How Do I Know I Know?

How Do I know I know?

There is a theory that all our wisdom is already inside us, we just need to remember it. Maybe that’s what a flash of insight is; the remembering of a bit of that wisdom. Wherever it comes from, that wisdom helps us make our lives good. At least, when we pay attention to it.

There are so many kinds of smarts; people smarts, business smarts, book smarts, street smarts, music and art and athletic and cooking smarts. Each of us is good at something, or several things, or lots of things.

Some of us trust our smarts, and some of us don’t. Some of us trust our intuition, some of us deny its existence. Isn’t that interesting?

Wisdom and knowledge aren’t the same thing. Knowledge can be taught. Wisdom is when we “get it.” Knowledge is knowing what your kids like to eat, wisdom is knowing when to make an extra treat.

Many of us hear that we are stupid. We probably started hearing it when we were little. Poor we. We often hear it as a bad creative question, “Why are you so stupid?” Well, you know what that does, and the next thing you know, you have this whole long list of why you are stupid. So, of course, we stop attending to our wisdom, we start looking for how we are stupid, and, worst of all, we start feeling stupid.

How do I feel when I feel wise? What makes me so smart? How do I know I know?

I’ve heard from so many of you that when you were a kid, some grown up with authority in your life told you that you couldn’t sing, or couldn’t draw, or looked funny when you ran, or were terrible at math, oh, the list is long.

The grown ups don’t think about the impact on the child. And then the child grows into an adult who won’t sing, or draw, or run, or balance his checkbook. Many of my clients who were told not to sing as children actually have fine voices, and have had  joy in singing “Happy Birthday” or “Auld Lang Syne” with their loved ones.

Learning to trust our belly brain, for some of us, takes practice. We have learned to ignore many of our non-verbal thoughts, and that’s what a belly brain is, non-verbal. That doesn’t mean our belly brain doesn’t communicate with our conscious mind, just that we need to learn how to understand that communication.

How do I feel when I know it will work? How do I feel when I know I’m right? How do I feel when I know I’m competent? How do I feel when I know I am loved?

These kinds of knowing are in the belly brain. They will translate into sensations in our bodies, and when we practice asking the questions, and noticing the physical answers, our lives expand so much. Being able to read the wisdom from our belly brain means that we can make decisions more quickly, we can assess situations with greater depth and deeper understanding, we can trust ourselves more profoundly because we have ceased to deny half of our existence. Oh, yeah!

How have I changed from ignoring my wisdom to embracing my entire realm of smarts?

(c) 2013 Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 020313