It’s one of the great paradoxes of mental life that we’re often unable to access our
true feelings about important matters.
What we really think about — for example — the character of a friend, or the next
best move we should make in our career or our stance towards an incident in childhood…
all of our conclusions on such critical topics can remain locked inside us, part of us but
inaccessible to ordinary consciousness.
What we operate with instead are surface and misleading pictures of our dispositions and
goals.
We may settle, in haste or fear, on the most obvious answers: our new friend is very kind,
we should aim for the most highly paid job, our childhood was ‘fun’.
We ignore our deep truths first and foremost because we aren’t trained to solicit them;
no one ever quite tells us that we might need to exhibit the patience and wylyness of an
angler while waiting at the river bank of our deep minds.
We’ve been brought up to act fast, to assume that we know everything immediately, and to
ignore that consciousness is made up of layers, and that it’s the lower strata that may
contain the richest, most faithful material.
We may also be hesitant because the answers that emerge from any descent into the depths
and subsequent communion with our inner pilot can sound at odds with the settled expectations
we have of ourselves in daylight.
It might turn out that we don’t, in fact, love who we’re meant to love, or are scared
and suspicious of someone who is pressing us to trust them or are deeply moved by — and
sympathetic to — a person we hardly know.
It’s the profoundly challenging nature of our conclusions that keeps us away from our
inner sanctum.
We prioritise a sense of feeling normal over the jolting realisations of the true self.
The steps we need to take in order to check in with ourselves are not especially complicated.
We need to make time, as often as once a day, to lie very still on our own somewhere, probably
in bed or maybe in the bath, to close our eyes and direct our attention towards one
of many tangled or murky topics that deserve reflection: a partner, a work challenge, an
invitation, an upcoming trip, a relationship with a child or a parent.
We might need a moment to locate our actual concern.
Then, disengaged from the ordinary static, we should circle the matter and ask ourselves
with unusual guilelessness: ‘What is coming up for me here?’
Holding the partner, work challenge, invitation or disagreement patiently in mind, we should
whisper to ourselves: what do we really think?
What is the real issue?
What is truly going on?
What is actually at stake?
We should — to sound a little soft-headed — ask ourselves what our heart is whispering
to us or what our gut is trying to articulate.
We’re striving to access a sincere part of the mind too often crushed by the barking,
harried commands of the conformist executive self.
What we will almost certainly find is that — in a quasi-mystical way — the answers
are already there waiting for us, like the stars that were present all along and only
required the sun to fade in order to come to light in the circumference of the sky.
We already know — much more accurately than we ever assume — who we should be friends
with, what is good and bad for us, and what our purpose on this earth is.
We just need to take the time to check in on our true selves.