Listening to my inner voice is a sweet challenge

“When you don't know what to do, get still. Get very still until you do know what to do.” 

Oprah Winfrey offered this advice to graduates at Stanford University in California during her commencement address there in 2008.

And she was right. If you are quiet long enough to listen, this advice works.

I know it works because before I got still, I had been pulling out my hair for two hours writing and erasing what I’d written while growing increasingly frustrated by my lack of creative integrity for this column space. I’d about given up for a second straight week on my submission.

What I know for sure is that anyone who know me well, also knows I don’t mince words about what I believe in and what I don’t.

I believe in a magic of sorts; a realm of otherworldly wonders labeled as gut feelings, conscience, and intuition.

I believe these three musketeers don’t lie. Trust your instincts. I believe some things are true whether you believe them or not.

I think these soul bodyguards are everywhere and at work in all our lives in magical countless ways even if we don’t believe in fairy dust and the man in the cape who pulls a rabbit from his top hat.

But you have to get still.

Yet I, as much as the next person, still have much to learn about trusting my gut, my conscience, my intuition, and listening to these messages when they whisper to me in subtle and not so subtle ways in my life.

They are, in my belief, part of the Universal plan and these three musketeers are very patient sages. If I don’t follow their lead, they just hang around in the corners of my circus until the next best opportunity arises in which to flag me.

Of late, my intuition has been tugging at my thought process using chocolate as a motivator. Yes, chocolate.

Thanks to a friend who gets extra brownie points for paying attention to and being interested in the things I love, I now have a book that touts chocolate principles as metaphors for life.

(As a brief aside, I must confess that most mornings I eat a small square of milk chocolate with my coffee, before breakfast. I am passionate about my chocolate.)

“What if you could devour life with the same commitment and passion?” queries the book.

“What do you want? How can you make the right choices if you don’t know what you want or where you are heading?”

I’ve been so busy lately running with the “going with the flow” herd, that I think I might be headed in the wrong direction.

“Never assume that the herd knows where it is going; it usually doesn’t.”

Quite frankly, in my life, I don’t know what my answers are to any of these questions I’m being asked by my musketeers—but I’m taking stock.

How about you? What’s your chocolate?