In the last article, we looked at how to recognise the voice of your Higher Self. This one is about the harder problem: hearing it at all, in a life of noise, notifications and never-ending to-do lists.
“Like the wind, our Wise Self speaks ever so softly. The whispers are sweet, and one must quiet to hear them.” Jan Lundy
I was afraid of my own Higher Self. That sounds strange, given how overjoyed I was to have found it. But for years I still shut it out, because I had an idea of what it was going to say: that I was doing everything wrong, and that putting it right would mean being generous to those that had wronged me, doing things I didn’t want to do to help others, and frankly giving myself up. So I sabotaged my efforts and kept the distractions as long as I could.
It wasn’t until I finally made space for my Higher Self to speak that I realised I had it backwards. It would never make me wrong. It only ever found ways to support me; it loved me unconditionally, and if I was set on a mistake, it would let me make it.
The Higher Self Is Never Absent
One of the greatest misconceptions about connecting with your Higher Self is that you have to search for it. The truth is quite the opposite. Your Higher Self is never absent. It doesn’t disappear when life becomes busy or when your mind is full of worry. It remains a constant, loving presence beneath the noise of everyday life.
What changes is our ability to hear it. Modern life encourages us to think constantly, react quickly and fill every spare moment with information, and the quiet wisdom within us gets drowned out by the chatter. The good news is that reconnecting doesn’t require a dramatic spiritual experience, a retreat, or an hour you don’t have. It simply means creating the conditions in which your own wisdom can rise to the surface.
What follows are five ways to do that. They are not a checklist or a formula; think of them as invitations. Take the ones that appeal to you, ignore the ones that don’t, and let your own path unfold.
Create Moments of Mental Quiet
Your Higher Self speaks through calm awareness rather than urgency, so stillness is where most people start. Meditation is the obvious route, and it’s worth saying clearly what it is not: it isn’t about achieving a perfectly empty mind. It’s about stepping back from the stream of thoughts for a few moments. Over time you begin to notice the difference between anxious thinking and the calm, compassionate voice underneath it.
But if you have tried meditation and hated it, you haven’t failed at this. My first foray into meditation was to help me sleep, which it did perfectly! A couple of minutes in and I would be asleep until morning. It wasn’t until I attended a Buddhist retreat many years later that I fully appreciated the benefits of stilling your mind. Not everyone connects this way. Walking in nature, swimming, gardening, painting, or simply sitting with a cup of tea and not reaching for your phone can all do the same work. The practice isn’t the point; the returning is. Whenever your attention comes gently back to the present moment, you have created the space.
Start a Conversation with Yourself
Like any meaningful relationship, this one deepens through attention and curiosity, and the simplest way in is to write. Keep a journal that is just for you, and be honest in it about your thoughts, your feelings, your hopes and your fears. Nobody else needs to read it. As you write, you’ll often find patterns and answers surfacing that were hidden underneath.
When I first began journalling, I didn’t know what to write until I realised it didn’t matter what I wrote to begin with; you’ve just got to get started. A client I worked with reported he felt blocked when faced with the blank page. I advised him to just start writing. “I feel blocked”, and keep going.
What you ask matters as much as the writing. “Why is this happening to me?” keeps you circling the problem. “What can this teach me?” or “How would my Higher Self see this situation?” opens a door. And gratitude does something similar, gently shifting your attention from what is missing to what is already here, not to paper over difficulty, but because a settled mind hears more than an agitated one. Even hard seasons contain gifts, though we rarely spot them at the time.
Feed Your Mind with Wisdom
The ideas we return to shape the way we think, and the right teaching at the right moment can loosen a belief you’ve carried for decades. Follow your curiosity rather than somebody else’s reading list, including mine. The right book has a way of arriving when you’re ready for it.
And that readiness cannot be forced. I owned A Course in Miracles for almost eight years before I felt able to study it. It sat on my shelf through several house moves, and every so often I would take it down, read a page, and put it back. It wasn’t until I reached a time when I felt totally stuck that I seriously decided to see what it was teaching me.
At this time, I had sought some counselling, and the counsellor concluded that I was feeling guilty about something, and this was blocking me. I couldn’t identify with that until the lessons of the Course came into full view. Little did I realise the sacred lesson on forgiveness that the Course would give me. Looking back, the timing was exactly right. Growth cannot be hurried, and a book you aren’t ready for isn’t a failure; it’s a seed. Like the Higher Self, the Course was there, patiently waiting for me until I invited it in.
Notice How Your Higher Self Already Speaks
Guidance doesn’t only arrive in quiet reflection. It turns up in ordinary life, provided we’re willing to notice it. Dreams can reveal emotions, beliefs and places that are asking to be healed; a simple dream journal will show you recurring themes within weeks. Meaningful coincidences, the conversation you keep having, the same book recommended twice in a week, the unexpected opportunity, sometimes invite you to look in a direction you hadn’t considered.
And then there is everyday life itself, which is relentlessly instructive if you ask it the right question. “What is life trying to show me?” is a small question that turns ordinary frustrations into information. You may find, as I did, that you have been receiving answers for years without recognising them as answers.
Quieten The Room, Not Just the Mind
A calmer environment supports a calmer mind. A tidy space doesn’t make anyone more spiritual, but it does remove a layer of low-level distraction, and most of us underestimate how much mental energy goes on stepping over things.
More importantly, protect a few minutes each day when nothing is asking for your attention. Not an hour. A few minutes, at a time you can actually defend, before the house wakes, in the car before you go in to work, the first ten minutes of a lunch break. Those small pockets are where clarity tends to arrive, and they are almost always the first thing we give away when life gets busy.
Try This: Choose One, For One Week
Don’t take on all five. Choose the single practice that appealed to you most as you read, the one you found yourself thinking “I could do that”, and give it one week. Five minutes a day, at the same time each day if you can.
Then notice what happens, and be prepared for it to be undramatic. Some days you will feel genuinely connected; other days you’ll wonder what the point was. Both are completely normal, and both count. This isn’t about perfection; it’s about consistency, and about trusting that your own intuition will lead you towards the practices that serve you, which may well not be the ones that serve me.
A Final Thought
None of these practices creates your Higher Self. They simply clear away some of the noise that has been covering something already there. As you make a little more space each day, you may find that the guidance you were looking for has been present the whole time, waiting for you to stop long enough to notice it.
Where We Go Next
Which raises the question this cluster has been building towards. Once you hear that guidance, what happens when you actually start following it? What changes in your decisions, your work, your relationships, your sense of direction? That’s where we finish: Living a Guided Life.