Trust & Consequence
on following your internal guidance to freedom through suffering
My intuition lies to me. Boldly and often.
I’ve had messages come to me in dreams and sometimes meditation. Usually short phrases, oftentimes quite literal and clear premonitory insights.
Most of them never come true.
I hear things clearly which prove to be lies mixed with truth.
They steer me because I trust them implicitly, even though acting on them often leads me to ruin. Finding the untruths I’ve heard colored by my personal baggage, providing clear reflections of the ways in which I’m broken inside. Also seeing the chain reaction of synchronicities these little course corrections set into motion.
Some part deep within me is connected to a wisdom and empowered to embody it. The wisdom that all these failures and embarrassments are divine. That to fight my way to being truly free in a body with so much trauma, in a world with so much oppression, I have to witness all of what I am — especially the ugly things — finding truth and hope in the fact that I don’t know the path which lies ahead, I do not know the way to freedom, and I can’t imagine what will take me there or who will be by my side. Knowing that these trials are here to illuminate what needs to be seen within me, so I have the opportunity to heal, and become the person who will lead myself to that better future.
If you’ve been reading my writings on this platform, you will know that I am esoterically empathetic person. I have unlocked an intuitive power I’m still figuring out. I feel people across distance. Sometimes, across time.
The more I learn about this power, the more I realize that all of my interpretations of what the feelings mean are projection. Or, at least, most of them. Rarely, am I truly aware what I am feeling with this outward-focused sense. But often, I find myself making anticipated guesses that prove incorrect.
I try to use my power for divination and it fails. Time and again.
Forever re-learning the lesson that our future isn’t written, and that we have to discover the path as we walk it.
And so…
To Walk The Path
Finding time to do all the things we have in our mind feels impossible.
Perhaps I’m projecting, and this is a product of my own way of operating in the world. But for me, I have about five good ideas for every one I have time for. So much cool stuff in the world. So many ways to express yourself. So many interests to pour yourself into.
This over-stimulated smorgasbord of options can sometimes create a kind of decision paralysis for me, with what I should actually do with my time.
If I read that book would it fire me up? If I cleaned my apartment would that make me feel better? If I wrote that essay would I feel more accomplished? If I recorded a meditation would I feel in tune? If I worked out or did yoga would that empower me to take on the rest of these tasks? Should I just play videogames? Watch a show? I’ve always wanted to get more into anime. Maybe I’ll go on a walk?
I spend my time considering all my options, over and over, instead of just choosing one and enjoying myself.
To combat this. I’ve found it helpful to allow trust in my current moment’s highest priority. What feels like I have the most passion to offer it right now?
What is most important to me right now?
Often, I still can’t decide. I don’t know.
Lately, when I’ve caught myself in this cycle, I’ve literally just done the first thing that comes to mind.
Just go. Move. Do. That seems to be the biggest hurdle most days.
My intuition tells me what should come first. What’s next. What path to take. But I’m quite often too tired to listen. I’m resistant because my grumpy mind wants to do something else. In reality, often something that wouldn’t make me feel better in the slightest.
So, considering all of this, I find it terribly important to find a flow. To let my intuition guide me through this sea of ‘too much shit to do’. To help me find the path of highest good, the greatest joy, the purest passion. Then just pour myself into that.
Flexibility, however, is so incredibly crucial. Because I’m often wrong.
I start doing something and realize I made a mistake.
Well, it wasn’t a mistake to start moving. To try one of the things on my mind. But doing that led me to an insight about what I should actually be doing.
Which leads to what I believe is the single most important thing to a life well lived.
Knowing It’s Okay To Be Wrong
This one is hard.
I don’t like to be foolish. Doing stupid things hurts my ego really badly.
I’m not the one who falls in front of a crowd of people and gets up without embarrassment.
When I respect people that gets amplified exponentially.
Making a fool out of myself to those whom I look up to is the stuff of nightmares. And I used to hold onto my failures in this sense, forever.
I used to never let them go.
It would start by not ever facing them dead on. Because the embarrassment was so hard to sit with.
Then I would find some way to distract myself, move on, jam it down inside.
Only to find it pop up again and again.
Little triggers, reminders, would take me back to the embarrassment.
With it all drawn up to the surface. I would do it all over again. Not face it, push it down. And so the cycle would continue that way.
I also hate being wrong. It comes from the same place.
I’ve been wrong a lot in my life. I used to joke about how good I was at apologizing for all the practice I’ve had. Always blessed with the ability to admit when I’m wrong, to be willing to change.
That’s one of the core virtues that my spirit values. That flexibility to learn.
It’s something I think we all work on, in this world, in these bodies—within the suppressive cultures of our civilizations.
Toxic masculinity doesn’t like being wrong, and unfortunately is quite present within the very structure of our institutions, emboldening folks in positions of power to wield the tendency as a distorted strength. Some people clearly resonate with liars who can’t admit wrongdoing — as our fucking depressing elections prove again and again.
But it’s okay to be wrong, damnit.
When you’re wrong. And you just own it. It’s kind of miraculous how little it matters. It genuinely makes you look good to your peers. The fucking sane ones.
