There are two basic approaches to any type of self-development:

• Work to strengthen your weaknesses
• Work to strengthen your strengths

Education is often focused on strengthening weaknesses. This is not always the best path to mastery. Building from what we are already capable of brings satisfaction more quickly and can build from a foundation of strength.

The best path may not be to either strengthen weaknesses or strengths but to create an intelligent hybrid approach. You can strengthen skills that come naturally and use these skills while gently rounding yourself out by developing weak functions. Some big marketers say to stick with the strengths. Let someone else do the things you’re weak at. This can work in business. From a personal development and brain function standpoint, working with weaknesses has far-reaching advantages. I believe Guidance to sense which approach is best in any given moment.

My mode of perceiving has always been considerably more kinesthetic (sensory, feeling and movement) and auditory, and less visual. First I strengthened my ability to recognize and access intuition through sensation. Strengthening this strength made me highly effective in clinical practice, especially with body therapies, intuitive coaching, and matching nutrients to client’s individual requirements via body reflexes and changes in energy.

Then I took up the photography as a hobby in order to develop visual perception and the related parts of my brain. Strengthening this weakness has increased my ability to pick up images intuitively, and makes me feel more balanced and whole. I am certain that strengthening visual skills makes my brain work better.

When it comes to increasing intuition I always want to know the motivation. Intuition and Guidance can only go as far as we are able to trust ourselves. I have observed that as we develop and grow in self-trust, our range of Guidance grows organically. Those who manage to develop skills without self-trust and emotional balance tend to get into problems. Developing integrity, wisdom and clarity naturally evoke Guidance skills.

Giving yourself good cause to trust yourself and cultivating sincerity prove in the long run to be of greater value than intuitive skills alone. Self-trust and sincerity support effective service.

The above being said, this entire post series is full of countless recommendations and exercises that will increase your range of guidance if you practice them. To get the most from this series let descriptions of experiences you do not relate to roll over you and work with strengths unless you are fairly experienced. I am speaking to a whole range of guidance skills. Whether you are just learning or rounding out your experience,consider the following:

• Allow your skills to grow gradually, within your comfort level
• Latch onto suggestions that resonate with you and put them into practice
• Remember that simple things done consistently are of much greater value in the long run than becoming overextended
• Do not try to get yourself to believe anything that doesn’t sit well with you
• Respect but do not take your lack of belief in things very seriously
• Let your beliefs change in response to direct experience
• Rely neither on belief nor disbelief but relax your opinions and stay open to experience
• Remember that being open to getting something wrong allows you the space and grace to learn real accuracy
• Do things your own way–but not from ego
• Do not manipulate yourself or others; invite instead
• Never criticize the level you are at now
• Cultivate honesty and value your authenticity
• Seek to remain sincere in your efforts
• Always verify or confirm intuition with factual means or alterations in sensation and experience

Remember that skill with guidance is an art. It is cultivated in the soil of your values. This art depends on your personal level of integration. Every time you successfully confront internal conflict by choosing your Highest Option or support yourself kindly in the face of a frightening emotion or work with your own energy you are developing your capacity for insight and guidance.

Verifying or confirming intuitive hits with actual fact is an excellent way to give yourself cause for self-trust. We will cover confirmation of Guidance after first looking into sincerity–which proves to be foundational and to offer surprising practical utility!

How do YOU feel about your current range of guidance?
Why do you want to extend this range?
What do you think it will do for you?
How do these motivations feel in your body?

Internal Guidance surfaces as a clear, sound sense of Inner Knowing. The resonance of Inner Knowing is utterly different than making assumptions or being smug about something you learned. Internal Guidance comes up as if from an inner spring like the mystery it truly is.

Inner Knowing is enhanced by being able to BE WITH Not Knowing. Accepting that we do not know something creates space for something more. Creating this space is like holding a bowl for Guidance to drop into. Not Knowing is a big part of how we create this space.

Not Knowing is a zone free from opinions, beliefs, preconceptions, assumptions, the need to control, and from reactive emotion. Not Knowing removes the limitation of rigid or habitual rational thought. In this zone Guidance can show up with depth and richness like a poem, not a report or dictionary definition.

Guidance that pops in from what seem to be external sources and Guidance from sources we experience as internal are both enhanced by receptivity, humility, surrendering the cognitive mind, and remaining open.

