What does it mean to be guided?

I’ve been fascinated by the topic of becoming guided for a long time, but this week I’ve been exploring it at what feels like a whole new level. And I’m sensing vast new arenas open up in me in regards to what being guided from within can mean and can feel like.

So after diving in on this topic with inner voice and then experiencing a really intriguing conversation about this in the Inner Voice Led Mastery community beta I’m holding, I wanted to come in here and share about this with you.

I’d be curious, if you feel like sharing in the comments below, what is your own definition of guidance? And if you ask your inner voice, “what does it mean to be guided?”, what answer do you hear?

Guidance ≠ getting step-by-step directions from God

To me as a 21 year-old Christian going through ministry school, being guided meant getting step-by-step directions from “Holy Spirit”, telling the human exactly what to do at each moment. I idealized this scenario, and frequently begged, demanded, and requested a much more full-fledged guidance, because even then there was a knowing that the method of living life by the mind just trying to figure out what to do didn’t feel like the lifestyle that Jesus and some of the Bible writers shared about as a life lived fully “by the spirit”.

I recall driving from the ministry school in Texas back to my parents’ home in Nevada, feeling so determined to be guided on the trip, that I decided not to stop at any gas stations until I felt the inner urge from God to go to a specific gas station.

But as my gas tank approached “E” and no direction was coming, I ended up making the more rational decision to let go of the demand for direction and just go get some gas. And that's why I didn't end up getting stranded on the side of the road.

Not the robot to a higher power

That story ran in various scenarios throughout my life, though maybe not always to that extreme. But there was an urge to become a “robot” to a higher power, because clearly the mind-led version of life never worked so well for me. And when there were seasons in which a sense of inner direction was more felt, the vastly improved experience of going through life with flow and effectiveness made me long to experience that all the time.

But the inner being refused to play that game by the mind’s rules and cravings. And the more the human tried to go to being/inner voice to get direct instructions in order to then go out as a separated, isolated entity and do whatever-it-was the most perfect, "right" way, the less the direction would come, it seemed.

But the clarity that did come is that we humans are not designed to play a puppet for a higher power to jerk around.

An underlying sense of direction, mixed with creativity

What has worked best for me along the path to becoming more fully guided has been to ask inner voice questions like “what can you show about . . . (whatever situation)", rather than "what should I do about . . .".

When there’s a sense of clarity and freedom of expression in an area, there can be a feeling of creativity with an underlying sense of direction. This can feel like a compass that points a direction, but doesn’t demand or require you to go that certain way. It can feel like you just sort of "know" what to do next, without feeling pressured about it. And the more the creativity is flowing, the more it feels like there's an internal stream of guidance through the human's innate personality and abilities, without making one feel less sovereign at all.

Now how direction works could be a post in itself, but for today, I wanted to simply invite a questioning of hidden assumptions around what becoming guided could mean for you, while I’m in the midst of exploring this in my own way. And I'd like to introduce a definition my inner voice brought that calls for a much grander opening to what being guided may mean.

An inner voice definition on what it means to be guided

I'll leave you with a snippet from my session last Saturday, when inner voice brought a definition of becoming guided that I've been sitting with and reflecting on all week:

What does it mean to be guided?

‘That this one is no longer wandering around as if a totally isolated, separate container in effort to meet its wants, urges, that arise from within this frame of separation.

Okay, so that’s what it’s not doing, but what is it doing?

‘There is allowing of us to lead through it still more and more, so that the human itself, these functionalities, become our expression.

Summarized from inner voice:

We cannot truly be the guide of any human that is not in deep trust of us, because this inherently sets us in a position of slave driver to slave. This is a role that we do not take, though it is played in by many.