Are you someone who struggles to make decisions? Or what to do with your life? Or even to know what to do next? Indecisiveness and aimlessness is a problem I’ve faced for much of my life. Fortunately, there’s a technique for learning to listen to your inner guidance. Here’s how I’ve learned to make decisions – a guide for women.
The Problem
As women living in a culture that highly values masculine energy, we’ve been trained to use our minds for everything. Especially decision making. And logic is an essential part of life on the earthly plane. You won’t survive without it.
However, as women, we are built to operate to operate more from a heart-centered, and intuitive space of feeling. We’ve been gifted with a stronger ability to connect to the spiritual world, if we so choose. The higher, spiritual self speaks to us through our heart, not our mind.
The fact is that women’s bodies and minds tend to operate slightly differently from men’s. When we don’t honor these differences, we risk burning ourselves out, and becoming highly disconnected from our authentic joy.
When women tune into their heart, they are able to receive the intuitive guidance they need from their spiritual, higher self. It also puts them in more touch with their feminine energy, which is a rejuvenating force.
An Epidemic of Women Disconnected from their Heart
I believe this is happening on an epidemic scale in this country, and we see evidence of this with women disproportionately suffering from autoimmune issues (up to 4x more likely), adrenal fatigue, and depression.
One quarter of American women are taking psychiatric medications, and 1 in 5 middle-aged women are on antidepressants specifically. This is far higher than rates for men. I don’t believe it’s simply due to higher diagnosis rates in women. It’s our collective lifestyle and mindset that doesn’t honor our biology.
Women have learned the masculine way of being – far too well. We now live in our heads, ignore our bodies, and discount our emotions. The chatter of the mind drowns out the whispers of the heart. Many of us are completely disconnected from our intuition. But we need to reverse this a little. We need to live in our hearts more.
Our hearts are always speaking to us, telling us what to do, and we can always rely on it to make the right decision and give us guidance, but we need to learn to listen.
Listening to Your Heart
As a woman, it’s in your best interest to (re)learn the skill of listening to your heart. When we start making decisions according to what our hearts want, we can start to find our authentic joy, our feminine magnetism recharges, and life becomes fun again.
HeartMath Data Supports a Heart Connection
The HeartMath Institute is a non-profit dedicated to conducting research studies on the connection between the heart and mind. Their studies show that increased attention on the heart improves “heart-mind coherence”, which is essentially harmony of the cognitive and emotional centers.
Heart-mind coherence is associated with a decrease in stress, increased resilience, better decision making, and increased wellbeing. I believe this is just the beginning of the research demonstrating the benefit of what I describe as: pulling the energy out of the mind and more into the body (or heart in this case).
Healing Trauma
To learn to make decisions in accordance with our hearts and higher self, we need to get in touch with our heart space again. Some people have a lot of trauma that gets lodged in their hearts.
When I first started this work 10 years ago, I didn’t understand the concept of intuition. I took a class called “Intuition 101”, felt totally lost, and was instructed to color in shapes for my chakras. Not even understanding what chakras were, I felt frustrated, but tried to just go with it, and colored my heart chakra in black without knowing why.
Now, with knowledge and perspective I understand what was going on back then. I was totally disconnected from my intuition, and my heart was closed and suffering.
How to Reconnect
The simplest way of healing your heart is to breathe into it and feel. Place your awareness on your heart and when your mind distracts you with a thought, just redirect back to your heart. Doing this kind of meditation on a regular basis brings healing energy in, to clear out old stuck energy.
This might sound abstract, and it is. But it works.
Tuning into the Whispers
We get so trained to listen to our minds that we don’t even recognize when our hearts are speaking to us. But the heart doesn’t attempt to shout over the noisy mind – it’s more of a whisper. It doesn’t use words, but speaks to us in terms of feeling. It can be a nudge or a pull in a certain direction. This is intuition.
Learning to hear the whispers of the heart over the loud chatter of the mind requires some training. We first reverse the tendency of mental preoccupation by building the muscle of placing our attention in our hearts, and growing awareness of what we’re feeling. It’s a practice. It takes some time.
How to Make Decisions Using your Heart’s Guidance
Let’s say you have 2 choices – A or B. To make a decision as to which is best, it’s always good to take some time to do a quick meditation to get centered in the heart. This can be as quick as 4-5 breaths if you’re good at it.
Next, as you tune into your heart space, imagine making the choice of A. What does it feel in your heart as you play our this scenario? Does it feel more expansive, or do you feel a sense of contraction?
Then, explore choice B. Play out the scenario quickly in your mind. Does choice B leave you feel expansive or contracted?
Which choice makes you feel more expansive? This is the choice your heart wants.
Knowing What to Do when you have No Idea
When we’ve been disconnected from our heart for some time, we may have no clue even what our choices might be to choose from. For this dilemma, there are two ways to get clarity.
Your Desires are Messages
The heart speaks to us not only in terms of expansion and contraction, but our desires. Yes, desires are our North Star! Our desires point the way, like a spiritual GPS system that’s aware of any traffic jams or closed roads ahead. When we follow our desire, without attachment to the outcome, we actually get to our destination of authentic joy faster.
The key is not being attached to the outcome. If our desire is telling us to learn to paint watercolor, we can’t be attached to the outcome of becoming a professional, selling masterpieces. Sometimes our spiritual GPS is telling us to do the thing because it’s just a necessary stepping stone to something even better that we hadn’t even thought of.
Journaling Exercise
If you’re really stumped what you want to do, start writing for 15 minutes. Don’t lift your pen the entire time – you want this to be really stream-of-consciousness work. Ask yourself, “If I DID know what I wanted to do, what would it be? What might I say?” Sometimes the clarity comes in the last minute or two.
Remember, there’s a part of you that knows what to do, but it’s another part that’s blocking your awareness – your mind. This stream-of-consciousness exercise can help get out of your mind and into your heart.
Using the Heart’s Guidance to Improve Limiting Beliefs
When it comes to personal transformation, doing work with limiting beliefs is one of the most powerful practices. We choose the beliefs that are empowering and beneficial for ourselves and the good of all.
Often we’re taught to use the mind to invent better beliefs. But consulting the heart is much more powerful. If you have a choice of beliefs – which belief feels more expansive? Explore different new beliefs until you hit one that feels really good and expansive.
Then decide to choose that belief. Actively choose it, and follow it, align with it. This is a powerful practice to transform your life guided by the wisdom of your higher self.
Tuning into the Heart for Guidance and Making Decisions Makes Life Juicy
In summary, our higher, spiritual self speaks to us in a whisper, which we can hear only if we learn to tune into the heart. When we distinguish between the loud chatter of the mind and spirit’s messages encoded in what we’re feeling through the heart, we are more in touch with our intuition and feminine energy.
Regaining connection to your feminine energy is essential for feeling your best, achieving authentic joy, feeling whole, and realizing your true purpose on earth. It recharges your magnetic feminine energy, which attracts the right circumstances for you to live your best life.
Living life according to the heart’s roadmap also creates a more magical experience full of synchronicity. A daily practice that includes thoughts like, “I don’t know why, but my heart’s telling me to go here…” can lead to some of the most synchronistic and lucky encounters. It makes life fun, and more of an adventure.
Learning to listen to your heart instead of your mind can also be a tremendous pattern interrupt that drastically changes the course of your life for the better. Because as they say: When you think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, do the same actions every day — you’ll get the same results in your life every day. Make a shift here – get a different life.
Like any new habit, listening to your heart instead of your mind to make decisions and guide the course of your life can feel uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. But when you understand and respect the healing power of embracing your feminine energy, it can be one of the best practices you ever embraced.
