Bust Through Confusion and Stay Rooted in Your Truth

What does it mean to stay rooted in your truth? How does it feel to be grounded in the values you hold to be true? How do you stay within that place of your own inner-knowing? It is often difficult to remain planted in our belief systems when they are threatened or poked at by those around us, especially those who are closest to us.

Confusion often comes up in strange ways. I’ve noticed in my own experience that confusion comes when I am feeling my worst. Confusion sets in when I’m feeling overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, guilty about the past or fearful of the future. I notice that I lose my grounding when I enter this state lack, this unsettling feeling that no matter what I do, it isn’t good enough, right enough, or propelling me to where I want to be.

At these confusing times, it is my norm to reach out to those around me for support, to some of my favorite books, to those influences that I listen to daily via podcasts or YouTube videos, or anything else that is drawn into my experience at the time. Even in the midst of the negativity and confusion, I try my best to remain aware of what’s occurring within me and I ease into opening my eyes to the things around me that can help bring me back to my center.

In the process of seeking what appears to be missing during those confusing times, I’ve found that I put a significant amount of weight and importance on the messages I receive. The outside guidance that I’m lead to becomes my truth, it becomes the only thing that I believe that can pull me out of this horrid feeling. During these confusing times, it is difficult to discern what the right path is for me to get back to myself. I end up becoming more frustrated and confused, overloading myself with information, perspectives, insights, and just too much data to organize.

Why Do We Become Confused?

We become confused because we so often look outside of ourselves for guidance. We look to the people we love, the role models and influences in our lives to provide us with that golden nugget of information or perspective that we think we’ve been missing. The reason this is so frustrating for us is that what we seek outside of ourselves is in all actuality WITHIN us. Nowhere we look will ever bring us the same truth and knowing that looking inside will bring.

We look to others for guidance because we believe that we can’t possibly know what is best for us. This is just not true! When we are inspired by others through their words and actions we are finding resonance within ourselves. A mirror is held up to us in each relationship and with each encounter with another person, we are presented with another opportunity to take a look in the mirror. When we hear something that resonates with us we feel it in our body and we know its stability. Goosebumps. Shivers. Tingles. That subtle vibration that we feel in our body is what cues us to say “this feels good, this feels right for me”. It isn’t that others are planting anything in our minds or body to make us think or feel this way, it is that they are watering that which is already within us. The seeds that were planted when we came to be in this world are only watered and nurtured and fed as we grow and move through this life.

I find that I become clear when I remember this truth: I am my own guide. I know who I am and the power that I hold inside. I know what to do. The guidance I seek outside of myself is right here, within me. I only need to remember this and I feel instant relief. I remember that I hold the truth I seek and that anything else that inspires me outside of myself is only invoking within me what I already have.

The Inner Guidance System as a Compass

What is our inner guidance system? I like to think of it as a GPS or a compass. I like the idea of the compass to create an image of this powerful system we hold inside. I attribute the directional points of the compass to be all the different emotions we experience and the needle as our inner guidance system. When the inner guidance system is clear and focused, the needle points to our “true North” or our own truth.

Our compass becomes disoriented when we experience strong negative emotion, like a magnet that confuses a compass, our emotions confuse our inner direction. Strong negative emotions push and pull us in all kinds of direction, but none of which feel good to us. By reducing the strength of the magnet of negative emotion we allow the compass to return to its true North, the truth we hold inside.

This softening of negative emotion, the reducing of the strength of the magnet occurs as we lean away from the negative and shift towards the positive. By taking baby steps in the direction of the positive we slowly, inch by inch, move away from the force of negative emotion. We can’t step out of the pull of the powerful negative magnet in one giant leap, but only in small, incremental steps towards what makes us feel good. These tiny steps are like moving from depression to anger, from anger to guilt, from guilt to acceptance, from acceptance to gratitude, from gratitude to love.

Follow the Feel Good

I love these words.. I use it as a daily mantra for myself. Follow the feel good. This mantra ignites me to scan my awareness across the horizon to find what feels better to me from the current point I’m at in any situation. Following the feel good means that I bring my awareness to the closest better feeling that I can truly hold within my grasp at the time. So, if I am feeling angry I’ll try to find what feels better than anger, for me, that is usually guilt or regret. From there I’ll reach towards forgiveness and acceptance. Then I’ll shift slowly towards gratitude, then love. This slow progression of emotions is how we can navigate our desires and feelings to the place where we most want to be.

This progression of following the feel good makes a lot of sense to me. What really clicked for me most was when I realized that we can’t move from extreme negativity to powerful positivity in one big jump. It just doesn’t work that way! So when others tell us to feel anything other than what is closest to what we are currently feeling, we feel resentful and angrier at where we are! Because that feel good place of HIGH positivity and LOVE and PEACE are too far from where we currently sit. They aren’t far enough that we won’t ever get there, but we must take the necessary steps to get there in our own pace following along our own path of least resistance.

What Exactly Is The Path of Least Resistance?

This idea of the path of least resistance is something that I’ve been pondering as I’ve been diving into my own patterns of habit in emotion. I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase before, but what exactly does the path of least resistance look like? How do we know if we are on the path of least resistance? How does it feel?

For me, the path of least resistance is choosing a better feeling though. When I am triggered to become angry or upset I simply widen my perspective, opening up the different possibilities there are of where I can draw my focus. There are ALWAYS so many directions we can take our focus. We give ourselves back our power when we remember this.

Taking the path of least resistance in any given moment feels really, really good in most cases. If anything, this should feel BETTER than you felt before embarking on this new focus point. By allowing our attention to wander to find the better feeling, the better though, we open ourselves up to the unlimited potential of the universe rather than blocking ourselves off from what’s here for us. When we choose to focus our attention on the negative, on what is going wrong, on what feels wrong or in-just, or on simply what feels BAD we close ourselves to experiencing the opposite… mostly because we don’t think it exists or that we deserve it.