Being able to completely trust yourself is probably one of the most powerful places to arrive at.
This is a simple example I thought about whilst brushing my teeth last night but, naturally, I shall expand: Three dentists recommended I take my wisdom teeth out as standard protocol. Six months later, with enough pain, beer and codeine, I watched two little teeth push through to say kia ora with the rest, happy and pain free.
Sometimes… I think the body knows what it’s doing.
To make that decision though I consulted three professionals. I didn’t arrive at it completely on my own and I should probably qualify that statement, especially when it comes to important health care decisions. However, when you’ve gathered all the information you possibly can about an upcoming decision, there is only one person to rely on: The same person who lays their head on the same pillow each night and the same person who wakes up with the decision to make.
Learning to trust yourself; to trust your gut; to trust innate; in Japanese, to trust your hara; to follow your own wisdom, is really something that takes a tremendous amount of practice and conscious effort in the beginning. All things are difficult before they are easy. And then ultimately choices become an easy yes or no.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink he describes how we invariably know the right decision in the blink of an eye but it’s the conscious mind and ego which wants to pore over all the facts and figures. Haven’t you often found that you go full circle only to come back to your initial impression anyway? And even though the mind demands facts, figures and evidence to support premises it’s constructed under its own pretenses anyway, the decision is usually emotional. Like the sale of a house residing simply on the fact that there is a beautiful apple tree that can be seen through the kitchen window, which catches the light just-so in the summer mornings and you remember as a young child, the apple orchards you used to run through on your grandparent’s farm. Sold.
My personal dichotomy had, for many years, been between the fact that I thought I was always late (not in the punctuality sense) and that I was too young, simultaneously. It was, as they say, a bitch. Perhaps this came from having three older sisters and being born ten years after the last, but I won’t bore you with the psychoanalysis. I had a vision for a business and a practice to be run a certain way to recreate some things which haven’t been done for many years – and will take me many years to accomplish – but thought initially because I didn’t “know” enough or have enough grey hairs that I needed to rely on others to help me decide the way. So I paid a lot of money to various people over the years to help me with these decisions, for which of course I am eternally grateful, but there came a point where decisions were coming too thick and fast and my hara needed to step up. Decisions for myself, decisions for my clients and decisions for the business.
I figured back then, at 27, I had gathered enough knowledge and had enough life experience for almost twice that to get on with the job already. Stop wasting time, you’re late! Then came multiple scary leaps of faith and trusting that somewhere at the bottom there will be a net. There was. How did my gut know? I’m not sure. But it allowed me to step into this immense realm of power and certainty that everything will be okay and I will be looked after. It is easy when you rest on the fact that each decision you make will bring the best outcome.
The grey hairs have now started arriving too.