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“You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are.” ~ Yogi Bhajan
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The answer is myself:
Bold, intuitive, powerful, wise me.
This is who I am when I choose myself.
But my past is riddled with turning to external sources for guidance, answers, and direction—simply disempowering.
A few weeks ago I went to a group healing event and was hoping the healer would help me heal something specific and consequently provide me with inner peace, love, and comfort. Tall order—subconscious or not, huh?! But, she ran out of time and I didn’t get to sit with her one-on-one. I left there feeling crushed, in tears, and emotionally ripped apart.
Being the inquisitive personal growth junkie I am, I asked myself what was going on. Why was I having such an intense reaction to this experience?
On a surface level, I felt cheated and perhaps like I wasn’t as important as everyone else who got one-on-one time. As I processed my feelings of envy and rejection, I inquired further. After several layers of digging deeper into my subconscious mind, I realized my old pattern had popped up again.
Ultimately, I was looking for someone else to take care of me—to fix me—because I felt incapable and like a failure in trying to provide myself with that care for this specific issue.
But, why did I believe this healer had more power over my circumstances and my physical health than myself? Why am I so quick to trust other people’s opinions but not my own?
Who knows if it was domineering parents, or a shy disposition, or a karmic pattern I brought with me from a past life, but this theme of turning to someone else for their opinion, wisdom, or insight, instead of asking myself, was my norm growing up and a pattern I have been conscious of trying to break as an adult.
As a result of always turning to an outside force, my own self-trust, intuition, and gut instincts were not nurtured and developed growing up. When I was younger, others’ opinions seemed more valuable than my chaotic, insecure, self-doubting thinking mind. I didn’t feel clear or grounded in who I was, so how was I expected to make good decisions for myself? I figured, better turn to someone older, wiser, smarter, prettier, more successful, or more confident.
In my early 20s, I hit a breaking point with this behavior. As I gave up my power over and over, I felt more and more lost, weak, and confused. The journey to reconnect with my intuition, my own innate wisdom, and my power has been a long and winding road—but it has been critically important to my sovereignty, healing, happiness, and empowered woman-hood.
My new mantra is:
I choose myself.
I am powerful,
I am wise.
I turn to myself for answers, guidance, and wisdom.
I am all I need.
I am everything I need
So, how did I learn to choose myself?
1. Slow down and get quiet
The first step of tuning in to our intuition is slowing down and getting quiet. It’s impossible to hear our inner guidance if we are constantly busy, distracted, and focused on external stimuli. We need open space for our gut wisdom to come through clearly. For some this may mean sitting in meditation every day. For others, this may mean a quiet, slow walk in nature, or sitting down to do nothing but stare at the wall or out the window.
Our nervous system needs our brain frequency to slow down. We need to let our analytical filters gently switch off, allow the body to relax, and swim in curiosity and open-mindedness to develop self-connection. When we take ourselves out of Beta brain waves (our thinking mind) and into Alpha and Theta brain waves, we can calm down and let our true selves flow.
2. Burn off the anxiety and stagnant energy that needs to move through our body
Often, the inner chaos, mind chatter, and discomfort we feel with slowing down is just a result of excess energy that has built up in the body and needs to move through and out. When we don’t move this energy out, it stagnates and manifests as anxiety, pain, or tension, and can lead us to numbing out behavior or overly intense emotional outbursts instead of staying present with what we really need to address and shift.
Some of us need intense cardio and weight training to burn off and clear this energy. Others need more gentle, restorative movement like Qigong or Tai Chi. Yoga is excellent for everyone because there are many styles, paces, and ways to customize. And, the true value is the focus on the breath, which facilitates energy movement, rebalancing, and calming recalibration of the body systems.
Bottom line: we need to move, breathe, and release energy build-ups from our bodies to stay present, tune in, and connect with our intuition.
3. Tune in to the heart
A great place to start building self-trust and self-knowing is in the heart. When we drop our thinking consciousness down into heart awareness, our energy shifts into true emotion and grounded wisdom. It takes much courage to look and feel into the heart because we cannot control what is there or un-feel the wide range of emotion we access there. Sometimes we feel love, and sometimes we feel intense grief and pain, but it is always valuable.
