Tapping into Your Inner Wisdom, Part 2

The Hard Questions for an Authentic Life
by Susan Piver

(Page 2 of 4)

What I found was that as I was able to fully live each moment, an authentic life naturally and directly arose around me. This life was not created by my thoughts or directed by my will, but was manifested through an ongoing dialogue within myself and with the world, a dialogue based on inquiry and a commitment to listen to the answers that arose. I've come to the realization that it's actually impossible to plan an authentic life - it's only possible to be authentic and watch as your authentic life manifests around you.

We live in a society that declines to teach us how to be authentic, how to wake up to our own inner lives. Our own being, that with which we are most intimate, is also, for many of us, the thing that is most inscrutable to us. For most of human history, tending to basic needs precluded all but the most privileged from wondering what their life path might be. For the majority, when moments of contemplation did lead to questioning, answers were offered by religious or spiritual doctrine.

An unprecedented number of us are now looking for our own answers to life's hard questions. We are no longer satisfied with the vision for life offered by clergy, family, society. We can no longer look to outside sources or institutions, no matter how cherished, to hand us a working vision of how to become an adult, find a spouse, raise children, or engage in meaningful work. It is up to each of us, individually and with those closest to us, to discover our own personal vision of life. How amazing: in our lifetime, the locus of responsibility for choosing a path has shifted away from religion, culture, society to...ourselves. Yet we've received virtually no education or training for assuming this potent task.

It's no wonder that in the last twenty-five years or so, an overwhelming quantity of personal growth books, workshops, therapies, seminars, and theories have been created. Spiritual trends cycle through faster and faster; even powerful wisdom traditions such as Christian mysticism, Buddhism, yoga, kabbalah, and shamanism are in danger of losing their potency through the speed with which we try them on and discard them. An enormous existential, spiritual gap has been created and we have looked to fill it from all external sources, doing anything to postpone the difficulty of looking within and working with what is found there, realizing that there is no guide, no teacher, no expert, and no other individual who can know how we should live our lives. If we truly want to discover the purpose of our lives, be guided by our own inner wisdom, and live with authenticity, this - assuming primary responsibility for our own precious human life - is the most important shift we can ever make.

Our culture discourages this shift by offering to life's hard questions a plethora of attractive, convincing, powerfully compelling answers that are ultimately useless. We take our life lessons from soft-drink commercials and magazine advertisements. We believe that our lives should have a narrative structure, as lives do in the movies or on TV; indeed many of us act as if we were always on camera - performing instead of living a three-dimensional life. Appearances stand in for real feelings, true connection. It's difficult to distinguish our own thoughts from the thoughts of commentators, pundits, and experts. We are profoundly disconnected from what is real, simple, and true for us. How to turn off and tune into your real voice? That is the work ahead of you.

The work begins with questions. Asking a question can be a sacred act. A real question assumes a dialogue, a link to the source from which answers come. Asking a question is a simple, profound way of initiating a relationship with the energies and powers around and within you. Talking, telling, explaining, complaining, railing, criticizing, praising, lamenting, beseeching - these are the ways we most commonly approach important questions. If we can drop all these for just a moment and simply ask, wonder, become curious about...an opening for an answer will be created. Questioning by its very nature is a spiritual practice. We come into dialogue with God, our true nature, wisdom, whatever we choose to call it, whenever we stop, look inside, and take the time and effort to really listen to ourselves.

I learned about the power of asking questions in 1997, when I was thinking about getting married. I was deeply in love with my boyfriend, Duncan. We had been together for four years and were certain about our feelings, but I was still very afraid of getting married. Hadn't all my divorced friends been in love at the time of their marriages? Why would we be any different? In thinking about these things, I realized that getting married wasn't only about being in love and staying in love - it was about creating a life together that we both loved. I couldn't find any resources to help us figure out if we could create such a life together or not, so I began writing down questions about money, friends, home, children, spirituality, and so on. We began answering them together and something really amazing happened: it turned out not to matter whether we agreed, disagreed, or didn't know how to answer any particular question. The act of considering the questions together created a revealing, instructive dialogue between us. As we answered them ("Will we keep our money separately or together?" "Will we share a religion?"), we became more intimate. Our love deepened. After we were married, some answers began to change - some agreements became disagreements, and vice versa; answers emerged for what was previously unanswerable. We kept checking in with each other, using the questions as guides. We learned that it wasn't the answers that were valuable - it was the questioning process. The Hard Questions for an Authentic Life uses this process to help you develop this sort of ongoing dialogue with yourself.

Why is tapping into our own inner wisdom so difficult? We long for it, yet we lack the ability to hear ourselves clearly. Our inner wisdom speaks a unique language, made up of a combination of dreams, coincidences, passions, revulsions, and intuitions - and something very powerful that transcends all of those. To understand this voice requires a type of pattern recognition that we're untrained in - but four very important skills can help:

1. Courage
2. Willingness to feel
3. Focus
4. Presence

Copyright © 2005 Susan Piver

About the Author

Susan Piver is the author of The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say "I Do." She was also a writer, producer, and marketing specialist for the entertainment industry for more than a decade before launching Padma Media, which creates special book packages for bestselling authors.