One of the guidepost that I follow is this: Trust what you feel, know what you know, and question what you know.
Each of these things hold deep wisdom and knowing for me. In this post I'll take just a little time to address each and what they mean to me.
Trust what you feel: Let me start by saying that I am a very emotionally intelligent person. I feel most things deeply. I feel my own stuff, other peoples stuff, what is being said, what isn't being said. I can feel people thousands of miles away, I feel things coming, I feel the release when something has left, I can even feel the ancestors. And I hold lots of spaces where people are invited to feel, I often feel with them, sometimes but not often I feel for them. In this I have had to learn what feeling are mine and which ones aren't. I have had to discern when I'm needed to feel with or for someone (note the later is rare). I have had to learn that sometimes when I thought the compassionate thing was to feel for I was really moving from my own discomfort and not from a place that was really in service to them. Sometimes people are so full of emotions that they just need someone to just grieve the top for them so they then can access the rest. In a world that wants us to believe that we can't trust our feeling I would suggest it's not the feelings that we can't trust but often the stories we make up about the feelings. Thank goodness that we don't have to have the details of the feelings to release them.
Know what you know: We each carry wisdom in us. Some hard fought and earned, some pasted down through the generations. One of the things that I love about elders like Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela is that they owned what they knew, they didn't play small in an effort to fake humility. I once heard Maya Angelou say that humility was knowing that someone else paid the price for you and now it is your turn to pay the price for someone else. Of course a part of that knowing includes constantly learn what you don't know.
Question what you know: As I often tell my children, being smart and creative is not always your friend because we can make up all kinds of shit. Put a stake in the ground but in every moment of everyday be willing to move it. Be willing to learn something new. Know that the new learning might come out of nowhere and knock you on your ass but be willing stay with it even when it doesn't make sense yet. These are the places where you get to step into more and more of who you truly are. It's not so much in the answers as we have been led to believe but in the questions.
So these things have served me well. I trust my feelings and let them have their way with me for a bit as they flow through me instead of me trying to control them. I claim the wisdom I have and know that they are needed in the world. And I live in questions helping me to see that the world is out to gift me and not to get me.
Quanita