The Difficulty of Hearing Your Own Voice
4/19/22
Dear friend,
Last week I talked about orienting yourself toward a posture of discernment in your life and how this isn't something we are readily trained to do in our culture or our faith spaces.
I also talked about how this posture of discernment is ultimately about believing in a relational reality and an ability to listen to the voices in those relationships—our own voice, the voice of the Divine, and the voices of trusted others.
(If you missed last week's letter and want to read it, you can find it here.)
So today, let's talk about the voice that is our own.
What gets in the way of our ability to hear our own voice inside us?
Oh, all kinds of things. I can imagine you're already nodding your head in agreement. You already know the many other things that can stampede over the singular voice inside you that is yours.
I know those for myself too.
Today alone, I've had so many other voices battling for supremacy in my inner landscape.
I've heard the voices of people I'm learning from right now related to my work, with all the things they say I should be doing and shouldn't be doing
I've heard a voice whose source I don't even know, telling me I'm moving too slow and need to hurry up
I've heard another voice from some other faceless source, shaming me for needing to circle back on some things and not being further ahead
I've heard a voice of someone I can feel myself trying to please, wondering what they might say to something I'm trying to do
And that's just a few examples from today alone!
I'm guessing you can relate.
How do we regard all those other voices when they're clamoring to be heard? How do we get back to the voice at the very core of us in those moments?
I find one thing that helps is identifying the other voices, similar to what I outlined above. When they're all clamoring together, filling up our head and attention space, it creates a cloud of chaos. We hardly know what's what anymore!
But when we can extricate them from one another, singling each of them out, we can then begin the next thing that helps, which is to respond to them.
For example:
To the voices of those who are teaching me some things to do in my business right now, I can say, "I'm so grateful for all you're teaching me. I'm learning so much! And it's going to be very helpful to incorporate these things as I move forward. But it's going to take me time. It can't all happen today. And for today, I need to keep moving forward on these other things. So, hang tight. I'll be back soon to keep moving forward with all you're teaching me."
Or to the voice of the person I'm trying to please, I might say, "I care what you think of what I'm doing so much. I have to confess, sometimes my care for that gets in the way of doing what I know I need to do. I'm afraid of disappointing you. I'm afraid of pushing you away through my choices. I'm afraid my right choices might be wrong choices for you and that this might cause us to drift apart. But you know what? I also want to believe that we can have different wants and still love one another. And that you would want me to follow the path that's authentically mine. And if my right choices for me do cause us to drift from each other, I want to choose right now to be someone who will be grateful for what we had when we had it. It was a gift to have been given it at all."
Sometimes it takes these kinds of conversations with the voices in our head to clear the way for our own voice to emerge.
I think this is partly because these conversations help us rename our values, our priorities, our stance, and our chosen way of being. It's a way of saying to ourselves, "This is who I choose to be."
Which, in its own way, is a way of being in touch with our own voice again.
Does this land for you? Have you ever tried it? What else comes up for you in the struggle to hear your own voice in your discernment posture?
Yours in contemplative light,
Christianne