We live in a chaotic time. Even more so, what this year has taught us is just how crazy the world can be. Everyday, it has been getting harder and harder to find what to trust, what to believe in, and what to do. Yet, even against the uncertainties this world has, there will always be a place where we can always trust to help guide us. That is ourselves. Welcome to the Living From the Inside Out podcast, a show dedicated to helping you turn within and trust our internal guidance. Join host Rebecca Victor in this inaugural podcast as she takes you into the bountiful wisdom you can expect from the series, most especially on what it means to turn inward. Many of us try to look for answers outside, failing to recognize that the keys to what we are searching for are so much closer than we think. 

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Listen to the podcast here:

Begin The Journey Towards Turning Within And Trusting Your Internal Guidance

I’d like to welcome you to my inaugural show. As I do, I’d like to say how excited I am that I am able to be doing this. I want to compliment the Podetize team who is taking care of doing all the background work for me to help make sure that the show turns out great. My hat is off to all of those who have been involved in helping me to achieve a dream that I’ve had for about five years. It’s fun to be talking with you. I chose to develop and start a show because it was a way that I could share some ideas and thoughts that come up for me when I spent time with individuals who are like me, seeking. They are finding themselves feeling confused and uncertain or trying to figure out a better way to engage in the world than the way they are doing it. 

This show is a way of learning how to turn within and to trust our internal guidance. With the world now being in a chaotic time, there’s a lot of change going on. It is hard at times to know what to trust, what to believe, and what to do. What’s going to be the best action or the best step that you can take to help move you or direct you in a way that you’re going to be where you want to be, to provide for you the best way that you want to have provided for you? That sounded good, didn’t it? 

Often, by continuing to look outside at the world around us, we see all the changes going on, and we are not sure. We used to be able to watch things happen and we could rely on them, and we knew what to expect. It was almost like you could set your watch to whatever and it was reliable. But with  things changing, there’s no clock there anymore and it’s like, “How do we know the best step for ourselves?” It reminds me of when I was a child and I would play in the ocean on the Atlantic Coast. 

The nice thing about the Atlantic Coast of the United States is that the water would go in and out and you had a smooth transition into deeper waters. We would play. Not only did the water come in and out, but it would move you down farther south along the coastline. As a child, I didn’t know that. I would leave, knowing my family was sitting on the beach. I would play and have a good time only to look up when I was ready to leave and get out of the water. I’d walk out to go back to the beach and my family wasn’t there. 

I couldn’t figure out what happened to them. I was like, “Where were they? I left them here.” As I started to look up and down the beach, I noticed that they were farther up the beach and that somehow by playing in the water, I ended up in a different place. It’s like that feeling again. All of a sudden, it’s like, “How did I find my parents? How do I find my footing at a time when things are shifting and I’m ending up in different places where I’m not quite sure how to look at something and to understand it?” 

The vehicle of turning within is a practice that I’ve been engaging in for well over 25 years. It has been a gradual practice for me. It’s one that I’m grateful for because it has helped me during this time of transition to know what I can rely on by simply going in with that, and then learning to trust the information that I’m receiving. When we look at this concept of turning within, in order to have an outward life, it’s not that we’re turning within and leaving things behind or taking this inward view and it’s got no practical application. 

It has a vast practical application when we turn within because it introduces us to the knowledge that we have that isn’t necessarily knowledge we’re going to find out in the conditions that we’re experiencing. When we turn within, we not only have access often to the logic that’s there, but we also have access to the emotional component of ourselves, as well as our intuitive nature. As we begin to play in the realm of going inward, we begin to understand that there is so much more to who we are that is there to support us as we make the decisions that feel the best for us to make. 

This journey and why I’m talking about it now is that it’s my hope that if you’re in a space where you’re questioning what to do, and you don’t know what to believe and it feels frightening – go ahead and take a look and see what it is to turn inward to gain a greater perspective. If you’ve never done it before, then you get to play with this, you get to learn, “What is this?” That’s what we hope to talk about in the upcoming episodes. What I mean by hope is that it is my desire that as I present ideas, thoughts and concepts, I’m not presenting them with this idea that I have all the information because there’s a lot of information out there. 

Internal Guidance: When we turn within, we not only have access often to the logic that’s there, but we also have access to the emotional component of ourselves and our intuitive nature.

All I can tell you is how I have perceived some of that information that I’ve had privy to and how I’ve worked with it. I introduce that to you to see how it fits. Is this information that you’d like to work with, or is it not? Either way, it’s going to serve you because you are getting closer and aware of what’s important to you and your life. That’s what this journey is about. It’s not about following someone else’s path, as much as learning from what you’re reading to things that people are sharing. What feels the most comfortable for you? I want to say comfortable because it’s it’s what you pay attention to. Can you work with this information? Is this practice something you’d like to try out or is there another one that you learned? 

When we’re working together, it means I share information. What I hope is that if you’ve got ideas around that information, that you’ll go ahead and send it back, that you’ll type in, respond and say, “This is what worked for me. This is what I found and I’d like to share it.” It gives us all a greater perspective of the simple magnitude of life that it is ginormous. It is vast. Yet, when we each share our piece, we get to have a greater perspective, a more well-rounded perspective of what it is and that there’s more. That’s what happens when we turn within. We get introduced to something grander about who we are and about the life we’re living and what we’re part of. It reminds me of a friend of mine who had sent me a picture that was taken by a photographer of an oak tree. 