Not Knowing is a very Zen process. Being present in the moment with a clear, quiet mind is an ideal environment for recognizing Guidance. If you cannot still your mind all is not lost. I have a busy busy mind and I recognize Guidance. Skill at differentiating between different ‘energy signatures’ or frequencies and surrender to the Highest Option are good work-arounds if you can’t quiet your mind. We’ll explore Spiritual Surrender and the Highest Option in subsequent posts.

A quiet mind has all kinds of bonus advantages:

• Increased inner peace
• Improved health
• Freedom from conflict and confusion
• Easier to tune in to spiritually developed people
• Easier to notice what is going on with yourself
• Clearer, more accurate observation of others
• Difficult to manipulate
• Greater access to states of meditative awareness

By a quiet mind I am not talking about a mind forced into silence by suppressing thought and feeling but freed from strife through genuine self-acceptance. I have seen a few people who had attained a false sense of quiet through control rather than acceptance. Eventually, when and if they had the benefit of an experience powerful enough to break into this fortress, the shock of freeing previously suppressed inner material was traumatic. Smug hyper-confidence doesn’t crumble pretty.

Being able to clear your mind assists but is not absolutely essential to the skill of Not Knowing. You can Not Know without inner quiet by being open and rigorously avoiding assumptions and presuppositions.

Because I prize and rely on Not Knowing, I habitually make what I think I know unimportant while I explore. In clinical practice, if I think I will probably find a certain thing and I discover something different, I am happy to be finding the actual cause instead of validating an opinion.

Openness to Guidance allows us to discover things we initially know nothing about. Intentionally Not Knowing invites new insights and solutions. Prefabricated interventions are rarely as powerful and may not exist for the issues we are addressing.

What things do YOU think, know, or believe that distract you from clear Guidance?

How do you sense the difference between random thoughts and real Guidance?

Range varies with circumstance, who our energy is linked with, state of mind and heart, brain function, our current internal biochemical cocktail, and so forth. If you’re exhausted, hung over and your mother is in the hospital, your guidance may have a narrower range than it does when you feel good. Or your range of guidance may actually improve under some types of adversity.

The flow of Guidance is not necessarily consistent. I’ve noticed when I am too tired or compromised to function logically my intuition kicks in without being squashed by too much thinking. This began after I intentionally cultivated intuitive arts while my brain was compromised during an extended illness.

I followed an excellent piece of generally-applicable guidance. It comes with a story: My brother studied internal martial arts with the only caucasian to have won the Chinese championship. During prolonged sparring sessions body and mind tired. Students were taught, “When one resource is compromised, use another.”

In the context of martial arts, application would mean that if your legs are tired you use your arms more, if your body is tired you use your mind, if your mind and body are tired you use your energy or your emotions, and so forth. Practicing this principle in circumstances that call for Guidance extends effectiveness and broadens your range by using your best resource in any particular moment.

An unimaginable universe of insight is available to those who can tune in and access it. Recipients of Guidance, however, receive viable Guidance about some aspects of life but not about others. We are better at tracking down or drawing in some types of information than we are at others. With the exception of a truly enlightened being, no one person can access all available Guidance in all dimensions. We each have a slice of the pie of all possible perception.

These considerations help to explore Range and various modes of Guidance:

• How many different aspects and arenas of life does it address?
• What is the reach? Is it just about relationships, or is it about relationships, health, spiritual life, finance, other-dimensional energies, and so forth?
• What is the detail and depth? If it’s about relationships, is it just about getting along, or is it about who you can become through the relationship, how it relates to your life purpose, and how to manage your energy optimally within it?
• How many senses does information come through? Does Guidance show up through sight, sound, scent, body sensation, energy perception, movement, or taste?
• Does Guidance come in as Direct Knowing, where it just shows up in your head whole? Some people excel at this mode and do not recognize that they are receiving Guidance because they do not get images or voices.
• How many levels of experience does the Guidance address? Does it impact just your mind, or your emotions, body, mind, spirit, afterlife, past and parallel lifetimes, displaced energy or parts, energy that doesn’t belong with you, energy grid systems and fields, etc?
• Does it address future or draw from the past when necessary? Does it simply report what is occurring here and now, or take place with respect to the past and future when useful?

• Does it involve perception of unusual energies or dimensions when these have a significant influence?
• Does Guidance reference things about which you have had no prior experience or exposure?

