Once you find clarity within, you’ll never feel lost again

Back in the days when I was still seeking clarity about the direction of my own work, I remember that frustrating feeling of fog in the brain. No matter which direction I looked, the path ahead seemed obscured. I couldn’t tell which path was the right path. I couldn’t tell if any path was the right path. I felt lost. So, I just stayed where I was. But that only resulted in me getting more and more agitated with every passing day. At the time, I wanted so desperately to make a career move, but I just didn’t know to where. And therein was the problem.

Most people believe that having clarity is about knowing your destination. They think if they could just see into the distance to where they are going, then they could simply plot out a course to follow that will get them there. But clarity is not about knowing where you are going. Clarity is the ability to access your own internal guidance and have the willingness to trust it to lead you to where you want to be – even when you don’t know where it’s taking you.

Clarity is the ability to access your own internal guidance and have the willingness to trust it to lead you to where you want to be.

The good news is, every person has the ability to do this. Your inner guidance already knows where you want to be. Every moment of every day, you’ve been telling it through your thoughts and feelings what you want and what you don’t want. It already knows what work would be satisfying and fulfilling for you, and it’s trying to lead you to it, but your determinedness to know the exact the destination before you make a move is what’s keeping you blocked from receiving your own clarity.

7 Blocks to clarity (and how to release them)

Clarity is a natural state of being. If we trusted ourselves enough to move despite our uncertainty, we would end up walking a delightful pathway of the ever-unfolding adventure of our life. Sure, there would still be obstacles encountered every now and then, but they would not hinder us to the point of us getting stuck. But we don’t trust ourselves, so we hold back.

When we suppress any part of ourselves, it creates resistance, which in turn creates a barrier between us and our inner guidance. It is through the releasing of resistance that we release the blocks and gain access to our clarity.

Block 1: Not allowing yourself to feel

Contrary to popular belief, clarity is not a function of our mind, it is a function of our body. We don’t “think” our way to clarity, we “feel” our way to it. Our inner guidance speaks in the language of sensation not words. The challenge with this is that most of us are operating in some varied state of bodily shut down. We have numbed ourselves to cope – to cope with our stress, our disappointment, our trauma, or the state of the world. Whatever the reason, it does not serve us well. As Bréné Brown says, we cannot “selectively numb”. Meaning, if we attempt to shut down the emotions and sensations we don’t want to experience, we also close ourselves off from those feelings that allow us to be in communication with our inner guidance.

Release: Rebuild capacity to feel bodily sensations.
This is not accomplished overnight. It requires a daily practice of being in relationship with our body, growing our self-awareness, and having healthy ways to process our emotions. We must be gentle and kind toward ourselves.

Block 2: Not letting your desire flow

Desire ranges from simple acts of self-interested pleasure to altruistic grand visions to ecstatic passion for life itself. Desire is an inner wanting, which is experienced in the body as the surge of creative life-force energy. This can be challenging if we are not yet practiced at allowing ourselves to feel. The intensity of sensation can trigger anxiety and cause us to shut down again in a protective mode.

Release: Allow yourself to want what you want.
It is important to have tools to manage our nervous system, such as being in nature, nourishing bodily exercise, or a supportive somatic therapist. We can learn to breathe through the discomfort of desire and to reframe the intensity as being a positive experience. (The feeling of desire means you’re alive!)

Block 3: Not acknowledging your fear

This was a big one for me. I talked about my own tumultuous journey with fear in my recent post, Befriend your fear and invite it to join you. What I have noticed over the years of working with hundreds of brave souls is that instead of acknowledging the fear that lies out ahead of us on our journey, we tend to fixate on the barriers that are right in front of us. But those barriers are not the real stoppers. The real block to clarity is knowing that when we remove the barriers, then we will have to confront our actual fears.

Release: Acknowledge your fear and honour it for its role in protecting you.
The good news is you don’t have to rid yourself of your fear (this is actually not even possible). What you want to do is to invite the fear in, honour its service to your well-being, and advise it that it no longer needs to protect you. You’ve got your own back.

Block 4: Not getting quiet to listen

One of the reasons we don’t get quiet enough to listen to our inner guidance is because we are afraid of what we are going to hear. It saddens me how many times people tell me they are afraid of listening within because they worry they are going to discover something about themselves they don’t want to know. Secretly, most people are terrified they will find out they are as unworthy as they believe themselves to be.

Many also fear they will be sent on a journey they won’t be able to handle, so instead of listening within, they distract themselves through a variety of outlets without. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The very thing that wants to lead us to the fulfillment of our desires – our inner guidance – is the very thing we resist listening to.

Release: Be willing to receive your own guidance.
You inner guidance knows of your worthiness and it only wants for you what you want for yourself. Its job is to guide you there. You will never be offered any path that is beyond what you are capable of handling. In fact, it will be an unfolding of tremendous joy.

Block 5: Not trusting your inner guidance

It’s one thing to listen to our inner guidance, it’s another to actually trust it enough to follow through with action. As mentioned above, this is usually because we don’t know where it is leading us, and that’s scary. Interestingly, it’s not so much our inner guidance we want to build trust with as it is ourselves. When we don’t follow through with action, we descend into a spiral of distrust, which we then use as evidence of our lack of worthiness, as we talked about above.

Release: Build trust with yourself in small steps.
Trust does not begin by taking giant leaps of the edge of cliffs. Start with smaller things that involve less risk. As you have more experiences where your trusting action produces positive results, then you can move onto taking more daring steps.

Block 6: Not honouring who you really are

In regard to work, one of the main blocks to clarity is when we externalize our value. Meaning, we seek a place in the world where we will “fit“ instead of bringing to the world the totality of the amazingness of who we are from within.

Release: Honour who you really are
This requires a courageous practice of self-love. Use your work as a pathway to realizing a passionate love affair with yourself. What better use of work could there be?

Block 7: Not embracing not knowing

Finally, as it’s been said already, our inner guidance is leading us on the path to where we want to be. The tricky bit is that not even we know exactly where that is. That’s because where we want to be is more grand, more astounding, more expansive than our human brains can even comprehend. On top of that, our limiting beliefs, our self-doubt, and our lack of self-worth all combine to obscure our view. It’s no wonder we can’t see where we are going.

Release: Be willing to step into the unknown.
If you move without knowing exactly where you are going, you will be okay. In fact, more than okay. You will send yourself on the exciting adventure of living your inspired life. And isn’t that what you really want? Why would we want to know where we are going, anyway? Imagine how boring that would be.

Allow me to share some more good news. There is no right path to your inspired work. This is because when you are in contact with your inner guidance, from wherever you are it can lead you to where you want to be.

The direction you are heading does not matter because if you are heading away from what you want, your inner guidance will provide you with course correction at every step. It only matters that you start feeling, flowing, embracing, receiving, trusting, honouring – and moving!