The desire to receive guidance for a better future has been around since recorded history. Oracles — individuals gifted with the ability to receive insight and direction from beyond — have always existed and often been revered in society. More and more today, however, people are beginning to tap into the intuitive abilities that we all have to tap into spiritual truths.
In working with people to hone their intuitive abilities and trust their own guidance, I typically find that the reason people feel doubt about their lives has less to do with their intuitive skills and more with myths about what spiritual guidance is and how it can guide us to some ideal future.
The following three myths are stumbling blocks that keep us believing falsehoods about how to make decisions for the future, thereby keeping us from believing in our intuitive gifts. Identify them. Understand them — and their shortcomings — and you'll be better able to tap into own your skills and ambitions for the life you want to create.
1. "If you're following your inner guidance, everything will flow easily."
Some teachers will tell you that it's only when you're "in the flow" that you're in alignment with your true purpose and direction. Yet some of the most clear and direct guidance I have received has included, "Move your family to Indonesia" and "Leave your relationship." While these moves indeed created some of the most profound and poignant moments in my life, they were also just as filled with incredible difficulty and emotional upheaval. Things were certainly not "flowing," but I definitely think I was following my internal compass. Following your inner guidance doesn't always mean smooth sailing.
Imagine for a moment you went to a movie and in the first 30 minutes the good guy defeated the bad guys, won over his love interest, made a ton of money and rode off into the sunset. You'd be bored. A story is only interesting because of what someone over comes and works through — so too is life.
2. "Do what you love and money will follow."
This could be considered as a corollary to the first myth but it deserves its own space because most people want their guidance to include a guarantee of financial success or at least safety of some kind. If financial (or other) security is missing from the equation, people tend to assume they aren't following legitimate guidance.
While the "do what you love and money will follow" mantra sells a lot of books, it's a myth, plain and simple. If you look at most people who have created anything amazing in their lives, their mantra looks more like, "Decide to do what you love but work three part time jobs in the interim, take out a second mortgage on your house, ask friends and family to help out financially …. and then the real money will follow." If you wait around for money to come, you may never follow your dreams.
3. "Inner guidance will show you all the steps you need to take."
I often hear, "I have a strong feeling I need to do X but I don't know how everything will come together to make it all work out."
When you program a destination into the GPS in your car what do you get back? The next move you need to make. We'd all like our internal needs and desires to lay out a neat, GPS-approved plan to show us exactly what we need to do in sequence to get from where we are to where we want to be.
But the truth is we only know what we need to know in each moment we live. This is precisely what allows our lives to unfold instead of following a preordained script. I tend to think of this as less a trick of the Universe and more as a gift in disguise.
If we truly knew what our journey was getting us into many of us might run away from the quest and thereby miss the prize. Likewise just because you might not know where the ladder leads doesn't mean you can't start climbing.
We are all capable of receiving guidance and assistance in our lives, both from within and from others. Just like a muscle, the more you listen, trust and act on your own guidance, the stronger it gets — and the stronger you will get.
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