While it is true that an excellent guide often has greater range, range of guidance does not directly equate with quality. Some Guides have a narrow range but operate superbly within that range, with good accuracy and utility. As in any other life arena, specialism has its uses. A trance medium, for example, may have stellar accuracy with the departed–and be clueless or useless with health or relationship guidance.

Some guides have a wide range of guidance yet have patchy quality and accuracy. It is unusual but quite possible to have a very wide range of guidance and excellent quality and accuracy.

These factors increase Range of Guidance:

• Skill with self-observation
• Recognition and acceptance of personal biases
• Ability to make adjustments for our emotional biases to see life more openly, without projecting
• Openness to a wide range of belief systems without necessarily buying in to them
• Courage to explore different realities
• Willingness to admit and correct errors in judgment
• Freedom from needing the approval of others
• Exposure to multiple cultures or systems of thought
• Presence in the moment
• Personal clarity and discernment
• Being in touch with body sensations
• Sensitivity to energy
• Ability to notice and release assumptions
• Compassionate detachment
• Desire to be of service

What is YOUR range of guidance?

How do YOU respond when you receive internal Guidance that touches on things outside of what you normally believe?

Yes we all receive internal Guidance but we need help unmasking it and learning to “read” it.

Modern life drowns out many of the conditions that foster healthy intuitive development. Living in nature promotes:

• Being grounded in the body
• Listening
• Silence
• Introspection
• Attending to small signals that indicate other life close by
• Anticipating weather changes
• Noticing exactly which influences strengthen plants or draw animals
• Sensing the importance of timing
• Breathing fully
• Noticing expressions of energy
• Experiencing directly the interconnected nature of all life

Expecting to be adept at accessing Guidance without some type of on-going training and practice is unrealistic. If you were born with innate tracking skills, you would still need to learn the prints and marks of animal activity and how signs show up in various terrain and weather and how much time that had passed since tracks or signs were made. Even those with inborn intuitive skills need life experience and practice.

Intuitive development calls for aptitude, training, and confirmation. Aptitude means being born with or acquiring in childhood neurological software that supports the skill. Training may be formal, or an outcome of committed personal attention. Confirmation is the process of receiving impressions, energy, or information and consistently checking your accuracy.

Intuitive aptitude and training are rarely across-the-board. This means that most of us perceive better in some realms of experience than in others. We’ll go into Confirmation and Range of Guidance in following posts.

Life consists of many different arenas of potential experience and dimensions. Intuitive perception can be applied to world situations, health, relationships, spiritual experience, clearing energy from rooms or buildings, your next step in personal development, and so forth.

Perception can be focused on body energy systems like chakras, and fields, for example, or on the fields that are much farther out from the body. I’ve had a few clients whose health required an adjustment 300 feet out from their bodies!

Confirmation and practice are necessary in each new arena of attention and experience in which we aspire to perceive clearly.

You may be far more intuitive than you know. If you have not spent a significant amount of time with someone who applies advanced intuitive skills you may not know your own level.

I practiced body therapies for years without any idea of my aptitude. Eventually I met an intensely powerful clairvoyant, clairaudient healer. By tuning in to exactly what he was perceiving as he worked I discovered that I could perceive almost all of it. I found myself working side by side with him with healing clients. Through focus and practice I discovered a vast world of and energy experience outside of my previous scope of vision and my beliefs. Immediate changes in clients served as confirmation.

This healer later disclosed that he had participated in a remote viewing program with the CIA. It is a known if unsavory fact that government agencies have applied psychic skills and remote viewing in military applications.

Some years later I also met a spiritual teacher with unnerving psychic skills who had been in a similar government program. In my observation government training distorts Guidance. The skills have not developed naturally alongside Heart, in a context of respectful ethics.

Before these and other encounters I hadn’t been focusing my attention in the ways that pull forth different types of information. I didn’t know what I was looking for–or that there was anything TO look for, or any reason to look.

Since then I have participated as other people awaken to their capacities by being in environments where energy is noticed and discussed. Comparing notes and experiences about perception is essential to learning to recognize and confirm intuition versus imagination.

