Are you like me? Have you a veritable library within your head?

We’ve listened to so many books, podcasts, interviews, and articles. Not to mention courses, programmes, and workshops.

Oh yes, if they were giving out doctorates for “studying” spirituality, we’d have one—probably five times over! It’s a process we enjoy so much that in some ways it’s become an addiction. Can you relate?

Relying on our trusted teachers and teachings, and returning to them at times of need to re-learn, understand, and make sense of the chaos we often experience on this journey becomes our lifeblood.

Many different teachers and teachings have played an integral role in my own awakening and path of embodied mastery. Too many to mention, teachers across lots of different subjects and perspectives: personal development, law of attraction, spirituality, consciousness, energy, yoga, and so on. I found value and comfort in each teacher for whatever stage I was at and could receive.

I stuck with one in particular for many years. I navigated back to the simplicity of the message again and again, and it helped me establish a firm connection with my own source within. However, after a while I started to feel “confined” by the teachings. I started to feel a sense that there was more, there was something else, another piece to the puzzle that wasn’t being fully addressed. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something felt off about the delivery and interpretation of certain things.

I couldn’t understand it; I tried hard to be a good student. I re-committed to being that good student. I listened more and tried to make myself do the processes that needed to be done. But try as I might, my own internal sirens alerted every time I attempted to conform. My own wisdom was getting louder, becoming clearer, and communicating with me through my intuition.

But I did what a good and humble student would do…I doubted it. I shared my newly found thoughts and questions with others and they didn’t get it; they parroted back to me the very teachings I was questioning. It started to feel like that—that everyone was simply parroting. So I judged myself harshly. I told myself it was my ego trying to prove that I knew more than someone else. I tried to bring my ego underwraps and make it conform. Except that didn’t work, because it wasn’t my ego—it was my soulfulness.

I had spent years chasing and trying to establish my own connection, and when it finally came, what did I do? I told it to shut up. I assumed it wasn’t real. I assumed I was making it up, and I questioned if I was falling into an egoic spiritual righteousness.

I wasn’t. I was receiving what I had long sought, and I wasn’t trying to force it onto anyone. I was seeking an answer, a deeper wisdom, one that felt truer to me. But I was questioning: Who was I to have a different version of wisdom than these other teachers?

Of course, who was I not to? When most every teacher and teaching that has integrity with a true wisdom teaches that we have it all within us. Even if that means what comes through us is a variation or even a deviation from what has been taught in the name of a source connection.

Because we are all individuated expressions of god consciousness. And individuality is the source of differing perspectives. Individual journeys to embodied enlightenment is to take different paths of truth, is to create different paths of understanding ourselves through our unique soul signature.

Listening to differing teachers and teachings help us to broaden our perspective wide enough that we don’t limit or box ourselves in to the point that we close off the possibility of our own wisdom speaking and being different to some teaching we rely on.

What I have now come to feel or understand is that whatever opens that avenue for you to allow more of the connection to you is perfect. Once you begin to embody more and more of the true you, you integrate wisdom in a feedback loop that then sources up from within and lets you know the resonance of truth for you.

As this gets more and more established, teachings that at one time may have seemed complicated or convoluted…suddenly don’t. Equally, when you find teachings that don’t resonate, you simply acknowledge that and perhaps you can discern why, or perhaps you don’t.

Either way, what begins to occur is that your soulful connection, which you so long sought to develop, approaches teachings from a more expanded perspective. No longer do you approach them from that mental way of trying to understand them.

Through your journey, you’ve brought forth more of the energy of the you who knows and so you feel a resonance and knowingness and a sense of “getting it” without having to process the information in the old framework of learning. Which incidentally exists in a different paradigm, so it’s like a using copper landline to connect to a fibre connection—it doesn’t work.

This is how I am coming to understand it for myself.

Our expansion is eternal, and that expansion includes expanding beyond the container of teachings as we move into different levels and dimensions of consciousness…in the perfect divine readiness for each of us. We don’t turn our back on that which has served us. We simply integrate whatever was ours to integrate and that becomes one and part of the wisdom we ourselves embody.

And we continue onward, with a greater and greater knowing and understanding that the true teacher we have always been seeking and waiting to arrive has been ourselves.

And when she/he does show up and whisper to you, try not to tell them to shut up!

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Author: Roisin Brady
Image: Flickr/rohit gowaikar
Editor: Travis May