How to listen to your inner voice

Listening to your own inner voice is the very opposite of trying to fix and improve yourself. It comes from self-acceptance, but acceptance doesn’t happen by repeating “I accept myself, I accept myself” over and over. Rather, it is a perceptual and emotional shift - a move from where you are now to a new way of being.

Listening to your inner voice is both the beginning of and the evidence of an entirely new relationship with your inner self. Your inner self consists of your true inner experience: what you really think, feel, know, sense and want, including what you may not yet be fully conscious of.

The inner voice experience comes when you open your ears to your inner self. When you open your heart. It is a reawakening to a different way of living your life, creating a life that is more in harmony with who you really are.

Listening to what feels true

Sometimes an inner voice experience can occur simply by acknowledging and accepting your smallest urges and impulses; the whispers of your inner self.

People caught in the “forgotten self”, mentioned in my earlier article, may have many psychological layers and barriers between who they are and how they are living. When they finally experience their inner voice, it can be a lot like striking oil. Something breaks through and gushes out.

Yet not all inner voice experiences are this exciting. Sometimes they are not even happy or hopeful. They are just completely and utterly real. They may reflect to us that we are unhappy with our current situation and something needs to be done about it.

By saying, hearing and accepting what is true for us, we can contact something inside that feels right. We begin to develop a reference point for being connected with ourselves, and for feeling less out of harmony between what is going on inside and outside of us.

Like removing a boulder from a stream, this can make way for other information to begin flowing more smoothly.

This does not mean, of course, that you have one inner voice experience and never again have trouble knowing and following your true self. It is more like an introduction, or a reintroduction, to who you really are. But you must consciously make contact again and again.

The difference is, it gets easier.