INtuition

I have just come back from doing an annual follow up for a client. We were talking about the many times she has had an inner voice telling her to follow a particular path or not to follow a particular path and the consequences of stilling the small inner voice.

All of us have access to inner guidance, or angelic guidance or spirit guides or an any other 'guide' that is in the current spiritual vocabulary.

Most of us lead such busy lives that we are totally deaf or blind to our guidance. We choose similar courses of actions, many times in similar circumstances.

Neuro-physically this is completely understandable. What you practice you strengthen. Just like exercising a muscle or more accurately a group of muscles, any thought pattern that we frequently exercise will get chemically encoded or hard-wired into our system. This means that whether we want to or not we will react in EXACTLY the same way when these reactive pathways are stimulated. The stimuli do not have to be identical to the original stimuli - they just need to be similar. This releases a neuro-chemical pathway and voilà you have the same reactive pattern, the same chemicals being produced in your system targeting the same cells. Put simply, what wires together fires together and likewise what fires together wires together. This means that reactive states are habitual.

The only way to bring greater awareness to our actions is to break the pattern when the stimulus is not present - this involves developing a greater sensitivity to when your body is being cued. If you do not have a mindfulness based daily (better if it is twice daily) stillness practice then you will never develop enough energy to break the gravitational field of your habit. The habit can have a physical basis such as smoking, drinking, using drugs, picking your nose, rubbing your hands when you are nervous, to thinking particular thoughts such as "whenever people look at me that way I feel worthless".

The key to most physical, psychological and spiritual problems or challenges is lack of mindfulness.

Address the mindfulness and you will release the pattern.

Release the pattern and you are 'available' to your inner guidance.