How to Find Your Inner Guidance: Trust What You Want

Trust that what you want comes from a good place and leads to a good place.

When you do, you find that you carry meaningful internal guidance with you at all times. This is a hallmark of conscious adulthood, and it creates incredible success.

Last week we talked about wanting and desire getting a bad rap. Today I want to continue that discussion by looking at one reason I see people getting trapped in a cycle of judgment about what they want.

It’s a sneaky one. They treat their wants as if they were those of a child.

Where Does This Come From?

Why do we do this? It isn’t hard to see where this way of acting, seeing or experiencing our wants started. It started when we were children. We got to experience asking our parents if we could do, act, say, and experience things and, sometimes, our parents largely giving us the answer: NO. We see it in any grocery store where a parent is trying to shop on task, and the children want run up the aisles, grab items off the shelves, jump in the cart, and grab two of every sugary treat at their eye level.

You’re Not A Child.

Very young children are impulsive and empathetic and self-centered and unconditioned. They react in the present and without higher-level rational and moral thinking.

We teach children they can’t have all the candy so strategically placed at the checkout counter. We teach children that wanting to hit their playmate over the head with the pot cannot lead to doing it. We teach children that wanting relief from a full bladder doesn’t mean they go in their pants. Gradually we teach them strategic thinking, train them in rationality, and shepherd them into the highest moral vision we can. Children do not stay children forever.

Yet many adults treat their own wants and desires as if they were those of children. They act as if their desire to find a life partner, express the vision they can feel sprouting within them, or help others to experience a bit of the solutions they’ve found as they grew up, are equivalent to the desires they had has a three year old.

They are not.

The First Step.

The first step in trusting that you have innate guidance within you that will lead you, without mistake, along your conscious evolutionary pathway, is to recognize (claim ownership of) your adulthood.

Give Your Inner Child A Break.

There’s a lot of pop psychology chatter about the inner child. The focus is often on looking for a problem. And the idea is the problem is caused by a basic psychic immaturity, a part of us that “hasn’t grown up.”

We can all resonate with the painful unfairness of asking an overwhelmed child to operate well beyond her years and capacity. So we identify with the inner child, and then what? We’re off the hook, so to speak, and all we need to do is love the inner child.

There’s a place for this work, and certainly it can release profound empathy and create a feeling of lessened weight for an overwhelmed psyche.

But it’s not all that useful in the pursuit of success. When what is called for is consistent, spiritually aligned action, we need to stop looking for our inner child and start looking for our adult.

Recognize your capacity.

Where have you already grown up?

When you recognize that you are largely a capable adult, you immediately improve your ability to act from, trust from, and improve from that place of capacity.

It’s a very different focus from being so caught up in where you still need to grow that you discount the very mechanisms and inner guidance that can help you with that growth.

You Have A Well Developed Capacity For Consciousness.

At what point do you claim your own adulthood? At what point do you trust yourself to have certain skills in place? At what point do you trust yourself to search out further skills as necessary?

Often, if we really listen to the self-talk we put ourselves through, it becomes clear that we assume we will pursue what we want with a child’s consciousness and capacity.

We often talk to ourselves as if our wants are basically dangerous. As if what we want is an uncontrollable, negative, subversive energy, with the power to “take over” and be impulsively acted out without regard for another, for consequences, for morality, or for long-term, strategic, higher-order goals.

This discounts whatever integrated capacities you have developed. As an adult, what you want does not arise unbidden, suprising and powerful, and act through your body with no filter. Watching my children grow I imagine it often felt that way for them. In other words, for many of us, this childish experience of how wanting works was true in the past.

Harnessing the Power of Want and Desire in Your Adult Self
Can you want to hit and know that you won’t? Can you react in anger or defense, recognize it, take a breathe, and make a different choice?

If so, then you have the capacity to allow your wants to guide you in your conscious evolution.

Allow the wanting, the longing, the call of the heart… and follow it to it’s unfoldment. A need for Aikido! A message of self-assertiveness! A new awareness of a more subtle level of self-respect and boundaries! A readiness to soften, to allow more vulnerability so that you can allow more love…

What You Want Is Your Guidance System.Every one of us is constantly wanting something.

It’s not a bad thing, it’s our hard-wired guidance system.

And check it out for yourself — what you want will change and adapt as you grow. You don’t want the same things at 40 with children that you did at 20. Feeling like you need to spend more time with your kids, if you follow it, will balance out at some point with feeling like you want to have a bit more time in nature, or time on the corporate board, or time with your partner.

Is there a trap of attachment? Of course. But it’s in the attachment, not the wanting.

The real trap is in thinking that happiness lies in the getting. It doesn’t. Suffering doesn’t come from wanting and happiness doesn’t come from getting.

Suffering or happiness is more closely related to the way we create, or act out, our want or desire in the world. How do we engage with what we want? How do we express it?

A Yogi, a Buddhist Master, a Guru — anyone who attains a recognized state of higher awareness has wanted it deeply! Such a path takes tremendous dedication, practice, and clarity of desire. What would happen if the Master spent all his energy fighting with his desire, wondering if it was right, wondering what others would think, wondering whether it was even possible for him or her?

In one sense, we are all Masters… A few who have just gotten on with the business of taking consistent action in the direction their inner guidance system is pointing; and the rest, Masters-In-Waiting, milling around debating with themselves if this is REALLY the path… if the course is REALLY marked… if the support staff will REALLY show up… if wanting to go this direction is REALLY ok…

It’s Actually Easier Than You Think.

So if wanting itself is not the problem, how is it that we are all so knotted up about what we want? Why do we struggle to express what is inside us, naturally?

Being a conscious adult is not about removing from yourself the want of anything but meditation.

Being a conscious adult is about trusting that you will — of course! — find the highest avenue of expression for acting upon your desires that you can. You trust that you are, in fact, engaged in practicing — over and over, getting better and better — at making the best choice you can.

You trust and then you act. You evaluate and you trust, and you improve and you trust, and you practice and you trust.

To do this without constantly falling into inner conflict, no-win choices, and polarization of wants, you must first accept that what you want arises from a good place and leads to a good place.

It’s a continual source of amusement to us (Tim and Laura) that describing the kind of breakthroughs our clients make every day takes so much longer than actually creating them!

We would love to know what you think of this format that we’ve been playing with: – a quick take-away in the newsletter because we are all so busy; a longer dose of perspective if you choose to visit the blog. Helpful? Too dense?

We love our readers and our clients — our growth and journey owes everything to you — and we get a lot from giving back. So if there is anything that would help make this newsletter and blog more enjoyable, please let us know. Thanks and Many Blessings to You All…