Our inner guidance system comes from the deeper parts of us.  These are the parts we don’t often acknowledge and even dismiss. These parts are numerous but can include the subconscious mind. Percolation from these deeper levels of us happen best when we take time to slow down and just be.

If our brains are constantly engaged on the next task at hand the messages from our deeper guidance won’t surface into our present thoughts because there is already too much going on the “desktop” of our mind.  The best and most original choices we can make for our lives comes from these deeper places.  It is through allowing the process of slowing down that our guidance can come to the surface and we are guided to make different and new choices through which our lives are healed.

Let me explain.

When I stopped at the ranger station prior to making the remaining 1000 foot climb  on foot, the weather was unusually surreal.  The station was on the peak of the adjacent but lower mountain to Craggy.  The wind was blowing hard pushing the clouds rapidly up one side of the mountain over the station and down the other side of the mountain in front of the station.  The cloud’s mist brushed my hair back as I stood, in near zero visibility, feeling a sense of awe and humility.  It felt as if the sky and earth were one.

 My climb to the top of Craggy was enjoyable but uneventful. I saw only few people that Monday morning. For the first time ever, there was no one on the precipice.  I was alone.  I took photos and could take pause, listening only to the wind and other sounds of nature.   I had always wanted to be there alone up there to take it all in.  I could think of nothing. My mind was a blank canvas.  I just stood in the wind and watched the clouds whip by me. 

 The ride back into the valley town was much quicker than the ride up.  It wasn’t as eventful as the ride up.  Back into the mundane of life.

The trip up the mountain was a necessary symbolic journey to show me I had attained what I had long ago dreamed of.  Prior to my illness I wanted to live my dream.  But I never knew what that dream was until the recovery from my illness opened up the new, unknown, unused parts of me and redirected my path.

 I am now doing work I love that is fascinating and uses my innate skills and abilities that only opened because I became ill. 

This was the gift the still-small-voice said would open when I realized just how ill I was and was leaving my job on disability. The world was falling in on me and somehow I managed to hear that voice. Why?  Because its ALWAYS there.  Never doubt that.

Even though climbing the mountain of my life, to return myself to health and wellbeing, didn’t look like I was listening to that inner guidance, I was.  I could see that Sunday morning how each piece, each step of the way back to health and therefore stepping into my new self was one guided by my inner guidance.  I struggled at times, like being stuck in the mud again, to hear that guidance but I always heard it somehow.  The combination of all those steps has gotten me to this place now where I’m being challenged by the clients coming in my door to “put it all together”.  All I have learned in 20 years, put it together and help others.

 I put my oxygen mask on first and submitted to the destruction before trying to be anything I thought I wanted to be.  I listened, I got well and now I’m standing on this place of knowing what I am, who I am, why I am here and I’m in the final phases of putting it together like I never could have seen.  As I saw in guidance given to me last Autumn, it’s opening now.  It’s in full bloom.  Standing on that mountain, feeling like a blank canvas, that is what is it like to fully bloom and be ready for the guidance to take me where I am needed next.

Even more,  I’m in my mid 50’s and by American’s standards I’m a throw-away, I “should” be winding it all down, but this too is an illusion.  I’m just getting started and because of all I’ve learned I have the strength, balance and deep guidance lighting the way for me like a beacon for any dark night ahead.  The truth is my illness got me stuck in the mud of my life and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because now I have a new life. 

I realized walking along that morning it’s never too late to listen, be guided and make a new choice.  It might a little more difficult the longer you have lived a lifestyle, a way of eating, of thinking.   But it’s never too late.  As long as you are still breathing and in a body—it’s NEVER too late – to allow the percolation of your true guidance to surface and right your course in this life.  Your true north, true guidance is in there but the key is you have to ALLOW.  You have to get off the treadmill of your life.  Not just once a year but some weekly and some on your own, alone and other times too.  If you don’t even take time for weekends, it won’t happen.  You won’t be guided by your individual truth.  Because all the well meaning elders from our past, the voices in our heads, drown that quiet voice out.  Those old ideas about who we are, whether we are worthy or not of rest and play and pleasure keep us stuck in a rut. These head voices do especially well the more “on task” we have become.

You see, our inner guidance, that peaceful place that you connect with when you rest and let go, connects you instantaneously with your higher self.   This is how we will be guided, even if it doesn’t look like it in the moment to BETTER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE. 

In 20 years of healing my body and my life,  this the most valuable piece of wisdom I can offer anyone right now.

There is no greater joy for you to experience or your children to watch you do.  How else will they learn to be on their unique path and living from their guidance?