What is your inner voice telling you?

What do you say to yourself, and how do you say it?

Do you speak to yourself as if you trust and value you? Do you listen to your inner voice? Are you kind to yourself? Can you sing out loud, tell yourself jokes, and reassure the timid, scared parts of you that you’re okay? Or do you judge yourself for being less than you think you should be?

Are you even on speaking terms with yourself? Or do you go for long stretches without remembering that you have an inner voice? Do you tell yourself that you love you? Do you compliment yourself for doing something well, and thank yourself for being brave?

Can you forgive yourself for making mistakes, yes – the big ones too? Even the mistakes that seem so big you’re not sure how you’ll get past them are easier to handle, if you forgive yourself for making them. Especially those.

Are you allowed to feel exactly what you feel, or do you tell yourself to stuff the feelings, buck up, be strong, and pretend it’s okay, when you know it isn’t? Have you already decided you are worthy of love?

Communicating clearly with yourself can feel a bit tricky at times.

You have an enormous body of information, a whole library of knowledge, just waiting for you to unlock and tap into. If you never spend time getting to know yourself and learning how to value and validate your inner voice and your own wisdom, you are missing out on a great resource. It takes practice to do this, especially if you’re not used to it. When you spend quality time listening to yourself, you are getting to know the most important person in your life.

You’ll never be lonely if you have yourself for good company. This doesn’t mean that you don’t want and need other wonderful people in your life, it means that you don’t need them to constantly define your relationship to yourself. You’ve got that one covered. Practice listening within: this is how you’ll learn to trust yourself, and to keep your own counsel.

Consider why you would want to be able to talk to yourself: if you can have a clear direct honest communication within yourself, you’ll be able to find your wisdom and truth. You’ll be able to hear your intuition, which is part of your inner voice. You can listen to yourself because you want to know or learn something. Perhaps it’s because you’re looking for peace of mind within, and you forgot how to have it. Listen.

If you haven’t yet learned how to listen to your inner voice, you can begin anytime.

When you exist on a steady stream of incoming noise, voices, opinions, drama, news, and you never take the time to clear it out and establish communication within yourself, you’re allowing the outside world to decide what kind of interior sounds inhabit you. All that noise coming in can be pretty toxic,, especially if you don’t move it out from time to time. Anxiety, stress, and depression are linked to a constant internal racket; there’s no space for you to think or feel clearly if the outside noise runs through you constantly.

You’ll be missing out on the opportunity to turn on some of your most valuable abilities, if there’s always someone else’s soundtrack running through you. You may have completely forgotten that your interior landscape can be a pretty peaceful one, if you’ll just give it the chance.

When you are constantly running other energies through you, and you find yourself on the roller coaster of over thinking, solving, worrying, and getting stuck in negative thought patterns, all of this energy gets in your way, making life pretty uncomfortable and interrupting your communication with yourself.

This is like trying to have a conversation with someone, only you keep getting interrupted so your communication doesn’t flow smoothly, and some of what you’re trying to say gets lost or misheard. This conversation is important to you – you want your friend to hear you, you’re trying to tell your boss or workmate something important, or you need to express how you feel to a family member, and so on.

As long as the two of you keep getting interrupted, that communication will take longer, and what you’re trying to express may lost some of its power along the way. Or you never say it at all, because the internal noise drowns you out, and you miss a chance to communicate something you wanted to say.

So, how do you listen? You can decide to do so. Meditation is one of the very best tools you can use to clean up the noise, and to recreate a connection with your own internal voice and thoughts, so that you know those thoughts are yours.

Tools that help you to listen to yourself include:

• Meditate daily. Yes, do it every day, especially the noisiest and busiest days.

• Turn everything off, and listen to silence. Don’t unconsciously have TV or music in the background all of the time. Choose the sounds you listen to.

• Get a journal, you’ll learn things about yourself. Start a blog. Write, even if it’s just for yourself.

• Go for walks and leave your phone at home.

• When you’re in public, observe. Don’t hide in your phone or another device. Pay attention.

• Ask yourself questions, as in “I wonder?”, and then listen.

• Learn to let go. Find a way to stop overthinking and worrying.

• Stop trying to make sense of everything, and practice acceptance instead.

• Listen to your body, follow your feelings, gut, intuition, heart, instincts.

Take the time to talk to yourself every day.

If the voice you hear back is unkind, invalidating, or mean, consider that it may not be yours. When you speak to yourself with love, and tell yourself the truth, you are in your integrity with yourself.

• ©Kris Cahill
  ‘Word Balloon’ ©Dawn Hudson on PublicDomainPictures.net