In addition to aptitude, training and confirmation, these traits and conditions are conducive to developing skillful Guidance:

• An open mind
• Motivation toward personal development
• Adequate freedom from personal issues that obscure Guidance
• Good self-observation skills
• Courage to confront the unknown
• Courage to confront the hidden recesses of your inner world
• Willingness to welcome knowing it when you are mistaken
• Discipline to maintain a consistent practice throughout different life conditions
• The need or desire to apply your skills in daily life
• Motivation to be of service
• Association with others who have similar or more-developed skills

We will address obstacles to Guidance in detail as we go along in the series.

What experiences, practices, or people have increased YOUR ability to receive and recognize Guidance?

How comfortable do YOU feel with your current level of Guidance?

If you think about the way email arrives through a wireless channel, it becomes evident that your email also arrives via energy. Energy is more elaborate, specific, and diverse than matter. In addition to the energy that makes up the atoms comprising matter, a number of different dimensions have been identified–so far. Since energy makes up matter and also has non-material expressions, the world of energy is vaster than the material world.

The fact that information arrives via energy is not occult. Various devices read diverse types of information from different sources. Radios, FAX, geiger counters, and instruments that assess electromagnetic frequencies are examples. Similarly, people with different intuitive skills are sensitive to and learn to recognize and read a range of frequencies.

Energy is direct information. It is relevant, immediate, specific, fluid, constantly available, and accurately represents what is going on.

I am not saying that everyone always reads energy accurately. Everyone cannot read blood tests, correctly interpret complex informational manuals, understand all spoken languages, or recognize microbes under a microscope either.

Plenty of accounts show that many animals know when an earthquake or tsunami will come. Dogs and other animals have less on their minds than we do. They read people’s energy and respond accordingly. This extension from instinct is the most rudimentary form of guidance.

Everyone does have an instinctual response to energy. Whether or not we pay attention to these responses, we are able to sense other people’s emotions, motivations, and other energies just like dogs and animals do. It takes practice. We’re usually thinking too much or busy enacting partly-automatic social behaviors instead of attending to energy signals. To assume that if it exists one will be able to access it personally is an error.

Some people are quite good at reading others at a purely instinctual level. In addition to those who serve others, a skilled con or high-level criminal develops these skills. This example serves to break down the artificial walls between intuitive development and ordinary life. You will have seen examples in the media.

If we extend attention into the energy of a place, we can actually tell whether or not a dark alley is safe at the moment, or if sounds we hear on the porch at night are raccoon and possum escapades or an intruder. This skill relies on relaxing fear enough to access the intuitive processes that receive Guidance.

In Part 7 I mentioned that “Good guidance makes immediate changes in the energy in and around us” and “A skilled energy healer can can see or feel a client’s energy changing in response to his or her verbal input.” The energy in our fields, chakras, meridians etc. shift and change in response to Guidance.

Guidance IS energy. It comes in, from, and with specific energy frequencies. The energy arrives with a unique signature that holds clues about its origins, spiritual level, and application.

Just as a skilled acupuncturist can recognize complex patterns of energy imbalance related to organ dysfunction, skilled guides learn to identify different types of energy and understand what they mean, how they originate, and how they are expressed in symptoms, behavior, and life circumstance.

Any form of energy practice accelerates the development of Guidance skills by exercising your ability to recognize and receive different types of energy. Qi Gong, internal martial arts, acupuncture, Touch for Health, silence, grounded meditation, and Dances of Universal Peace are a few examples.

Learn to attend to energy.

How do YOU perceive incoming information?

How do YOU recognize the difference between Guidance and energy that is just information?

Learning to tell the difference between Guidance and personal opinion is a foremost task of an ethical person in the role of guide.

“Guidance” that does not resonate with personal meaning or change our energy and the way we live our lives is merely information, no matter how obscure, spiritual, or esoteric, and regardless of its source.

Sensing changes in the body’s energy systems (chakras, meridians, fields, etc.) can provide direct and immediate feedback for the effectiveness of guidance.

Most of us can access some degree of Guidance some of the time. We may or may not be able to differentiate it from our general welter of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and input from external sources.

Learning to sense the ways it impacts our energy is a skill that magnifies the effects of Guidance. Energy feedback trains us to recognize Guidance with greater confidence. Guidance can direct energy work while energy work enhances Guidance.

Giving or recognizing genuine Guidance requires being deeply in touch with yourself. Since energy reflects our actualities rather than our conceits, paying attention to energy aids self-awareness. Energy mirrors us. Authenticity is a huge advantage in the world of energy.

