Living a Guided Life

After my son was born, I took on part-time work so I could be with him. When his school start date finally came round, I couldn’t wait. I decided to restart my career. I spent weeks gathering vacancies and working through application processes. Then I couldn’t fill in the forms.

Every time I sat down to complete them, I felt stressed and put them off again. Eventually, I asked my Higher Self what was going on. The answer came as a knowing rather than words: rip the forms up and bin them. It wasn’t advice about whether to start work. It was telling me that now was not the right time.

Several weeks later, a fire caused extensive damage to our house. Nobody was hurt, but the aftermath took three months to put right.

Did my Higher Self know? I’ve no idea. What I do know is that the peace I felt when I stopped applying for jobs proved well-founded. When I resumed the search, I was genuinely inspired.

Listening to Your Higher Self Is Not the Destination

Listening to your Higher Self marks the start of a different way of living. And living this way looks less like certainty than most people expect.

A guided life doesn’t mean withdrawing from the world or floating above your responsibilities. We still make decisions, face challenges and sit with uncertainty. What changes is our relationship with it all.

We stop insisting that we must know exactly how everything will turn out.

Guidance Rather Than Control

Most of us were taught that success comes from thinking harder, planning further ahead and controlling as many variables as possible. Planning is valuable, but beyond a point, more thinking only makes us more confused.

Living a guided life doesn’t mean abandoning reason. It means allowing the rational mind to work alongside another perspective, rather than expecting analysis to solve everything.

I still get this wrong myself. I can see a problem and immediately start trying to fix it, instead of stopping long enough to ask whether there is another way to look at it.

Sometimes acting quickly is exactly what is needed. Other times, I realise afterwards that I was pushing for a solution because I wanted the problem gone. When I give myself a little space and ask for guidance, I often notice something I had missed.

Instead of always asking, How do I make this happen? we can ask, What is the next right step for me? It is a small change, but it can make a real difference to the choices we make.

You Won’t Be Given a Map

Many people expect that once they connect with their intuition, uncertainty will disappear. My experience has been almost the opposite.

The Higher Self rarely hands over every answer in advance. In my experience, it shows us the next step and very little beyond it. I was not told anything about the fire. I was told to put the application forms in the bin, and at the time it made no sense.

When I eventually applied for work after the fire, the first role I was offered fell short of the salary I had hoped for. I felt torn. Part of me thought I should hold out for what I had intended, but rather than rush, I slept on it and asked my Higher Self for guidance.

That night, I had an unusually vivid dream. I was planting a seed in a pot when, almost like watching time-lapse photography, it began to grow. Within moments, it became a red rose and opened into full bloom. Then I woke up. I knew what the dream meant to me: I still had some growing to do.

The next day, I accepted the job. Within a short time, I moved into the role I had really wanted. Looking back, that first job was not the destination. It was part of the route that took me there.

Not knowing where a step leads is difficult for the part of us that wants guarantees. But a guided life doesn’t require us to see around every corner. It asks us to trust the next step in front of us.

Guidance Looks Ordinary

People often expect revelations. Occasionally, that happens. Far more often, guidance looks remarkably ordinary: making the phone call we have been avoiding, recognising that an impressive opportunity is not right for us, choosing patience instead of the reaction we could easily justify, waiting, apologising or saying no. Quite often, when I wake up, I ask for guidance and end up with a “to-do list”. I have come to accept that this is how my Higher Self keeps me moving.

These moments can seem insignificant at the time and turn out, years later, to have been the ones that mattered. We learn to trust our guidance slowly, through experiences like these. We can’t decide to trust it in advance.

When Guidance Asks for Something We Don’t Want

The real test comes when the guidance contradicts what we expected or wanted. Sometimes it asks us to stay when part of us wants to run. At other times, it asks us to let go of something we worked hard to build.

This was especially true at the end of my marriage. I remember the moment I asked within whether leaving was the right path, and the answer I received was a resounding yes.

The fallout was painful for everyone involved. Yet I also know I would never have set out so wholeheartedly to discover my Higher Self if I had made a different decision.

That doesn’t mean I believe painful things happen because they were “meant to”. It means that sometimes we cannot see the full significance of a decision while we are in the middle of it.

Fear Still Comes, but It Stops Deciding

Instead of being thrown by every challenge, we become steadier, even when things are uncertain. Fear still shows up; it never entirely stops. What changes is that it no longer makes the decisions. We bring peace with us rather than waiting for our circumstances to provide it.

This is one of the clearest signs that we are beginning to live from our Higher Self.

“Far more often, guidance looks remarkably ordinary: making the phone call we have been avoiding, choosing patience instead of the reaction we could easily justify, waiting, apologising or saying no.”

Telling the two voices apart may take some time to distinguish if listening hasn’t been your practice.  In the journey to being able to do so, you will need to develop your self-awareness, and this is what we look at next.

Articles in The Higher Self

Connecting to Your Higher Self: Discovering the Wisest Part of Who You Are

1. The Quiet Voice You Keep Talking Over
2. You Are More Than Your Busy Mind
3. When Intuition Speaks: How to Recognise Your Higher Self
4. How To Quiet Your Mind So Your Higher Self Can Be Heard
5. Living a Guided Life

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