Fire Your Internal Critic — Don’t Overthink the Inexplicable

Deep knowing comes from many sources beyond the rational mind.

You are walking down dark road and sense danger ahead. You take a side road instead. Later you learn that there were muggers on your original path.

You wake up from a dream and intuit that an important message was being communicated.

What’s the source of this knowing?

And do you listen to the message or discount it as random firings in your brain?

Many times our first impulse is to reject or deny the validity of inexplicable experiences. That’s the action of the internal critic that has a disease of the “but”.

Here our minds act like some combative trial lawyer. In cross-questioning we hear “Yes but, What do you mean?” “Yes but, can you trust that?” “Yes but, has science proven that?”

Quickly we second-guess ourselves, get into our heads, and banish from our minds potential life-changing messages.

What we don’t realize is that these mental lawyers are doubles for a mind-created ego that lives with the illusion of total control.

We need to learn that for life to touch us fully we have to attend to multiple sources of information.

Did you know that our brains extend to our stomach (gut knowing), the seat of intuition?

Other cultures instruct us about multiple ways of knowing.

The third eye, intuition, messages from ancestors, synchronicity, dreams, visions, and mysticism teach us that there are ways to access important information beyond logical analysis.

Without an appreciation for multi-faceted knowing, thought is no longer the king but the drunken fool staggering through life. There is a lot of thrashing around but you are on the road to nowhere.

When you experience something and can’t explain it,

Recognize it but don’t overthink the phenomena. Don’t allow your inner skeptic to become your inner cynic

Accept the possibility of its validity. Treat it as a hypothesis to be tested

Feel it deeply and don’t shunt it away. Without over thinking the experience let it wash over you. Notice when the hair stands up on the back of your neck or you start weeping. Those are often signs that something important is trying to get through to you.

Trust that a nugget of truth could be found in that inexplicable event.

Maybe your life will be richer for this effort