A practice of Listening
That sentence, re read this morning, is better than I first thought.
Good morning God. Thank you for this day. Thank you for this life. Thank you for the struggles and tribulations. Thank you for all you have given me. I am the person through Christ who can do this. You have chosen me, made me, way before me, to listen to you and do this. I will. I am. In Jesus name, amen.
As a writer who listens to God and works to bring His ideas and His thoughts thru, I read the bible from this perspective. As a person who built a life around wanting to be able to hear God, listen to God, know God and respond to God, I understand what an effort it is to do this. At least in one way, or my way. I am a writer and painter and life coach who uses my body, my vessel, & my life to channel God’s inspirations, his visions, his wisdom.
This is a hard thing to say. To articulate.
Living an inspired life.
Father, how do I do this? Do you want me to say this?
YES!
SAY IT LIKE YOU WERE 3
That’s a good idea.
The path to here: I could always hear God. I knew it was God and I built time into my day, even as a young girl, to listen to and understand God. We all know that this statement is clarified with the statement to the best of my ability. That’s what we are all doing. To the best of our ability, we want to hear God, know God, feel God, and benefit from His direction and ability.
I did not grow up in a religious home. I was told that people who believe in God were stupid. I didn’t read the bible until I was 47. I believed in God because I heard him. The experience of a presence being with me and guiding me was always there. Such a presence can be shrugged off. But a voice? Is hard to ignore, especially when its accurate, time and time again.
As such meditation became a dominant aspect of my life from my teenage years on. I was convinced that God exists and with Him a supernatural realm that we can’t see but one that is very much there, before us and with us. (I use the pronoun Him because that is how I identify the voice and how the presence feels to me.) Before I left high school I had many experiences that I called God experiences and I left high school wanting to better understand the guidance I seemed to be receiving.
In college and graduate school, this voice—this guidance—became especially prominent. The voice interrupted me. Came out of nowhere, which I was accustomed to, since the age of 3, but somehow it was getting louder. Certainly, this is a dance; two have to move together as one. This is what hearing is: one has to be listening. As the information or guidance became clearer and proved to be accurate, I listened harder. The dance elevated. I became known to myself and others as ‘intuitive.’ Although at this time I was still genuinely concerned that I was nuts, so I kept my ‘intuition’ for the most part, a secret.
I lived for many years with the worry that I had this bizarre secret in my pocket and that if discovered I would be labeled weird, or bad, so I hid it, to the best of my ability, always wondering if it was obvious or visible on the outside. I rode the bus at times with vast amounts of information coming in and I crouched down in my seat attempting to act normal and surely making myself look the opposite. I met others who self-identified as ‘intuitive’ who wore flowing colors with crystals everywhere. I was not that girl. I wore tweed suits that played up my academia. What’s more normal than that?
It’s important to distinguish that the world labeled me intuitive, and I embraced it because here is where I found the books that most represented my experience. But that label always felt to me like scratchy clothing. Something that you can’t wait to take off the second you are home. To me, I simply thought I hear God or God talks to me. It was simple really: there is a supernatural realm, there is a God—who made all of this—including me and I am on the hunt to understand myself and my world more deeply.
The hunt for understanding would take me to all kinds of places. What would evolve and continues to evolve is my daily practice. Hearing the supernatural realm in a very noisy reality takes work. Awareness and effort. All this to say that I developed a morning routine of quiet and stillness that would last anywhere from 1 to 4 hours, depending on my day and time of waking. This morning routine became sacred to me and I could not function without it. And still can’t.
I can go 1, or 2 days (in a pinch) without it, but not 3. Meaning, this quiet routine, listening to God and talking to God in my mind for hours in the morning has become something necessary. I could not function without it any more than I can function without food or water. All this to say that every morning I take direction from God and the supernatural realm to the best of my ability and then execute these directions to the best of my ability.
I am not the only one doing this. Many of us, I might even say most, understand this as a concept even if the execution is spotty to nonexistent. In my line of work as a life coach specializing in trauma and crisis, discussions of the supernatural realm and the role it’s having on one’s life is common. It often takes a crisis for some of us to wake up and/or be forced to account for the forces one can’t see.
The antithesis to living a life from one crisis to the next is to live an inspired life. One where you recognize your body as a vessel, your mind as a spaceship with a command module, and the fact that you are here on planet earth with a purpose that you simply cannot execute without a little or a lot of extra help. In spiritual communities the saying you are a spiritual being living a human life is readily embraced. Even if the noise makes it very hard to hear.
The trick then, is to hear. To develop the faculty to listen. And the faculty to execute. It is hard. Or not easy. But the alternative is a life feeling alienated and lost. And miserable. Which I consider harder, but many of us chose it, by default.
Years ago I would slink down on the bus seat or hide in a corner at parties, praying that no one notice the jet stream of information entering my mind through the top of my head. My greatest fear was to be labeled not normal or crazy. That seems funny to me now. To be so afraid of that. We are all designed to hear God. That is your design. And you are meant to live an inspired life: one that embraces you specifically, that only you can live that comes with ability and assistance, if only you will ask.
The first thing you must do is develop the habit of asking and listening.
The second thing you must do is identify if darkness is messing with you (and YES, he/it is)
Just start. Somewhere. Start with thinking about it differently.
If you believe that life is a gift. It is.
If you believe that life is hell on earth. It is.
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