What if you Trusted your Inner Knowing?

 
 

  • Have you ever just known the right path to follow but kept seeking more evidence from external sources, to ensure you were right?

  • Have you ever noticed yourself feeling really tense and only trusting you were stressed when you looked down at your watch and saw an increased heart rate?

  • Have you ever had a wonderful experience e.g. through a particular form of therapy like acupuncture, but didn’t quite trust it because you didn’t know of any research to prove it worked?

You are not alone. We have learned  to deny the value of our own experience and look for validation from the culture outside. 

What if you could learn to really drop down into your own experience and trust what you find there? And combine that with external sources of information.

I spent all of Saturday reading and listening to podcasts on the metacrisis, for example about how the environmental challenges effect health challenges which effect educational challenges, in an entangled complex system. Perhaps a little obsessive, I go through stages like this, especially when preparing to run a new GameChangers program.

All of this material is hard to face into but I believe essential right now. There are some brilliant thinkers offering useful concepts and maps to enable us to step outside and look at the underlying drivers and fundamentals of what is occurring in our world. But there are no easy answers about what to do.

Unsurprisingly I came away lost in thought and somewhat down about our future, appreciating the sophisticated minds that I had spent hours listening to, but somewhat distant from my deep inner knowing that regardless of how advanced and impressive our cognitive capacities, something more is also needed now for a phase shift, to find our way through this. 

Then I was reminded of a quote by Dr Ian McGilchrist (inter alia, Former Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, Psychiatrist, and former Research Fellow in Neuroimaging at John Hopkins Hospital Baltimore) in his recent book The Matter with Things

“an innocence the other side of experience, a knowledge the other side of unknowing, a wisdom the other side of folly”

Such a relief to be reminded of the limitations of conventional knowing, as important and impressive as it is. The possibilities and actions that can spring forth from penetrating through to the other side of this, offers hope.

Sending love and courage

Áine

Prompts for your Week

Prompts for your week

  • As you ponder things that matter to you, what do you know deep inside to be true?

  • What enables you to get in touch with that e.g. walks in nature, meditation, art? 

  • What external evidence do you need to augment and refine that knowing

 
 
Aine Watkins