Wise Guys

Wise Guys

I have been privy to a very curious phenomenon recently. I talk to a lot of people over the course of a day, and many of them are reporting variations on doubting themselves. Riffing on notions is fun, but I don’t think self-doubt is on that list.

The thing is, we are wise. Effortlessly. We accrue wisdom by just living our lives, experiencing our experiences. Sadly, for many of us, we listen to people who tell us we aren’t wise. They may even tell us we are stupid. Depending on who they are, what our mis-learnings are, we buy into that idea and believe we are dumb.

Poor we!

How do I know I am wise? How do I feel when I own my wisdom? What makes me trust my smarts?

In the dark ages, I was in so much pain. I bought into the idea that I didn’t know anything about living, but a tiny part of me trusted my wisdom. That wisdom told me to find a good teacher. My first brilliant teacher whom I found on my own was a shrink named Dan. He helped me to begin to see that my emotional pain was based on past events I was holding on to, and by habits that kept me stuck.

I trusted my wisdom more because of my time with him and started to clear out the negative, abusive people in my life. I made some big changes.

I sought out more teachers. I found good ones, sometimes they were there to teach me one lesson, sometimes more. I found a wonderful teacher who worked with me for many years. She created a space for me to find my way, my wisdom, my self.

We all need teachers at different times in our lives. They always show up when we need them. Our job is to trust our wisdom enough to spot them, and then to trust them, and ourselves enough to learn the lessons they are meant to give us. Sometimes we have a topic that is a bit treacherous, and we need to address it with more than one teacher.

Our Personal Doubt is that kind of lesson.

Our Personal Doubt is our first mis-learning. We mis-learn it very early in our lives, and we buy into it wholeheartedly. For some of us, it’s that we are wrong. Or that we hurt people. Or that we are bad. Or that we are unlovable. There are many others. It’s that bad feeling that has been with you for your whole life. We may not even be aware of it.

My Personal Doubt is that I am garbage. It informed many of my choices for many years. I have worked on releasing that belief for a long time, and bit by bit it has gotten much less powerful. Like all our really important stuff, no one else can fix this for us. Like happiness, the truth behind our personal doubt will come from inside us.

The more we practice trusting our wisdom, the easier our lives will get, the less our Personal Doubt can flatten us. The wonderful teacher I mentioned above, Vi, would say, “You do know.” Oh, I hated that phrase! But she was always right. When I relaxed and calmed down, I always knew what I needed to do.

How have I changed from denying my wisdom to believing that I do know?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2015 all rights reserved 04112015

Finding Teachers

Finding Teachers

One of the things that blows me out of the water is how full our lives are of teachers. We have teachers who teach us in school or formal classes. They teach us knowledge-y things like math and languages and science stuff, and they often give us tests. Some of them teach us fun stuff like music and art and cooking, and the proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes.

We have teachers who are parents or other adults we are close to who teach us useful skills to help us in life; how to express our feelings, how to iron, how to forgive, or wash dishes so they are clean, how to jury rig stuff, or take care of ourselves when we are sick, or how to be generous. Sometimes those teaching are really helpful, and sometimes they can really mess us up.

When we go to work we get new teachers who show us the ropes, sometimes they are our supervisors or bosses, sometimes they are co-workers. We sometimes find spiritual teachers at our places of worship, and sometimes we run into what I often refer to as our “best teachers” who drive us crazy but also give us the space we need to really grow into ourselves, to let go of being a victim, or to see our parents or other adults from our childhoods as just people, and not demigods.

When we are looking for a good teacher, the universe will usually provide us with someone. Thing is, we may not recognize them as a teacher.  Maybe they are a lot younger than we are. Maybe they are of a different lifestyle, or education, or something else that makes us think we can write them off. We miss a lot that way.

How am I supported? What makes me recognize a teacher? How do I open to learn something new?

Often we get ourselves in trouble by feeling like we are better than, that we know more than so and so, that there isn’t anything they can teach us. Sometimes we get ourselves in trouble by thinking that we we can’t learn, we can’t change, we are just stuck in this miserable mess we’ve created for ourselves.

We can always learn. We can always find something inside that we need to let go of; an old resentment, a mislearned belief, an attitude that doesn’t serve us. We occasionally know what these things are, but often we don’t, and a teacher will help us get there.

How do I know I can change for the better? What makes me courageous? Why am I strong? Why am I competent?

When I listen to me and hear things like, “I always, I never, I can’t, that’s just how I am, this is just how it is” chances are good I have some stuff there that I can let go of. If I choose to believe that I am meant to be happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy, there is a lot of room for me to grow. It may just be a matter of changing my point of view. It may be a matter of counting things differently, or reframing an old idea into a fresh belief.

By keeping my eyes peeled for my teachers, wherever I may find them, I open my heart to being my best self. I am not grateful for the tumor, but I am grateful for what I am learning from the healing of my body. I am not grateful for the discomfort, but I appreciate the skills I am acquiring without drama, the flood of good will and kindness, and my willingness to change my ideas about my experience from things that bring me down to things that uplift me and leave me lighthearted. I will take them where I find them.

How have I changed from feeling stuck to opening to a world full of good teachers?

3. Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 09252014

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