What does your inner voice tell you? What does it want you to do? Do you ever listen to it?

There is always a voice inside that talks to us, or sometimes talks at us, depending on how it has been programmed. Sometimes it’s not a real voice, but the feelings or sensations we perceive in us when we talk to someone or when we do something, or when we make a decision.

I see the Inner Voice more like the part of us that is more alive, the spark of life, our deeper intelligence, the part of us that knows what we need, what we desire.

It sometimes speaks a language we stopped speaking eons ago. When we are faced with a challenge in our lives, or when we have to take an important step, there it is, talking to us, but many times we don’t listen to it, or we pretend not to listen.

At times the Inner Voice is masked by the domineering “inner voice” of the culture or the family we live in. We think that it is saying something to us, when in reality, the one who is talking is our fear, or our resentment, or the voice of what we have been raised to believe is the right thing to do, or the truth. In other occasions, the voice is our own voice, but it is full of the garbage we have picked up along the way.

Let’s face it, many times you speak to yourself in horrible ways, the way someone in your life who deeply hurt you spoke to you, and you internalised that voice, you made it part of your own inner discourse and you keep doing because it comes natural to you. In many cases, you might even be proud of the way in which you demean yourself. You might call it perfectionism, or discipline, or accountability.

I am not saying that striving for work well done, or cultivating discipline in your life, or being responsible or accountable for whatever decisions you make in your life are negative things. But they can be, when they are done from a place of fear, or cruelty. Working hard for something will always be necessary if you are to follow your Inner Voice’s deepest yearnings, but if you have to degrade yourself to achieve them, you’re not really listening to your Inner Voice, or it is not the Inner Voice who is talking to you.

Your Inner Voice is the voice of Love in your heart. It is what wants the best for you, the loving presence inside you that wants to protect you, to nourish you, to watch you grow. And many times we don’t believe that we deserve any of this, and when our Inner Voice shouts at us that we truly do, we’re shocked, and we shut it up.

And thus many a dream is dead. The Inner Voice speaks to us, but it cannot force us to do anything. And in the end we get so used to not listening to it, to burying it deep inside, that at times it seems as if it were dead.

But it’s not dead, and it will come back to speak to you, or rather, shout at you. If the experiences is new, if it is unsettling, just sit it out. Breathe. What is it that this Voice is trying to say to you?

Hear what it has to say, or otherwise feel it, vibrate with it. It can be a shocking experience, the fact that you have been silencing this for so long and that you believed that everything was ok, when it clearly wasn’t, when you were not giving to yourself what your soul most craved.

It will be a sad moment, but not without its beauty. It will be beautiful because you will finally open yourself to your own good, because you will be able to construct a new life from this knowledge, because you will nurture the light that has always been inside you and that can never be extinguished, even if you have neglected it for so long.

May your journey of self-discovery be filled with light, love and beauty.