Self-Care Sunday: Check With Your Gut

Resilient people know that their minds can get cluttered with negative thoughts and limiting beliefs, so in this week’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we encourage you to check in with your gut feelings when making decisions.

If no one tells you how important your gut feelings are, you might forget to listen to them. In fact, when we are kids, we are taught to abdicate our own feelings and instead listen to our teachers, our parents, our babysitters, and our coaches. And while sometimes this is appropriate, the danger is that we lose touch with this powerful tool.

We can feel in our bodies when something is the right decision for us, and we can feel in our bodies when it is not. We learn to think our way through decisions instead of feeling our way through decisions, which means we can overlook or intentionally ignore the welcoming and warning signs our gut feelings are trying to give us about the choices and decisions we need to make in life.

But whether we listen to them or not, our gut feelings are there.

Think about it … have you ever made a decision that felt wrong, but you made it anyway, and you later regretted making that decision?

That’s your intuition, your gut, your instinct, your “Inner Wisdom.”

The next time you have a decision to make, take a moment to check in with your gut feelings.

Close your eyes, take a deep, relaxing breath, and ask yourself, “What does my Inner Wisdom have to say about this? Which is the best decision for me?”

If it still isn’t clear, imagine making one decision and notice how that feels. Then imagine making the other decision, and notice how that feels.

There is a part of us that knows what we truly desire and believes we deserve it. If we try to listen to it, we can feel it in our bodies.

Questions to consider:

• Some people call it a gut feeling. Others call it instinct, intuition, Inner Wisdom or their higher self. What words do you use to describe the way you can feel in your body whether something is good or bad for you? Give it a name so that you can talk about it and honor it.
• Can you describe a time that you listened to your gut feelings when making a decision?
• Can you describe a time when you didn’t listen to your gut feelings—you knew they were there, but you chose to ignore them?
• How can you tell the difference between something you are thinking and something your Inner Wisdom is trying to tell you?
• Can you describe a time when your gut feelings protected you from danger?