Despite the fact our values are clearly skewed collectively, there are so many good people who are actively learning their way through life, open to change. Having the flexibility to learn on the run. Not wasting time with ego and self-judgement. Not overcompensating with self-deprecated humor born of insecurity.
People who’ve learned to just take the loss. That it’s not a big deal. We all make mistakes.
Simplest wisdom. So hard to embody.
Even harder to understand when the same guidance and intuition that has led you to freedom, has also led you to make terrible mistakes.
It can make you wonder, ‘Am I off base with everything?’
Is my intuition a lie?
Have I just been telling myself stories with everything? Or worse, letting in bad energy that’s twisting me up.
I propose that if you ever find yourself in that situation, or if you can think back to a time where you may have doubted yourself and your intuitions in this way — wondering if what you had believed was an inner voice of truth, is perhaps, not the friend you thought it was — that you try this.
Pull yourself back and look at all that wisdom, insight, vision, etcetera brought into your life. What actions did it inspire you to make? What mistakes? What did you learn? What other positives came from this altered course of living? Perhaps you met a stranger, or had a chance encounter with an animal, or were late getting somewhere, or experienced any number of miniscule things which could gently alter the course of your life.
Whatever little changes to your life were made by receiving this insight. Consider why that might have led you exactly where you needed to go.
Perhaps we aren’t told the truth.
We’re Told What We Need To Hear
Perhaps, you’re like me dear reader. Perhaps, you have intuitive channels open to you in one form or another. Perhaps, you sometimes get messages from beyond, in dream or meditation or within otherwise expanded states of consciousness.
What do you do if that guidance lies to you?
I see only a few ways one could logically progress. The first is denial. To pretend the guidance wasn’t wrong, that you must of misheard it, or something else got in the way. Justifications for why this voice can still be trusted in the future which skirt around the fact that you were dead wrong.
I’ve done that, certainly. But that is not the most productive path forward. Leads to repeated mistakes.
Another way, would be to face it dead on. Well damn. I just got lied to. I shouldn’t trust these voices. Or maybe, not ‘all of them’. Maybe there are some bad ones — some demonic-type energies out there being cruel.
That’s a way forward. Again though, that one doesn’t sit with me. That one contradicts the deeply held wisdom I mentioned. The wisdom which informs that this guidance I receive is divine despite the chaos it may lead to.
Finally, there is my favorite. Though, the most difficult, complicated, and requiring the most amount of courageous surrender.
To accept that these voices or intuitions know better than you.
You don’t know what’s best for yourself. Even though you think you do. And this guidance is helping you, regardless of how it seems.
It’s probably giving you exactly what you asked for, in some way.
Though your intuition led you into the fire, it will also lead you out the other side, transformed for the positive. No matter how raging the flames.
If you give up half way. If you trust for a bit, but it hurts, so you stop. You can either walk back out of the flames in the direction you came. Start over from the top to learn your old lessons all over again. To walk through the same flames again on a later date or another lifetime. Or you can just die there. You can let the flames consume you and ruin you.
Initiation into an alchemical lifestyle, life as a healer and conscious co-creator of a new and better world, is a scary path. For the brave and the committed. It will ruin you if it does not set you free.
So, walk with confidence in the support you have. Trust the guidance and keep trusting it. Knowing that it tells you what you need to hear to put you on the path. It does not tell you ‘the truth’. But by trusting and walking the path it leads you on, you will see why you may have been lied too, or why you lied to yourself, and why that was needed. How your ego needed calling out, or it got you to exactly where you needed to be for a blessing you weren’t expecting.
Fear is the enemy in spiritual awakening. The fear that you are not safe. The fear of the unknown. The fear that your mind must protect yourself at all costs, even from spirit itself.
The answer is surrender. Not only to your own internal and spiritual guidance, but to the flow of life itself.
To Flow Like Water
Everyday is a new chance to get things right.
Even if you can’t fix the things you broke with other people. You can fix them with yourself.
There’s a new calling from our heart each day. It’s never quite the same twice. Everyday leading us on strange new adventures. Into bizarre new circumstances. When we listen to it.
Rigidity plagues us as a people.
We harden our opinions. Form our fiefdoms. Ignore our whims because of genuine responsibilities and projections of lack.
The very whims that, if listened to, would lead us where we want to go.
I believe deeply that we are flowing in a stream of life — through time.
That in this flow we move with autonomy and free will.
But when we run into the banks of our river. When we want something that is not in stream for us. And we fail to accept that. We get lost trying to forge a path over land, and it doesn’t work. It just hurts us. It leads us right back home. To our river. Which, though we can flow within at our will, we cannot reverse. We can’t undo. We can’t make it go places it doesn’t go or intersect with rivers it doesn’t intersect with.
Knowing all this. I choose to walk in acceptance of what I cannot control about my life. Acceptance that I cannot change the past or undo my mistakes. But also trust in my intuitive guidance, which helps me navigate the currents of this mysterious river called life, even when I don’t understand how.
Surrender is my intention.
Truth is how I get there.
Love is the horizon.
