Listening to your gut or heart, is by far the best guide you could ever have
When was the last time you read or heard “listen to you heart”? Probably not too long ago. It seems like everyone is talking about that. Whether it is people who are deeply convinced by that or people who argue that it is unrealistic. However, people keep talking about listening or not listening to that inner voice.
Personally, I am a big advocate of listening to one’s inner voice, one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s higher self, one’s guides, one’s gut – whatever label we want to give it. I am saying that as a person who was deeply convinced of the opposite.
Melissa Kiss
I needed to see things black on white or touch them in order to believe them. I didn’t trust any “feelings”, people were talking about. If you are like that, I get it. I don’t judge it. I know how it feels and it took me quite some time to become deeply convinced that this inner voice, these feelings are truly a reliable guide through life.
Have you ever met someone, and they were the sweetest person, kind, smiling, smart, entertaining, polite – let’s say there was nothing negative to say about them, as far as you can tell. And yet, you felt like they couldn’t be trusted? You just had a bad feeling and you decided not to do business with them or to engage in a further friendship or whatever the case was? I never met anyone who said no, to this. We all had this kind of experience. And many of us did business with this person or became friends with this person despite the bad feeling we had. Eventually, we wished we had listened to our gut in the first place. Does this sound familiar? I experienced that not just once.
A friend of mine was traveling. A few weeks in, he was in a beautiful town in Italy and just about to enter a bus to drive to his next destination. As he was waiting in line to enter the bus, a woman approached him, grabbed his arm gently and asked him if he could come with her for a second and help her with her luggage. He was a little irritated, because the lady could have asked one of the many people around, who were not just about to enter the bus. But out of kindness, he grabbed his bag and followed her to her bags. He asked her how he could help her with the bags and if she was also entering the bus. The lady looked into his eyes and told him that what she was about to say might sound silly or even insane to him, but she begged him to hear her out. He was a little irritated but nodded his head and gave her a sign to keep talking. She told him that she pulled him aside, to ask him not to go on this bus. It was not his time yet and he should stay one more night and take the bus tomorrow. Her voice was very serious, she spoke clearly, and he told me as crazy as it sounds, she didn’t seem crazy to him at all. He asked her why he should do that. He already paid for the ticket and there was no reason to stay another night. She again said, that it was not his time yet and that if he would go on this bus, he would be in great danger. I looked quite irritated when he told me that and I tried to imagine how I would have reacted and what I had told the lady. Then, I asked him what he had told the lady. He said, that he was confused and at first, he wanted to simply turn back around and enter the bus. He couldn’t stop looking at her and when he finally turned around to get back in line, he had a very weird feeling, his chest felt tight and he was nervous. He wanted to go back to the lady and ask her again why she was so convinced that he shouldn’t go on this bus but as he turned around, she was gone. My friend still had this pressure on his chest and was unsure what to do. Contrary to his first impulse to just get on the bus, he decided to stay one more night. It was a beautiful little town and he said, it just didn’t feel right to go on that bus anymore. The next morning when he was in the cab to the bus station, the cab driver asked him where he was off to. As my friend mentioned his destination and what came next, came really unexpectedly. The driver told him that the bus which only drives once a day and in which my friend was supposed to sit in, crashed the day before. The bus driver fell asleep and they came off track, down a hill. All passengers died.
I know, this sounds like one of those stories who people just tell each other. More a fairy tale, than a real story. But this is true. The whole story is weird. I don’t know if I had trusted that lady without further explanation, honestly, I don’t think so. My friend told me that he wasn’t trusting the lady, as much as he was trusting his gut in this moment. He wanted to go back on the bus, to get away from the lady. But as he approached the bus, his gut told him not to. He never saw the lady again, but he is deeply grateful for her intervention and that he listened to this “weird” feeling of his’, which before he so often ignored.
Listening to your gut feeling, can literally safe your life.
It doesn’t always have to be that dramatic, but it can. Listening to your heart, your gut, your instinct – is what all beings, including humans, have done since the beginning of time. And we came pretty far I’d say. It is great that we have science and can measure certain things and evaluate and calculate things. But I learned, from my own experience and the many people I met, that when you don’t feel it, don’t do it.
When all the studies, all the numbers, all the experts, all the people around you tell you something and you don’t feel it, you got your answer. YOU, got the answer.
Melissa Kiss
Of course, sometimes we are at risk to mistake our fears and insecurities and ego for that inner voice. This might happen, and it might mislead us sometimes. But the more we train ourselves to distinguish between those different internal voices, the easier it gets. We all have this inner guide, that warns us from great danger or just small mistakes. We need to experience what happens when we don’t listen to it, in order to value the power of this voice.
But don’t wait too long to trust yourself. You are more powerful than you know. Allow yourself to trust yourself, your judgment of situations, no matter what the voices around you say. You know what’s best for yourself, better than anyone else.