Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.
— Billy Wilder, Austrian-American film director
If I have learnt one thing over the last few years, it’s that we need to listen to our hearts more than our minds. We have been taught differently though – having been told that the brain is the one that leads us to success, the smarter one that ‘learns’ information and thereby makes ‘educated’ decisions on where we should go in life and what we should do.
As a Physics graduate, this was my outlook all my life. I put faith in the brain more than my heart, believing that to think with your heart was emotional and weak, but to think with my brain was logical, precise and guaranteed to lead me in ‘the right direction’ – whatever that was.
It was only when I went through what I now call ‘the dark night of my soul’ – the darkest place in your darkest hour where everything you know and have built crumbles around you like a house of card and you question your very existence – that I realised I was wrong. When you start seeking answers to help pull yourself out through the darkness, the profound sadness, to be free of the weight of the world, you go within yourself to find answers.
It is then that real wisdom speaks. It speaks with clarity that breaks through the years of imperfect reiterations we pick up from school, universities, society, authorities, family we have been trained to listen to and start to learn to trust ourselves. The voice within that says you are not as small and insignificant you think you are – you have great power within you that can heal, transform, decide, build and manifest whatever we want in our lives.
This comes from the your heart, and it’s called instinct. Instinct is our greatest ally and our best friend. It is when every inch of your body believes without hesitation in something, even if it goes against the given narrative, even if it does not make sense at the moment, even if experts are not agreeing.
This is because our brain is conditioned to think a certain way. Your subconscious mind hordes all kinds of triggers from childhood and creates a knee jerk reaction to many situations in our life based on old psychological traumas. Bad habits, fears, a lack of belief in oneself are often times learnt from what we are subjected to when we are young and it becomes a part of the psyche. So we grow up with a lot of emotional baggage hidden deep inside that repeats a loop of self-destructive behaviour. The conscious mind may try to overcome it, but the subconscious mind almost always drags us back to programme it continuously plays.
And so you make choices based on this, when you use your brain all the time. Choices that can come out of fear, learnt reactions and limitations of your past.
But if you want the real truth of what you really want, what you really can be, what is best for you, will make you happy no matter how ‘unreasonable’ that choice you take to achieve this may be, listen to your heart. Your instincts are ancient wisdom of your soul, free of clutter and fear and learned responses that has been fed to you from the time you were born to the time you die.
The adage ‘believe in yourself’ actually stems in this. It’s the root of what every sage and mystic tells you – that you are more powerful that you know you are, that you are your own reservoir of wisdom and healing but that you have forgotten how to tap into it. We are inundated with people in ‘authority’ telling us how to think, live, eat, walk and behave, that we have forgotten how to listen to ourself.
Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla both said that we are nothing more than light, vibrations and frequencies and that matter does not exist. What we see as matter are just particles vibrating at a frequency low enough to be visible.
So in my darkest hour, I learnt to trust myself, to let go of preconceived notions about myself and dream bigger, do bigger, and become fearless. Being on my own scared me the most, especially when I had built a business and a life with someone else for twenty years and being a half was all I knew.
What I did not realise then, is that everything that we think is the worst thing that can happen to us, is actually God’s way of giving you strength, resilience and a gift for the future that you have not unwrapped yet. What I thought were the worst, most frightening years of my life, were actually the foundations for the best years of life that I instinctively know are coming.
We are our own light, connected to our universe. We have to understand how powerful this is, and how far we can go with this understanding.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasisgroup.com.