The heart has its own intelligence, its own vibrational frequency, and its own pulsating energy. By tuning in to the heart, we can see and feel our greatness, we can feel magnetized to the next steps on our path, and we can sense ourselves on a deeper soul level.
4. Self-connect, self-date, and self-love
Another essential to choosing ourselves is to carve out specific time for self-connection. We need to date ourselves, court ourselves, and love ourselves more intensely and profoundly than we have ever felt for another person. We need to laugh at our mistakes. We can treat ourselves to the luxury of experience, time, and kindness. We need to hug ourselves when we are down and talk to our younger selves, showing up for them in a way our parents didn’t know how. We can have fun, find joy, and play uninhibited and freely. We must prioritize the personal work it takes to love ourselves—mind, body, and soul.
We can be our own rock—prioritizing time for self-connection shows us that we are there for ourselves. That consistent showing up will create an unwavering bond that will carry us through anything. We need to be our greatest priority, our own grounding force, and our deepest love.
4. Stay grounded in our truth
Knowing our own truth is the key to choosing ourselves. As a curious person, I tend to ask for others’ opinions. While growing up, I often took others’ thoughts as reality and fact, but as I got older and increasingly saw the value of forming my own opinions, I would get others’ input and then compare them with my own as a guiding post. This would often just confuse and jumble my own inner compass, and it was hard to find my actual truth—let alone stay grounded in it.
Now, whether or not I get another’s input, solicited or unsolicited, I pause to check in with myself. And then I live by my truth even if it means creating tension, emotional waves, or disagreements. I stay connected to my authenticity first and foremost; its the only way I can feel aligned with my heart, integrity, and self-love.
5. Keep our chakras and energy centers balanced
Whether you believe in the chakra energy centers or not, the qualities and characteristics they represent are critical for being a self-sufficient and self-reliant healthy, happy, and harmonious human.
First Chakra: We all need to feel grounded, safe, and stable to trust ourselves and our inner wisdom.
Second Chakra: We need to feel pleasure, tune in with our desires, express our creativity, and flow with the fluctuations of life.
Third Chakra: Feeling our personal power, inner strength, and unique fire is crucial to choosing ourselves and seeing our worthiness and value.
Fourth Chakra: Self-love, choosing the vibration of compassion and kindness, and moving through sadness and grief to keep our hearts open is a key element of self-trust and self-connection.
Fifth Chakra: We need to speak our truth and express ourselves. Having the capacity to vocalize and outwardly express our inner strength, uniqueness, and conviction is essential.
Sixth Chakra: Believing in our innate wisdom is greatly valuable. We all have a wide range of experiences, emotions, and ways we process life, and we need to understand our own internal guidance system. Our intuition offers us the best advice, guidance, and wisdom.
Seventh Chakra: Feeling a connection to universal energy or oneness in part of the wholeness is fundamental to seeing your part in the grand design. We are each no less and no more than individuals and divinity. We need to acknowledge our own greatness and grace in order to trust ourselves and turn to ourselves first.
6. Practice using my inner compass
The last ingredient to learning to choose myself was to put all the above together and live by my internal compass. Practice lets me refine, sharpen, and fine-tune my skills—month by month and year by year. I practice checking in with my intuition for everything. I feel which way my body moves—whether I literally lean into something because it feels right or I lean back because it’s not for me or the timing isn’t right.
I notice if my mind feels like a hell yes, a maybe that needs more exploring, or a solid no. I get quiet and still enough to hear the messages beyond my fear and chatter. I play the game of assessing how much joy something brings me and how big it lights up my smile. I breathe when a new challenge will take me out of my comfort zone, but my soul is screaming “Go!”
I let myself be guided by me and me alone.
This is where I found the magic, the gold in properly steering my life forward. Instead of being intimidated or wanting to avoid the mind’s chaotic mess and go seek external advice, we can slow down, check in, and always ask ourselves for our own answers.
Our soul knows best for our unique journey—99.9 percent of the time we have the answer within us; and it’s usually much more obvious and on the surface than we think it will be. Our soul, our bodies, our hearts, and our wisdom wants to guide us. We just need to listen.
And so the mantra I come back to over and over and over is:
The answer is myself—bold, intuitive, powerful, wise me.
This is who I am when I choose myself.
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