that lies deep inside you. We constantly take invaluable information from our senses, and each of those information points plays into our decision-making. So, when cognition sometimes overrides intuition, it might not always be the best course of action.
Listening to your inner voice affects our perception of the world and how we react to things. Most of our world is constructed in our minds. The world is nothing more than my perspective of it. Even things that won’t happen in the real world happen in our heads—take the example of nightmares, dreams, and even amazing lucid dreams. This is why our inner voice is important. It helps us process and interprets the impressions and feedback we get from people and things we interact with. For example, if you were in a toxic relationship, your intuition would point out both its negatives and positives. After all, the onus for reacting rests on you.
Ways Of Experiencing Your Inner Voice
Our Inner voice won’t always be a voice in your head that you hear actively. More often, it is a sensation, a feeling, energy, image, or emotion within you. Your body will always channel it anyway because there is no perfect way to experience your inner voice. As the Lord works in mysterious ways, so is our inner voice, as it reflects our deep divine wisdom. The best you can do is to be alert and recognize where and when you feel it. The following are ways that can definitely help you experience your inner voice.
A Gut Feeling
The gut is not called a second brain for no reason. Thanks to the enteric nervous system (ENS), it can operate independently of the central nervous system and make decisions by itself. Literally, this means you can think with your gut. If you have experienced the feeling of your stomach feeling knotted or terribly lurching before a major decision, that may be your inner voice.
A Feeling In Your Heart
For some people, their sense of self-awareness stems from their hearts. The inner voice comes from intelligent organs, and coming from the heart should come by no surprise. It is an autonomous organ that can think, feel and decide things on its own. There are close to 40,000 neurons and a robust system of neurotransmitters from the heart to the rest of the body. So, if you feel a primal urge or a mysterious voice sensation that seems to come from the heart, it’s wise not to ignore it. It is at the center of your existence, and the conscience resides there too.
A Voice In The Head
This is the most common and most obvious manifestation that your subconscious is talking to you. The voice at the back of your head is not a figment of your imagination—well, it can be, but when it is telling you something, it is a call you ought to heed or at least consider.
Common Reasons For Not Listening To Our Inner Voice
We have seen the significance of an inner voice in our lives, but sadly, we don’t always listen to it. In fact, most of the time we are completely ignoring it. Here are some reasons why we don’t listen to our inner voice despite being a powerful and effective decision-making tool.
The Answer Is Not What We Wanted
When you don’t like an answer, you won’t have the will to follow through with it. For example, if you were thinking of buying a car and need an affirmative answer but your inner voice points to the reality of your finances, chances are you will not be happy about it. But if you are all about making good financial decisions, you will probably suffer the consequences of heeding to your inner voice by planning your finances well and procuring the car when you are in a better financial position to do so. But that’s all hypothetical. How many people really do that?
Logic And Reason Taking Over
We will always try to rationalize and see sense in things, especially when our instincts are not backed by enough evidence. At these moments, we will go to extremes to find justifications and explanations for things. This puts us in the crosshairs of desire, logic, reason, social pressure, and social graces. In such situations, we will choose the decisions that ‘seem’ to come from rational thought at the expense of the inner voice.
Inability To Recognize, Hear, Or Listen To The Inner Voice
Sometimes the reason why the inner voice takes a back seat is that we don’t know how to listen to it or even cultivate it. In our ultra noisy world, it is very common, and it is actually very difficult to silence everything that is going on outside you, to be able to hear what arises from inside you. But what can we do to change that? To work on our internal and external environment so that we can better listen to ourselves?
Here are some ways you can listen to it.
Five practical ways you can listen to your inner voice.
1. Pay Attention To Your Feelings
The inner voice can manifest itself in several ways, and when you ignore them, your emotions are how they come through. Emotions provide a feedback mechanism for the inner voice, and sometimes it is your reaction for not heeding it and ending in a spot of bother. For example, if a voice at the back of your head is warning you against going for a bike ride in the rain and you ended up falling or, worse, getting hurt. You will automatically be mad at yourself for not listening to it. So, when you feel a shift in your emotions, it is better not to shrug it off or feel embarrassed for feeling the way you are. It’s better to explore them and only dismiss them after you have explored them.
2. Observe The Patterns Of Your Inner Voice
Yes, your inner voice has patterns. If you tune into it and observe the history of your decision-making, you will understand the gist of how it sounds and the things it is always telling you about. After collecting data on your historical decision-making, you will notice how your intuition helped you make tough decisions, avoiding trouble, or even look out for your best interests (whatever challenge you are facing). This will show you how intelligent and prescient your intuition is—this is all the proof you need of not doubting your inner voice.
3. Learn How To Control Your Mind
Overthinking happens when you try to make cognitive sense of everything you experience. It is normal to want to think we are conditioned to always look for the logical or reasoned perspective of things but what this does is skew us from listening to our inner voice. In the constant battle between reason logic and intuition, your fears and your mind will create confusion. But if you learn to take everything in stride, you will enable your inner voice to be stronger and more vocal, and this will help you embrace the fact that you are not your thoughts.
4. Find Quiet Time For Yourself
Life is hectic, and there are many distractions anywhere you look. The more you will find time away from distractions, the more your inner voice will become louder. You could find quiet time by meditating, yoga, exercise, finding time in nature—the aim is that you block out distractions and have time to rummage through your thoughts.
5. Flip A Coin
I know it’s a stretch but bear with me. If the answer your intuition is giving you is not what you were expecting, perhaps taking the decision away from you will give you something to act on. To follow your fate rather than your destiny. If you have ever done a coin toss, you are probably expecting it to make the decision for you. Eventually, though, you will often go forward with the complete opposite of what it states. This is because the alternative is the sensible decision, and deep down, you know it. So, if you are stuck, perhaps it’s a coin toss you need to spring to action.
Reflecting on what we have discovered, it is clear that the inner voice plays a crucial role in our lives. That said, since it mostly goes ignored, we can’t help but wonder what life would be if we listened to our inner voices for every choice we have to make, actions we have to take, and everything in life. What possibilities would we have? What hidden powers will we find in ourselves? And perhaps even find what lies deep inside all of us, that unifies us all.
