Embracing the Woo-Woo

My Journey to Trusting Inner Wisdom

“I want to learn how to trust the wisdom of my body and give myself permission to be my authentic self, so that I can feel connected, confident, and in balance.”

I told my life coach yesterday. Yes, I have a life coach. Yes, it makes my stomach turn to say those words out loud. Yes, I don’t know why.

Detour:

Actually, I do know why.

It’s because I tend to devalue a profession that has a low barrier to entry. This is a giant chip on my shoulder. Instead of acknowledging that there are good life coaches and bad life coaches, just as there are good and bad therapists, doctors, teachers, and so on, I lump them all together.

I make a giant moral assumption, and then potentially lose out on the gargantuan benefits of having such a wonderful life coach.

But here is what I know: my life coach was born to do this work. I've learned a lot about myself in just three sessions. I should caveat this by saying that I’ve known her personally (and as her voice coach) for almost twenty years. It was not a low barrier of entry for her. She trained and has lived a life to be admired for sixty years. That is not a low entry barrier. As we all know, life is hard.

Okay—we’re off the detour and back on track.

In my last article I said, and forgive me for once again quoting (ahem) myself-

“Acknowledging, honoring, or simply waving hello to this deepest self is the key to sustaining a creatively spiritual life. By giving this self the recognition it craves, I nurture my inner creativity and maintain a fulfilling, spiritually enriched existence.”

Who wrote that? I guess I did.

My deepest self acknowledges that I have about “20% more to go.”

Twenty percent of what?

I don’t know; it’s not a number born out of reality. Maybe I have twenty more years left to live, twenty more nights to sleep, twenty what.EV.ers.

I don’t really care to know, because it’s just a metaphor. A metaphor for that stretch of a marathon that is the hardest to get through.

I live a lot in the past. There is a lot of video of me in the past—singing, dancing, with the energy of a train barreling down the tracks.

But as I’ve aged, and as my illness waxes and wanes in various directions, I have to be in the world in a new way. Finding that way has taken many years, as I seek out mentors, teachers, and people who’ve walked this path before me, with grace and a mustard seed of humility.

I intuitively sense that a significant part of that last twenty percent of my “shedding,” as I call it, involves releasing the old ways I accessed my creative intuition. How did I used to tap into this creativity? With sparks and flashes of inspiration, followed by relentless hustle to get it done.

I feel instinctively that I must instead rely on a gentle voice guided by my “inner wisdom”—omg, that sounds so woo-woo it makes me want to throw up. And yet, it’s so right.

I am making myself say these sorts of things out loud. It’s as if by taking these thoughts from the cave where they float around in my body and brain, and putting them onto the page, I am progressing through this “twenty percent” to go.

And you know what?

That feels right too.

It’s cringey, but maybe that’s just my higher self wanting to say hello.