Trusting the Inner Voice

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

I imagine many of you have a few writers whose every book you buy when it comes out.

For me, that writer is James Hollis, a Jungian analyst whose work explores personal growth in the second half of life.

Anastasiia and I are currently reading his latest—Living with Borrowed Dust—and one story stood out:

He said: "A couple of years ago, I was asked whom in history I would most like to interview. I thought most of us would leap at the chance to go back and talk to ourselves at ten years old.

We now know what that child most needed: modeling, mentoring, instruction, affirmation, and most of all, permission—to feel what he really feels and to risk what is rising within, asking for expression.

He needs to be told that he is already equipped by nature for the trials of life and that if he trusts himself, hangs in there, he will come out the other side of those conflicts.

He needs to be told that his fears are normal and natural, but that life still summons him to live as fully as possible in the face of that fear.

He needs to know that the Other within is his real self—and that honoring that dear soul, risking its imperative in the world, will be his lifelong task."

After reading this wisdom, I'm reminded that the intuitive knowing of childhood is the same force that guides us when we feel most lost.

I take a lot of faith in the idea that when we risk any journey into the unknown, something rises within us to support and direct us. And maybe the task isn’t to figure everything out, but to listen more closely to what has always been there—to trust that inner voice, even when doubt creeps in.

What would your ten-year-old self need to hear from you today?

A POEM

“A Good Story” by Ada Limon

originally published in The Hurting Kind

Some days—dishes piled in the sink, books littering the coffee table—
are harder than others. Today, my head is packed with cockroaches, 

dizziness and everywhere it hurts. Venom in the jaw, behind the eyes,
between the blades. Still, the dog is snoring on my right, the cat, on my left. 

Outside, all those redbuds are just getting good. I tell a friend, The body
is so body. And she nods. I used to like the darkest stories, the bleak 

snippets someone would toss out about just how bad it could get.
My stepfather told me a story about when he lived on the streets as a kid, 

how he’d, some nights, sleep under the grill at a fast food restaurant until
both he and his buddy got fired. I used to like that story for some reason, 

something in me that believed in overcoming. But right now all I want
is a story about human kindness, the way once when I couldn’t stop 

crying because I was fifteen and heartbroken, he came in and made
me eat a small pizza he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped. 

Maybe I was just hungry, I said. And he nodded, holding out the last piece.

Grateful,

Michael