Wednesday 5 October 2011

Natural Inherent Wisdom


Have you ever noticed how amazing human beings actually are?  Small children overflow with innocent love and exuberance for life.  However, how many of us continue to express this love and exuberance into adulthood?  These qualities become hidden to varying degrees, but they do continue to exist inside each and every human being. 

There is an astonishing magic to the human race that most of us appear to have forgotten: an innocent, loving, joyful passion for life! It is at the heart of everything we yearn for, every act of creativity, each expression of true love and care.  Yet in our day to day activities, it seems like most of us are caught in a multitude of ways of being that are not in alignment with our natural inherent joy and freedom.

We can all think back to a time in our childhoods when there was no doubt in our hearts that we ourselves, and the world around us, were inherently good and pure and beautiful.  This certainty in our hearts is what I am calling our Natural Inherent Wisdom.  Some say that this wisdom is just the ignorance of childhood and that with time the child’s perspective matures, but I would like to suggest that this recognition of the inherent goodness and purity of life and humanity is the truth.  The rest is just ‘beliefs’ that we made up to deal with painful experiences that we could not process at the time. 

We all have experiences that shake our trust in our Natural Inherent Wisdom about ourselves and the world around us.  You can call these moments of disillusionment, though the term indicates that what was lost was just illusion, which isn’t what I’m saying at all.  In the midst of an experience where the behaviour or words of others clash with our NIW, our child minds create ‘beliefs’, in an attempt to explain what’s happening around us.  We give up our innocent heartfelt knowing of goodness and decide that this new ‘belief’ is necessary to survive.  But it hurts.  Deep down inside, we can never reconcile ourselves to this new ‘belief’ and thus starts the internal battle between knowing ourselves to be ‘one with God’  and believing ourselves to be less than, not good enough, deficient in some way.

So how does this process occur?  The simple fact is that it occurs because in the moment of the experience, whether that be something deeply traumatising or apparently relatively innocuous, our tiny child minds and hearts cannot process the intensity of emotional energy that gets triggered and we have no resources to communicate what we need to the adults around us.  Add to this the fact that the adults around us are also out of touch with their own NIW and it often appears that it’s the adults themselves who trigger these emotions. 
In the absence of a safe and nurturing space in which to release these emotions, and express our confusion, we suppress the emotional energy, and build a wall of ‘belief’ to hold it in.  The strength of these walls is dependent on the intensity of the emotional energy that they protect.  They become cemented, and then central to our experience of life.  As we continue to grow, we look for further evidence to back up our ‘beliefs’, filtering our experiences to see only the parts that validate these ‘belief’ walls.  We are terrified of living without these beliefs, thinking that without them we are vulnerable to shock and confusion.

So how do we release these beliefs so that we can get back in touch with, and live from, our natural inherent wisdom?  I would like to guide you through an exercise that can open up small doorways to intuitively sensing it and trusting it.  Of course, this process is ongoing. I look at it like a glass house where all the windows and doors have been boarded up.  There’s a magnificent light inside the house which no-one can see because of all the boards.  The owner of the house (you) has a sense that there’s something really beautiful inside, but is unable to find out what it is.  Every time you do this exercise, it’s like piercing a hole in one of the boards, or even removing an entire board.  Eventually, though there may be many boards remaining, the light which is inside is so bright, the boards become almost unnoticeable.

You start to see yourself as this natural inherent wisdom rather than as all the beliefs you made up to wall in emotional energy.  Of course, sometimes in this process, there will be powerful emotions that come to the surface and it’s good to be prepared for that to happen.  The more you can trust yourself and open to these emotions, knowing that they are not the truth but the energy that you could not process as a child, the faster the windows of light will appear.

Take yourself to a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for about 15 minutes.  Make sure you have with you a notebook and pen.  You might want to light a candle or do something to mark this as a sacred moment.

  1. Choose a belief that you know limits your freedom of expression – for example I chose ‘I’m a fraud’ for the purposes of writing this article.
  2. Ask yourself what happened that made you believe this? Immediately a memory comes to mind.  For me, it’s the memory of a substitute teacher telling me, when I was 6 years old, that I was stupid.
  3. Invite in the energy of safety and love – this might be a spiritual teacher or guide, your highest self or even just the essence of unconditional love.  Bathe the memory in this energy and allow yourself to feel the emotions it triggers – for me it was shock, fear (there’s something wrong with me), embarrassment (now everyone knows there’s something wrong with me) and shame. 
  4. Connect into what your natural inherent wisdom was in that moment.  For me it was carefree, joyfully creative, spontaneous and playful.  I knew I didn’t need anyone else’s approval and that I was whole, complete and perfect just as I was.  Allow yourself to get the impact of this.  For me, it freed up so much energy, I had to go for a walk and then for a run! 
  5. Take a moment to recognise all the additional ‘beliefs’ and subjective evidence you had piled on top of this original ‘belief’ wall.  For me, it was astonishing to see how much I had convinced myself of this ‘belief’ and limited myself accordingly.  You may need to take time to tune into your sense of your NIW a few times over the next few days, especially if more emotional energy from later experiences arises to be released.
  6. Write a few words that remind you of your sense of your NIW and stick them on your mirror to keep it alive for you.  You may want to share your experience with a close friend or family member.  Speaking about your NIW can help make it more real for you. The more real you can make it for yourself, the better!