Wise Ol’ You

Wise Ol’ You

What do you know? If I know you, and I do, you know a lot. You’ve been learning stuff it seems like for almost ever. You know how a lot of things work, you know how to do stuff, you know about your people.

There is a bunch of stuff that you understand that other people just don’t seem to. You are wise.

Have you started to trust that yet? Have you come to expect that you see things in a way that is really useful, that your experiences have given you a deeper grasp on how to successfully live in the world?

Or do you think of yourself as stupid/ Other people who matter to you may have told you that, or you may think that it seems like everybody else know stuff you don’t, like you are supposed to know everything already. Perhaps you focus on the topics that are challenging for you, ignoring the ones that are easy for you, assuming that everyone finds them easy.

Maybe it’s the case that you have decided wisdom comes from book learning, and that you have to have degrees, letters after your name, in order to be wise.

If you don’t believe it, there aren’t enough degrees in the world to make you feel wise from the inside out. If you don’t believe it, all the accolades and praise ever uttered won’t make you feel wise. You could win all the Nobel prizes and still feel stupid.

How do I know I am wise? What makes me tap into my inner knowledge? Why am I brilliant?

Wisdom is such an interesting thing. We can learn trivia from books, we can memorize formulas, and vocabulary, or recipes. We can learn tables by rote, analyze literature for symbolism, measure specific gravities all day long. Facts. Knowledge that comes from the outside in. Teachable.

Then there is wisdom. Wisdom isn’t really teachable. We tend to find it when we are trusting our gut, the brain in the belly. The belly is almost like another brain, with more neurons than in the spinal cord. This is where our hunches start. We get set of sensations, and, through our wisdom, we get a notion about the matter, and, though our experience, we find that we are right over and over.

“I just had a feeling about it.” A hunch, intuition. It happens so fast, it seems like there isn’t a reason for it, but there usually are a bunch of things that we pick up on, and process at lightening speed out of our own awareness.

When I started studying NLP, we talked about how we already did what we were doing, it was just unconscious. Our job was to bring the wisdom up into our conscious mind, refine it, clean out the superstitious behaviors attached to it, and then practice the cleaned up version until it was unconscious again.

Wisdom is always available to us. Our task is to relax into it, to allow ourselves to connect to it, to use it, to hone it, to value it.

How have I changed from discounting my wisdom to trusting that I know?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10132013