What if you could trust yourself in every way and every situation? What if you allowed yourself to know what you know and never doubted that knowing? How much more ease and peace would this add to your life? Does that seem like a far off ideal? Something that would be almost impossible to achieve? Although it may take some practice, it’s actually easier than you might think!

Many of us believe that we are fundamentally flawed and were born without the capacity to trust ourselves, but consider an infant. If you’ve ever been around a newborn baby, they trust themselves completely to know what they need and to ask for it. They would never consider, until they were older, that someone’s judgment of “Oh you don’t really need to eat/move/be comforted now, would be anything but insanity! Infants can also pick up the energy of other people. Have you ever seen an infant with someone who appears to be nice but is actually mean or just sleazy? They will often arch their back or make it very clear that they don’t want that person to hold them or come near them! So what happens?

How do we go from knowing what’s true for us to doubting ourselves and shutting down our awareness in favor of other people’s points of view? Whether through a misguided sense of being a good parent, or meanness or simply not being willing to be aware of their children, most parents begin denying their child’s knowing at an early age, because it doesn’t fit into the parent’s conclusions and decisions about what’s true, possible or appropriate. Being aware and speaking what you know to be true, is often considered rude. For example, most parents will scold a child who says things like: “That lady is fat”, or “Uncle John is mean”. Not only are children told that their behavior is rude, but many people tell children that they are wrong. “Uncle John is not mean, you must have been doing something wrong”, or “Aunt Sally is not drunk, You must never tell lies like that. She’s just sick today.”

Another reason that most kids are taught that they can’t know that they know, is based on the idea that only adults and teachers and experts can know the “truth”. Did you ever have the experience of knowing more than your teacher and speaking up to correct him or her? How well did that go? Perhaps as well as it went to question a person in a position of authority? There’s a lie that perpetrated in most cultures that anyone who is young can’t know anything of value. This is simply not true. Many people think that the only valuable “knowing” comes from having studied a topic. In other words, it’s linear. Real knowing is an innate capacity that has nothing to do with studying something external to yourself. It’s a knowing that goes beyond logic and what’s apparent to simply being aware of what is. Knowing has nothing to do with age or gender or any other physical markers. A young child who has not been made wrong for their knowing can be more aware than an adult who long ago decided that their knowing was flawed. By “educating” children that they can’t know what they know, society is better able to control children, and in turn the adults they grow up to be. By being willing to access your knowing, you can have back all of the genius and brilliance that allow you to be uncontrollable by others!

You may be asking: “Just how do I do this?” “What will it take for me access my knowing?” Great questions! One of the first things to do is to acknowledge that you DO have the capacity to know, even if it has been denied by others. Think back to a time when your knowing was activated. Maybe it was knowing not to walk down a particular street, or to exit a highway for no particular reason, only to find out later that there was a wreck there. Our knowing often seems irrational. It’s not so much that it’s irrational as that it functions way beyond rationality. Have you ever known that someone was not who they appeared to be? Or that there was something “not right” about a job offer that seemed to be everything that you desired? Once you begin to acknowledge that you CAN know, you are on the road to allowing yourself to be more and more aware. It can be helpful to practice. You can go through your day being aware of what you do know, and/or asking yourself questions like: What am I aware of in this situation? What do I know about this person?

If you can practice without judging yourself, you are on the road to becoming more and more aware.

As you engage in this process, you may find yourself at odds with what other are saying about a particular person or situation. This can be a challenge, but the rewards of staying true to what you know to be true are great! What if you never had to doubt yourself again? How much more ease and freedom would that create for you and your life?