Your Internal Messaging System

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Andrea Mathews, author of the new Letting Go of Good.

Most of us have been taught that we must seek guidance from wise instructors, such as parents, friends, significant others, or spiritual leaders. Some look for signs from the external world to tell them what to do. What we don’t as commonly know is that we have our own internal messaging system that can guide and protect us as needed on a daily, even moment-by-moment basis. The components of this system are described in detail in my book, Letting Go of Good: Dispel the Myth of Goodness to Find Your Genuine Self.

But for a brief overview of these components, the internal messaging system includes emotions, desires, intuitions, and discernment. Of course, there’s been a lot written lately about trusting one’s intuition, but it is often difficult for us to distinguish between intuition and other things, like emotion or desire. In fact, these distinctions are hard to make, generally speaking, because we don’t have an intimate relationship with the interiority of the genuine Self. Letting Go of Good: Dispel the Myth of Goodness to Find Your Genuine Self will inform the reader as to how to make these distinctions and build that relationship.

Further, we have commonly been either covertly or overtly taught not to trust our emotions. They are fleeting, they are based in ego, and many of them are labeled as “negative.” But actually they are messages to us, for us, and about us, from our own souls. They are meant to tell us something very important about ourselves and/or our lives.

For example, anger is commonly thought to be a “negative” emotion with “negative” consequences. While it is true that we can misuse anger, when it is used as a component of the internal messaging system, it gives us information. One of its most common messages of anger is, “I am here, I am real, and I matter.” It is trying to tell us that there is something happening about which we need to step up and take care of ourselves. When we use that anger to clarify the problem and decide how to best take care of ourselves (that is, as opposed to trying to get someone else to behave “correctly”) then we have followed our inner guidance.

Even in the event that our emotions do not accurately reflect a current event, they can lead us inward to find deep unresolved issues that need our attention. They are meant to facilitate our deep, intimate relationship with the authentic Self—as are our desires, our discernments, and our intuitions.

The worst thing that we can do with these internal guides is repress or suppress them. When we do that, not only do we miss the message, but we miss the opportunity to become more intimately acquainted with the Self. It is the Self that offers us the greatest potential to create an intimate relationship with the spiritual world. In fact, it is impossible to have a genuine relationship with any aspect of the universal divine, without a deep and abiding relationship with the authentic Self.

Our thanks to Andrea for her guest post! For more from Andrea Mathews, read her article, “Identity or Self?.”