#8 Self Leadership – An inner experience
Self Leadership Series – Part 1 #8
“What if we could put down our iPhones, our gadgets, our laptops and spend a little time just settling in?… Settling in to paying attention to what lies inside us. To see our troubles as a knock on the door to an invitation” – David Whyte The Door Beneath Everything July 2022
This blog series began close in – sharing the personal circumstances that I found myself in my mid-thirties. This was at its core, a deeply internal experience that would fuel my own self-leadership journey. So, for this final post I wanted to touch briefly on how I came to be aware of and begin to cultivate connection with my ‘inner experience’.
First a little bit of background……
When we moved house seven years ago, I stumbled across an assignment from my teaching degree back in the early nineties – complete in its original Atari computer format. Looking at the assignment took me by surprise at some level, while at another level I thought ‘of course I was interested in that’. The assignment was about student wellbeing practices, a topic less heard of at that time. It was built around The Inner Game by Timothy Gallwey. I recall it being a lightbulb moment for me at the time – this idea that there was an inner experience open to all of us that, if we were open to it, could greatly improve the way we showed up in our lives and help us achieve higher levels of performance.
I didn’t understand ‘inner experience’ beyond this conceptual notion at the time but looking back, I could see that a seed had been planted (as knowledge often does). It would take me another decade or more for this enquiry into the ‘inner game’ to come back onto my radar.
Roll forward …
So, until my mid-late thirties, beyond this idea of an ‘inner experience’ that had been planted years before, I had no way of understanding or accessing this ‘inner experience’. Sounds bizarre now but that was my reality. I was disconnected from myself – from who I was, from what mattered to me, from the life and love that was all around me. All my time and energy was spent reacting to the outside world and simply trying to keep afloat in day to day.
The invitation into my inner experience presented as a little voice inside of myself that was telling me that ‘something needs to change’. I decided to listen to this little voice. Through guidance and direction from trusted others and commitment to a daily reflective journaling practice, I slowly learned how to observe my thoughts and feelings and how to connect with my body to notice sensations.
Over time, and with the discipline (on and off as is most often the case) to keep practising the skill of self-observation, I learned a lot about myself and my reactions and responses in life; I learned how to rebalance my previously very stressed nervous system with obvious flow-on benefits to my wellbeing; I became better equipped to make decisions and choices in life from this place of a clear head; I cultivated clearer access to the wisdom of my heart and my internal knowing; I learned how to acknowledge and make space for all feelings so that they can move through me rather than to ‘fuse’ with them which allows both of us ( the feelings and I) to more far more freely. Most importantly, I have been able to come into a more conscious relationship with myself. This is continuous – changing and evolving as my relationship to self continues to unfold.
Cultivating a conscious connection with our internal experience is a pathway through which we can begin to peel away the layers of conditioning of our socialised selves and rediscover our true nature. Over time it can become the source from which we show up and operate in our lives, from the inside -out. Some of what I now understand about cultivating this relationship with self (our internal experience) is that:
- Discovering and nurturing this connection to self is a lifelong process.
- There is no ‘end point’ as the more you learn about yourself, the more you realise there is to learn.
- It takes practice and discipline (choosing to focus Key # 1 – Attention on this)
- If we choose to attend to it many benefits can follow. The greatest of these is that this is a pathway to re-discovering our true nature.
So, if this notion of’ inner experience’ is new to you, as it was for me, I just wanted to let you know that that is a perfect place to begin. Set yourself with a clear intention to nurture this beautiful opportunity to develop a more conscious relationship with yourself; and open your journal and leverage the discovery questions in the Three Keys to Practising Self Leadership to get started:
- What’s alive in me now?
- Body Sensations
- Thoughts
- Feelings
Enjoy the process of nourishing and cultivating this connection with yourself.
This is the final post in this Self Leadership Series. Thanks for your company.
This post is an excerpt from my draft book Activating Self Leadership.
