Messages from yourself

As someone who really values research, empirically proven methods, systems, and other people’s informed opinions, one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is how to learn from myself.

And as it turns out, my self has some pretty crucial stuff to say.

Only you and I can know what our own dreams, motivations, and values are.

But if you haven’t been in the habit of accessing your innate knowledge, as I hadn’t been, it can be hard to even know where to look for it.

I have learned to search for clues, and the most helpful of these have been negative emotions. If I haven’t already offered enough benefits to accepting and processing all the way through negative emotions, let hidden messages from your inner wisdom be the thing that motivates you!

Some negative emotions speak more clearly than others. Take envy.  We all encounter people daily who have, do, or are things we have not and are not. But only a relatively small subset of these spark envy in us. When they do, it takes very little digging beneath that emotion to find our dreams of having, doing, or being something similar clearly starting back at us.

But what about a general sense of malaise? Where’s the message in that?

For me at least, it often means I’m not honoring one of my conscious values, the ones that I choose when I’m actually thinking about what it is that I care about rather than letting my default instincts and fears run the show.

I first realized this by accident. For years, I had worked out two hours every weeknight, beginning at 7 pm, which was also my kids’ bedtime. Being an employed mother, I was protective of the time I had with my kids at home, but I saw absolutely no problem in handing over the last few minutes of their bedtime routine to my husband.

Then I started doing some work on body image and moderation and decided to cut the gym back to an hour a day, going at 8 p.m. instead. I put the kids to bed, went to the gym, then woke up the next morning to a whole new reality.

For the first time in years, I didn’t feel upon waking that something was wrong.

The day before I couldn’t have even pointed to the existence of this feeling. It wasn’t until that giant weight was lifted that I recognized its daily presence. I didn’t know waking up could feel so good!

A review of the night before revealed what had made the difference: Sure, I may have been missing only a few minutes of bedtime routine, but those were a crucial few minutes, time spent the night before in cuddles and soft tellings of vulnerable thoughts. And while my husband’s work demands returning to soon after tuck-in, I was able to stay upstairs to patrol the silence that brought sleep at the needed hour to tired tiny bodies.

In the morning, I realized that for years I had wanted to show up the way I did that night at bedtime. I had wanted to let my husband work uninterrupted in the evening, I had wanted to make sure the kids got to sleep on time, I had wanted to give them more of the physical touch they craved, and I had wanted to emotionally connect with them without distraction. I’m not saying that you should put your kids to bed every night. I’m saying that I valued doing so and only wasn’t doing it because I was essentially being governed by fear (in this case, a fear of gaining weight).

When I finally honored that desire, that value, I stopped disappointing myself every morning. In fact, I started waking up feeling like everything that mattered was right.

After this revelation, I started hunting for other times I had a vague notion that something was seriously wrong.

I next found it in the kitchen. Specifically, when I was serving my kids breakfast and hadn’t done the dishes the night before. Nobody likes a messy kitchen (right?) and it didn’t surprise me that I in particular disliked it considering my attachment to order, but there was something else going on there. A more intense feeling that hinted at a more fundamental problem.

I analyzed my current relationship with the dishes. One of my instincts is all or nothing: if perfection isn’t possible, it’s not worth doing at all goes that insidious assumption. Which meant that my kitchen in particular had been either immaculate or, well, the opposite. Basically I used to do the dinner dishes only when I felt up to tidying the entire house before bed. Because getting the whole house neat would give me a rush, a feeling of efficient productivity. And if that wasn’t possible, what was the point?

The point, it turned out, lived in another of my conscious values. When I looked closer, I realized that the kitchen is the launching place for our family for the day. It’s the last room we congregate in before stepping out the door and going our separate ways, and its state helps set the tone for the hours to come. In this light, it made sense why I would immediately feel so grumpy when that room in particular was chaotic. Doing the dishes nightly mattered to me because it related to a larger parenting value. I wanted to send my kids out into jumble of the world from a space of order and peace.

So the next time you feel that something is wrong, listen to the message your self is desperately trying to make you hear. 

You may wake up feeling better than you ever have.