The Voices Inside.
Learning to listen.
It took a lot of work to start listening to my body.
Meditating, changing my diet, focusing on my breath, years of trauma work.
Most people in the West aren’t shown how to hear their body. It’s how we can fill it with so many substances, booze and fast food, and still demand it to work more than anybody has a right to.
The body’s voice and our culture’s voice.
I know for me part of this disconnect to my body came from trauma and part of it was learned.
Every time I was told to suck it up and get through my discomfort, every time I saw my parents in pain, every time I saw them or their friend pop a pain pill I learned not to listen to my body.
I remember dozens if not hundreds of conversations about people’s pain and what pills they were on.
For some, it seemed like a competition of sorts, “you’re taking 800mg ibuprofen? Try this Norco my doctor gave me, it’s the only things that works.”
The adults would one-up each other on their list of injuries, on their mg count.
I remember taking six ibuprofen in high school one day as a friend stared at me and said I took way too many. I had a lot of pain so I took a lot of pills.
I thought that’s what people did.
No one taught me actual pain management just as no one taught me to meditate or how to work with my stress and anxiety.
The culture I was raised in had a Bible for the soul and pills for the body.
I intended today’s article to be simple.
The article in my head when I started this was as quick as:
My body told me to rest and so I will, because listening to my body is a lesson I’ve learned is important.
The voice that said I needed to rest wasn’t exactly the voice of my body though. My body has its voice that I check in with but this was more of the still small voice, the voice of guidance.
The guidance that helped break me from my old habits. Took me from the point where I’d roll my eyes at that “hippy shit” people preach like “listening to the body” and actually make space to listen, actually realize why it was important.
Sometimes we need a voice of guidance to break through conditioning.
Before I started listening to my body I started listening for the voice of guidance, my relationship to the Mystery.
I didn’t really have a choice. I was having a mental breakdown and nothing I knew worked.
The alcohol I drank, my clinging to friends for love and support, Bible passages and “rules of life,” weren’t enough to get me through the pain and depression, the manic episodes and nightmares.
I fought medication at first but eventually I signed up for more pills. Those didn’t work for me and prayer without answer wasn’t getting me anywhere.
So I prayed and I prayed and I prayed until I heard an answer. A voice of intuition, a voice of guidance.
The breakdown caused my world to fall apart. The voice of guidance helped me see why that was necessary. The rules, the ideas, the beliefs I had been running with weren’t enough to sustain me.
They kept me distant from my body, distant from the reality of the world I was creating through my rigid dogma and consumerism, my beliefs were keeping me distant from the depths of my mind and soul.
Luckily for me my breakdown was so painful, my life so chaotic, I knew I had to follow the voice of guidance where it would lead. Everything else was falling apart.
That didn’t mean I followed the voice well. It’s not easy following our inner guidance. I was scared, anxious, it went against everything I knew, everything that conditioned me, the way I thought the world was.
What I found though is that after every time I ran away, every time I broke down, every time I landed on my ass, it was that voice of guidance that got me through.
The Spirit of the Depths Versus the Spirit of the Times.
Jung described that deep inner voice as the Spirit of the Depths. The one that seizes us and teaches us a new way beyond the Spirit of the Times, our mass conditioning, the things we are taught by our day and age.
His Red Book is based on his own experience of the Spirit of the Times and a mental break down of sorts. From this comes everything he did, everything he learned.
An incessant stream of fantasies had been released . . . . I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. . .
All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.
— Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Jung.
The Red Book came out the same year I had my breakdown and I bought it on credit. I then realized I shouldn’t read it yet.
The voice inside knew I needed to have my own experience, after which I could compare notes. So the Red Book went under the bed and I lived my own madness.
Afterward, I compared notes and found a lot in common.
The Spirit of the Depths taught me new stories. New lessons. New ways to act.
Life has gotten better since.
So, when my voice of guidance says to take it easy, I’ve learned to listen. I spent time with my friend, I napped, ate great food, got horribly sunburned, and rested.
What voice are you listening to?
Are you still working with the operating system of what the world around you says?
Or have you made room for your own discoveries, for the inner voice of your depths and the lessons it teaches?
Do you run from these lessons as I have so many times or do you greet them? Do you make space for the new you, the you that you are teaching yourself to be?
Love and share.
I’m starting something new. Writing every day as I put my random thoughts on binary paper.
If you’d like to join me on this journey you can sign up for my email list here.