What is Good Guidance?

Good guidance makes immediate, healthful changes in the body’s energy systems. It is directly applicable to current life themes. If Guidance is used to look into the past, its usefulness comes from the past’s relevance to current goals, needs, and directions.

The most important guidance assists us to align directly with who we really are inside, and to bring forth hidden qualities and inspiration.

Good guidance helps us to clarify and anchor what we learn through life experience and inspires us to move into new territory. A point of view aligned with purpose and free flowing energy eases us and helps us to adjust positively to our circumstances.

A good guide identifies, supports and refines the most constructive direction in which we are just beginning to move. We are ready for and able to apply this guidance.

Good guidance fits like an ideal shoe for your foot shape and size. Words that guide one person may rub another raw, slop around in their life without providing support, or leave them unbalanced as they walk forward. Concepts, directions, inspiration, ideas, or instructions for something as significant as guiding your life should fit well. You don’t want blisters on your dharma (life walk).

A good guide is like a tug boat. Tugs bring huge ocean liners into dock or set them out to sea, safely and reliably. A tug serves the liner, which has its own power but allows the tug to navigate in tight spaces. The tug is not the focus or the point, but the movement of the liner.

A skilled energy healer can can see or feel a client’s energy changing in response to verbal input. Skilled energy healers often become effective guides: If you can see the energy change as you talk, you refine your skill by seeing what is actually working.

In my healing practice I used to do more direct energy work and less discussion. Now I discuss the issues that will allow the client’s energy to shift as I begin to address energy symptoms–and accomplish more in the course of a session. Done accurately, the discussion IS direct energy work.

Energy work and effective guidance accelerate one another. Appropriate shifts and changes in your energy systems advance the speed at which you can respond to guidance and put it into practice.

Energy interventions and Guidance work together when you work on your self too. Working with your energy assists intuition. For example, you may practice Qi Gong, visualize cleansing your fields, or balance your chakras and find that you get strong intuitive hits during or after your practice. Your intuition will also assist you in directing your energy practice.

What have YOU noticed about the way energy practice or therapies impact your intuition and your ability to apply your insights in daily life?

What makes YOU trust your intuition when you do?

Then gently find ways to notice and manage your needs before distress must arise.

Distress is a form of guidance to those who are willing to respond to their needs. It may not be anybody’s favorite form of guidance, but we can learn to use it well when it shows up. Distress alerts us that we need to do something kind for ourselves or make more loving choices.

Intestinal distress encourages more enlightened eating. The distress of feeling invaded invites better boundaries. Distress about situations suggests positive action toward change.

Turning distress toward benefit is a highly positive skill. The skill works much better when we allow ourselves to feel and explore our distress long enough to understand what is actually called for. Learning to attend to the origins and sources of discomfort is crucial.

Turning away from distress before discovering the underlying need can lead to numbness, dissociation, compartmentalization, artificiality, or superficiality. It is important to honor distress. I am not saying wallow in it, just take a careful look and use it constructively. That is the most positive way to handle it.

Here is a funny little example of using distress as guidance: Once I began coughing as a client entered my office. I could not stop. I left the room for water. The moment I left, the coughing stopped. The moment I went back to my office coughing came back. I figured out that the client had toxic energy in his fields. The moment I cleared the energy I was fine. For some years now I get an odd cough if I’m not noticing energy that needs to be addressed.

Loss, prolonged pain, betrayal, and disillusionment are more complicated than mere distress. This kind of intensity can uproot our belief systems until we don’t even know what we believe any more. [link to related Post on Disillusionment.] During difficult life transitions when core beliefs are in question ill-fitting or overly-directive guidance can cause complications. The more intense our distress the greater the call for comprehensive and effective guidance.

We tend to live as if we expect to be the same person from day to day, able to control who we will become over time. When life shakes down the pillars of temporary consistency we discover that our responses to life change in the face of different pressures, circumstances and energies.

New situations, events, and collisions of emotion bring forward fresh and untried self expression. Guidance allows us to use our responses to circumstances and conditions toward our highest good, in partnership with life.

The energies that evoke earthquakes, tsunamis, and world-rocking change also restructure our personal lives. While things we took to be stabile are shifting and coming apart it is important to consider how we might use disruption itself to bring about positive outcomes.

We can use upheaval to help restructure relationships, health, finances, living situations, communities, and global structures. We transform ourselves in the process of doing so.