It was specifically with an oak leaf. The photographer started with a camera view of way out in outer space. You saw the multitude of stars in a vast space. As the resolution or the distance began to become closer to the Earth, you began to see more detail or more elements within it. It got to the point where the photographer turned around and looked at the leaf and you saw the leaf as a whole. The deeper they penetrated into the leaf with their photography, they began to go into the cell of the leaf and it was an oak leaf. 

As they took photography a little farther into that leaf, it began to show up almost as a replica of what had been seen in outer space. They took their photography from a farther distance, focused it into a closer distance until they finally got to the leaf itself and then into the cell. I think it’s like nano photography. It was fascinating to me to realize that within the context of this cell was this immenseness that was there for us to see with the right equipment. If it makes no sense to us now, that’s okay, but at some point, it may open up to us a new way of seeing, experiencing and understanding who we are. That’s a new way of living and engaging in the world. 

That’s what this program is about. It is what I’m hoping that we’re all, at some point, in whatever way is meaningful to us are going to be able to do. As I said, this is not about sharing my thoughts and having people think, “Let’s follow and say that.” No, it’s not like that. Instead, pull the information into yourself. Play with it.” In other words, pay attention to it. How does it feel? If it feels like you’d like to explore it, great. If it resonates with you, great. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. That’s great too because all along the way, what’s happening is that you are learning to tap in and trust what it is that’s working for you in that given moment. 

You may find, like me, when you’ve learned things that might have been uncomfortable for you at earlier times in your life, when you revisit them a couple of years down the road, what was uncomfortable or what didn’t make any sense five years earlier all of a sudden is making a lot of sense now. You get to experience it from a different perspective. My hope is that in this journey, you will experience a level of stability from within. In that level of stability, you gain a greater awareness of you, of what makes you tick. What’s important to you so that you can live in the world in a way that is genuine for you. 

There’s a quote that I love by Howard Thurman. He says, “There’s something in every one of you that awaits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide that you will ever have. If you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend days on the ends of strings that someone else pulls.” I thought, “How true is that – finding yourself at the ends of strings that someone else is pulling. ”I think that’s what happens here. We get information inundating us and we question it. We’re not sure which way to go or what to do. We start to practice the art of turning inward so that we can work with our logical minds. We can work with our emotional aspect, the heart aspect of our being, and we can work with our intuition. The more we can access all three, the richer the experience that we receive will be. 

When we do that, we can have an experience much like Pifa Shashidhar that said of her inward journey, “Every time I learned something unique about myself, I fall in love with me. It empowers me to rise and learn more.” Regardless of what everyone is sharing, it’s not about trying to find out if there’s somebody trying to do something that’s dishonest, or not in your best interest. Instead, it’s realizing everybody is walking their own journey and people are seeing things genuinely the way they see them while they are trying to make heads or tails out of it all. It’s not about trying to make somebody wrong as much as it is to respect that their are different perspectives and you can choose to agree or not with that perspective. 

Internal Guidance: When we turn within, we get introduced to something grander about who we are, the life we’re living, and what we’re part of.

When I take the time to turn within, then I can gain a greater awareness and understanding of what is my perspective and how it is that I want to engage so that I am not at the mercy of the conditions outside of me. That’s another advantage point for when we turn within. If we’re feeling victimized, if you’re feeling like you have no control, that everything outside of you is determining your life, then this journey, if you’re interested in walking it for yourself, can help you shift your understanding because you are to the degree that you believe, a victim, or you are to the degree that you believe, free. 

The key is that when we turn and we look at outside circumstances that exist that we are focusing on, and we align ourselves with those circumstances letting them be the indicator of who we think we are and what’s possible, then they’ll continue to do that for us. If we pause and we say, “These conditions may be what they are. I’m going to pause and explore the idea that there’s another way for me to see. There’s another way for me to understand and learn how to assume authority for my own life.” It reminds me, especially if you’re someone who’s experienced feeling oppressed, how easy it is to feel like you don’t have control.  

There was a gentleman, Viktor Frankl who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. He had been in a concentration camp during the rise of the Nazis. They had stripped him completely of everything that he owned. They brought him in because they found that he had been writing a book on toilet paper. They found it, brought him in and mocked him. At one point, he became aware as this was all occurring that no matter what they did to him physically, they could never make him shift his mind to hate them. 

He had full authority there and I thought, “What a revelation.” Part of that comes from the inward journey. I hope that this process has given you some ideas of what this program can be about. We’re going to be looking at principles and ideas, the power of our thoughts, the concept of things being energy and how vibration is a precursor to creating. We’re going to look at how to work with things called willingness and openness. We’re going to talk to different people sharing their different experiences because what I want you to get from this is the idea that there’s not one way. 

There are many ways as there are people walking this planet. The idea is how can we create the space for ourselves and allow others to have their own? How do we learn this art of turning within, and the art of understanding how powerful we truly are as the creators of our lives? We can learn different tools. 

I hope that you’ll join me. I hope that you’ll come back again and learn and share so that we can be one another’s teachers. Until we meet again, I want to celebrate you, acknowledge you and your life. Here’s to it. Have a great day. 

Important Links:

• Podetize
• Man’s Search for Meaning