Ian Gawler Blog: How to access your own inner wisdom

What do we call it? Intuition? Instinct? Gut feeling? Insight? Inner wisdom? We all have times where we seem to access some deeper, more profound aspect of our being that speaks to us with wisdom and guides us towards a good decision, a good choice; that leads us through complexity to do the right thing at the right time.

Now imagine being able to connect and communicate with that inner wisdom at will. For this is the domain of Creative Imagery as taught by Dr Nimrod Sheinman, a world authority with this technique. Ruth and I are delighted to be hosting Nimrod back in Australia in October when we will combine to teach these methods in a residential program in the Yarra Valley: Images, Words and Silence.

So this week, lets go Out on a Limb once more and examine the rationale and techniques behind inner wisdom. But first

Thought for the day
The decisive factor is not the problem, 
But the way we think about it. 
Albert Einstein

Modern neuroscience tells us that our mind’s capacity to store information is pretty well fool proof. It seems that everything we ever learnt, everything we ever saw, heard, read or experienced is actually stored in our memory banks. Storeage is not the problem; remembering it – now there is an issue!

Some people it seems do have almost perfect memories. But for most it is partial recall. We probably all have the experience of knowing we know something, having it “on the tip of our tongue”, but struggling to actually remember it.

Then again, we can all probably observe in ourselves how sometimes we seem to act with real insight, with an inner wisdom that leads us to do just the right thing in a situation where a poor choice could have led to a real mess. Then other times we may have been baffled by the poor choices we did make and the chaos that followed. Ah, the benefit of wisdom in hindsight!

So imagine being able to learn, or even teach others a technique that reliably accessed this bank of stored memory and inner wisdom. Actually, it is not so hard when you understand how the mind works and take the time to develop a simple but profound technique.

Quite simply, wisdom does not exist in the rational, thinking mind. That analytical, deductive, calculating aspect of our mind is useful for many things, but of itself, it contains no wisdom; just thoughts and thinking. No, wisdom dwells in the deeper recesses of the unconscious mind. It is in the unconscious where instinct, intuition and insights are to be found.

So if we are to access our inner wisdom, we need to access our unconscious. It is like we need to communicate between two different systems, the conscious, thinking mind, and the unconscious wisdom mind. This is where it gets easy. For what we need is an interface, a common language that both the conscious and unconscious minds can speak.

Welcome to the world of Creative Imagery. For images are something that the conscious mind can create, understand and communicate with; while images are the natural language of the unconscious.

So we can learn to create an image for our inner wisdom in a form with which we can communicate. The image becomes the bridge between these two aspects of our mind. Then we can enter into a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious. We can pose questions, put problems to that deeper inner wisdom and have it speak to us in simple and clear language; a language we can understand, the language of symbols.

I have to say that having first learnt this technique from Nimrod many years ago, I have taught it to many people over the years and seen them gain major insights that made sense of symptoms of physical illness, that gave direction in life, that did solve burning questions and provided major life lessons and insights.

But given this process could work, how would you know the response you received from this inner wisdom, this inner guidance was real and could be taken seriously? Well happily that too is easy. Sometimes when we sit to contemplate and think something through, we know we are having an inner debate and the conclusions are inconclusive. Sometimes we reach a point of inner certainty.

Where Creative Imagery is so powerful, is that it commonly leads to this inner certainty. Put simply again, if one does an exercise like this and doubt remains, then doubt remains. But if as often occurs, there comes an inner knowing, a conviction; then that leads to the confidence to take the guidance received seriously.

So from October 28th, Ruth Nimrod and myself will lead a 5 day residential retreat at the Foundation’s beautiful Yarra Valley centre and teach this technique. The training is designed for those who seek to use these methods personally, as well as for health practitioners who may like to teach them. We will combine this with an overview of how to learn, teach and deepen the experience of stillness meditation, as the meditation supports accessing inner wisdom and has so many benefits in its own right.

This will be a fabulous program and Ruth and I are very pleased to be able to welcome Nimrod back to Australia and work with him again.

For full details, CLICK HERE, while to book, call the Gawler Foundation on 03 59671730.

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RESOURCES

BOOKS The Mind that Changes Everything – details on how to use Creative Imagery and many other mind techniques

CD: Mind Training – the double CD that details how the mind works and how we can use it to greater effect.