Here’s a fun quote from the end of a friend’s email: That is my plan –If chaos does not poke its lovely head into my affairs – I will be here.

As we careen into an uncertain future many feel frustrated, confused, overwhelmed, or unclear about how to harness motivation. Motivation can be difficult when we cannot see a clear path or need to alter our goals. Guidance is interaction that assists us to select a meaningful path or purpose with greater clarity and confidence.

These questions may be useful in learning to take guidance from distress:

• How well do you listen to your distress?
• How much distress is required to get your attention?
• Do you respond better to some types of distress than others?
• What do you need learn to respond with compassion to the kinds of distress you try to ignore?
• What changes are supported by any disruption you may be experiencing?
• Do you develop strategies for change or resist change?
• How does your response to change increase or reduce your distress?

Attraction and resistance offer an indisputable sense of direction–at least for the moment. The results of paying attention to attraction and resistance vary widely according to our personal values and level of spiritual development.

Let’s begin with the most limited expression of this mode of guidance: Until we develop comprehensive personal values, simply pursuing what we want can mire us in indulgence. Resisting what we don’t like might be like digging in our heels, plugging our ears, closing our eyes, and humming. Where is the guidance in this? Basic lessons can be discovered through the results! When we get tired of the results our values and self-awareness become more sophisticated.

The act of seeking guidance promotes personal development. Contemplating guidance involves looking within to find out what we want or need–and then paying attention to the results of the actions we take in response. This process refines self-observation.

The more we develop self-observation and come to value personal development, the more subtleties we discover through what we love and what we resist.

Love unfolds in response as we take guidance from what we love.

Suppose we love an allergens or someone who treats us poorly. If we take guidance from the results of our experiences we gradually become rooted in greater love for ourselves and learn to treat ourselves kindly. We may come to love feeling clear and healthy. We may love an ideal, a way of life, a cause, or an inner state.

Moving toward what we love shows us which way to go. Even if we make a mistake, if we make it wholeheartedly, we learn much more quickly than we will through half-hearted sampling.

What we resist also provides more advanced guidance as we become more aware. We notice that we resist in others shows us what we still need to learn to love in ourselves. Noticing when we feel uncomfortable allows us to set healthy boundaries, to make decisions that work for us, and to make choices that invite happiness.

Anything we judge is an opportunity for self-exploration, discovery, insight, and release. Repulsion, resistance, annoyance, and hatred all speak to things going on inside that can use some healing–if we open ourselves to listen. It takes guts and love to carry light into those dark corners.

Sometimes we resist what we love or love what we resist. Delving into this type of conflict yields self discovery and leads to greater peace.

Following inner guidance with sincerity establishes a way of moving through life with attention to what is happening inside us. We begin to engage life with meaning and intention. As mastery develops, the habit of attending to guidance becomes more and more fluid, intuitive, and almost magical.

The purpose of Guidance is not to magically avoid what we dislike and attract what we desire but to accelerate learning from our experiences, live with a sense of meaning and navigate our depths. The habit of attending to Guidance leads us to reinvent ourselves. In this process we may discover that what we dislike can be used to serve goals that bring far greater satisfaction than getting what we thought we wanted.

Whenever we give what we love or resist authority over ourselves we lose energy and reduce our personal freedom.

Anything we give authority over ourselves can interfere with our ability to receive and respond to guidance.

What do you give over authority to in your life?

How do YOU take guidance from what you love?

Think about some of the things you wanted passionately some years back and did not get. Are you in any way relieved that you didn’t get them?

We seek guidance when we want or need something–or when we value it. Guidance helps us find a way to get what we want, to release wanting it, to revise what we want, or to find something even more important that uproots what we thought we wanted. This includes states we long to experience or sustain, such as strength. clarity, or equanimity. It includes states of release, such as forgiveness, accepting a death, or deciding to change vocations.

Wanting this or wanting that is related to but a little different than having values. Wanting is not necessarily organized. Desire may provides a temporary direction–toward getting IT–but this direction disappears when we have obtained IT or given IT up. Wanting is not rational. We can WANT to be out of distress, for example, and NOT want to do any of the things that reduce distress or avoid the same distress in the future. Reducing distress may require facing a fear, for example, and the avoidable distress may be a hang over.

