Trusting the Inner Compass
Without an inner compass — cultivated through practices of stillness and inner listening — the landscape of healing available to us now can be staggering. There are many exceptionally good modalities in our collective field. Gifted practitioners, powerful methodologies, genuine pathways to wholeness.
And yet healing has its own rhythm and its own timing. The right medicine at the wrong time will not have effect — and can actually deepen our spiritual shame and disorientation rather than decrease it. We lose trust in life. Thoughts arise like nothing will ever heal me or I am a failure — and we respond by putting more effort into our healing, not realizing that effort itself can become the barrier. The harder we try, the more defended we become. Because fear is at the root of it. And fear does not yield to force.
The path forward is staying with the fear. Understanding it at deeper levels. Meeting it, as we explored in recent weeks, with curiosity rather than flight.
The Right Medicine at the Right Time
My own fear is often ancestral — and I have many examples of this in my own life.
At one point there was a great deal of work around walking with the ancestors. As much as I could understand the nervous system connections and the epigenetics involved, the effect was minimal. I could see it intellectually. I could not yet receive it.
Moving forward four years — the ancestors I feel now walking with me.
The right medicine at the right time is profound. It is worth waiting for. And the waiting itself, when met with trust rather than anxiety, is not empty — it is part of the medicine.
Without this understanding, we can fall into what Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche called spiritual materialism — running from modality to modality like a chicken with its head cut off, because there is no centre within us to receive the healing. The abundance becomes noise. The seeking becomes its own form of avoidance.
The Caboose and the Engine
Spiritual maturity and healing from spiritual shame are both the same thing. When shame is running the show, we have no confidence in our own blessing force — no confidence in the higher dimension of who we are. We are kept small. And our search outside ourselves for what can only be found within becomes an epidemic.
It is like many cabooses with no contact with the main engine. When we cannot reach the engine, we cannot go deep. And deep is where the soul lives.
The mystery of life is held in unfathomable depth. Once we have even one small taste of this reality — even a single moment of genuine contact with the engine — we feel held in a divine force that is both exceptionally personal and transpersonal. Nothing is quite the same after that. We know there is something real to return to. And we know that no technique or formula will take us there. Only the courageous willingness to drop in and discover.
The Wound and the Longing
As John O’Donohue pointed out, our wounds heal from the outside in — just as a physical wound does. We draw toward us, from what seems initially like the outside of ourselves, the right medicine at the right time.
This is why our healing cannot be rushed or engineered — because our timing is uniquely ours. There is a divine order to healing utterly unique to each one of us. And eventually, gently, we learn to trust what we hear.
This is why it is so important to be with our wounding rather than bypass it. The wound initiates a longing to come home — a longing to be at peace with ourselves and with life. And that deep yearning is what pulls the healing medicine toward us.
Follow Your Inner Compass
An inner call put out into the world will be answered in ways that will surprise you. Guaranteed. What is not guaranteed is when and how. Letting go of control is difficult for any of us — but much joy comes in when we do.
We learn that we cannot lead with the thinking mind. But when we are following our inner compass — when we have slowed down enough, dropped in enough, become still enough — we will know where to go. We will know when to go. And we will know how.
Slowing down. Being with ourselves. Dropping in. This is not a formula — but it is a direct and simple recipe for being present with the sacred and deep paradox of life on this beautiful planet. And listening from there.
The compass is within you. It has always been within you. Trust it.
With gratitude for your presence — and for the trust you are learning to place in your own deep knowing.