Values have consistency and congruence over time. They have a certain rationality and support entire collections of behaviors. The desires supported by values are comprehensive, involving lifestyle. If we value being healthy, for example, we begin to organize our lives to sustain health. We return over and over again to principles and practices that promote health.

Values shape life direction. For this reason values are a an important element of effective guidance.

We organize our lives around what we value. What we choose to care about the most and the qualities we chose to express act like a rudder, giving direction to our lives, especially during times of rapid change. Our values determine how we make important decisions.

What we value provides psychological and emotional structure. Lasting values keep us on a somewhat even keel through life’s inconsistencies. They provide guidelines and motivation around which to rally and focus ourselves when faced with challenges.

Sorting out and clarifying personal values is a delicate and powerful aspect of guidance.

In Part 3 we considered “Doing the Right thing” and traditional values. Bringing different value systems elbow to elbow through travel and technology adds a whole new level of complexity to life. There are so many choices! And to make a choice truly viable we need to accumulate life experience to substantiate its validity in our lives.

Values are stands that we take in order to bring forth what we feel is best in ourselves.

A value is not a standard. It is not an expectation for performance. A value is a powerful and intentional preference, a guide, a horizon goal or ideal we continue to approximate. A lasting value is like gravity. It tells us which way is up and helps us land on our feet, or stand up again if we have fallen. When life structures become uprooted core values serve as guidelines.

The movie “Groundhog’s Day” is a parable about values. We may need to take the same actions over and over and over until we are able to respond to life from our core values—and when we do we feel happy, perhaps even when circumstances are unpleasant.

While lasting values make good guidelines, they do occasionally change. When values are undergoing change we may feel a strange, flat sense of uncertainty and even apathy based on not knowing what really matters any more, what will make a difference, how to use our time, and what things mean to us now.

How do we set a course when we cannot see the stars and don’t know which way it is to land, or when landmarks change? Periods like this call for especially skilled and comprehensive guidance.

“When you meet a virtuous man try to equal him. When you met a man without virtue examine your own shortcomings.” ~Confucius

What inner values do you stand by, that you will stand tall to bring forward because they make you who you are?
Do your desires tend to support or conflict with your values?

Let’s take a quick peek into the way people in the U.S. tended to make life-direction decisions in the past: Up until recently we had a strong, cultural precedent called “Doing The Right Thing.” This societal construct was generally based on Duty and Tradition. These traditions have been the basis of many important decisions. As such, they have been a source of guidance.

Some exceptional individuals developed their own interior sense of values and lived by their personal ethics as a code. Those not bold enough or simply not inclined to work out a personal code did “as family, church or tribe have always done”. There were advantages.

Advantages of Duty and Tradition and acting in accord with Family, Church or Tribe:

• Easier and feels safer to stay with group consensus
• A sense of identity as an accepted group member
• Clear formulas for personal behavior
• A way to know right from wrong without having to work it out inside
• A powerful experience of belonging and connection
• The security of understanding of one’s place in the world

Our faster-paced world offers much more exposure to differing sets of values. Through contrast we have seen how tradition can limit exploration and creativity, and how duty may be overdone and run you into the ground. Many view most beliefs as preferences and choices instead of standing in for Reality itself as it usually did in the past.

The internet, television, and travel shrink our world. As we step away from tradition each individual is forced to assume greater responsibility for whom s/he becomes and what s/he believes. This is a mixed blessing.

If modern life holds the advantages of greater personal freedom and it has become easier to acknowledge and embrace all walks and ways, it also strips us of the identity, certainty and security we enjoyed in more-insular groups based on traditional beliefs.

As life requires greater amounts of personal responsibility for our values and direction we require more personalized Guidance.

The movie “Pleasantville” speaks to the bittersweet longing for a safe and clearly defined world–and the internal conflict we have about embracing freedom from the same rules and constraints that make such a world possible. If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend it.

So here we stand on the brink of accelerating global change. Many have rejected formulaic beliefs and their implied restrictions. Many have adopted new beliefs that are equally formulaic and have other restrictions. These restrictions are lesser known because they have not been tried out for generations. Now what?

It is no surprise that Guidance has become more important than ever.

What do YOU do when you feel uncertain about the validity of your beliefs?
How do YOU make decisions when you’re not sure what you want?

Great Christmas Gift idea! Simple but potent tools effectively clear out unpleasant energy & promote higher awareness.