A reader asked me recently how she could go about getting in touch with her Higher Self. The answer I gave her was much too brief to be of any real help, so I thought I’d go into it more in depth here. Sometimes it helps to have tools that put us in the right mind-frame and teach us how to listen to the usually very small voice that always “knows”. The Higher Self resides in the domain of the Soul, and this is the reason I’ve been consulting the I Ching for all these years now – because it helps me put myself in touch with my Higher Self aka my soul. You can call that Higher Self a lot of different things. You can call it “God” or “Allah” or “The Universe” or “The Creative” or “The Grand Master Puh-Bah” or… or even “Chocolate” if you like. You can call it whatever you like. Everyone has access to that power.

I keep returning to the I Ching because I feel very comfortable with the “Living Oracle” part of it. All The Oracle does is to reveal to us what our Higher Self is needing us, our ego selves, to get in touch with at any given moment. What we find in the I Ching are universal lessons. These could be learned and assimilated simply by taking the I Ching book and reading it cover to cover and be done with it, once and for all. But that would be akin to eating one big feast and saying “I am nourished for life”. If you chose to do that, insome ways, you would be right. Because when you think about it, how many big feasts does one person need to eat in a lifetime? But the way I see it there’s this huge banquet of delicious (soul) foods to be savoured that is offered to each and every one of us when we are born. Sometimes it’s right in front of us, ready to be enjoyed while others have to travel or struggle to find it, but once you do find your way to it, you may as well enjoy it in bits and morsels. That way it’s much easier to digest, and you have the added benefit of prolonging the pleasure over a lifetime. Another reason it might be helpful to take one’s time to ingest all this wonderful soul food is that for most of us, it takes time to develop our palette to truly and completely enjoy and savour certain flavours and ingredient combinations.

You can decide to ignore your Higher Self. You can try to shut it out, shut it up, or you can choose to listen to it, follow it’s counsel and act according to it’s “will”. You can do all that. You can also mistrust it and doubt in it’s wisdom at the same time as you embrace it. You can do all sorts of things. But no matter what, you higher self KNOWS the truth of things and it’s always quietly observing and it’s always THERE.

Most of us aren’t terribly interested in finding out what our Higher Self is observing. And most of us DON’T DARE actually enter into a dialog with our Higher Self because… gulp? What is it likely to tell us? But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Because everything the Higher Self tries to draw our attention to is to better help us complete ourself, so that we can realize ourselves to our full potential. Because all of us are made of light and energy. And the most basic form of life is necessarily benevolent energy because… well because life would not be possible otherwise. Because the other kind—negative energy—well that just creates a void, and no lifeforms possible there. Of course the universe contains both kinds of energy because that tension is necessary in order to prevent stagnation, or inertia. I’m no specialist, I’m not a doctor or a scientist. But I’ve spent the better part of my life thinking, reading, talking and having conversations with the Higher Power about these matters.

I suppose the secret to any sort of growth, or in this case, (Higher) Self-Growth, is learning to truly listen to it, letting it’s voice grow stronger, letting it take the lead, and letting it guide us in our choices in life. Slowly but surely. Some of us aren’t entirely comfortable with “listening to our gut feeling”. It might take practice. Especially if your “gut feeling” happens to run counter to the society we live in, or what our familes and friends believe, or how our religion (or lack thereof) informs our choices in life.

Consulting the I Ching can help you make the proper decisions in any circumstance because it teaches us to pay attention to our gut feelings in a much more informed way. When you decide to do a reading, you can be as specific or non-specific about it as you like. I generally don’t ask specific questions because I think we all too often tend to focus on the wrong things and this compels us to ask the wrong questions. But the I Ching gives us the answers we need at the appropriate moment. And no matter what, the advice it gives us can only be good advice because when you think about it, how can a universal message ever be WRONG?

It’s been my experience that whenever someone shows an opening to wanting to receive the teachings the I Ching contains, it means they are ready for it, and chances are they are about to start undergoing a very major evolution in their life. I suppose it’s the same way for any other spiritual system. When a person starts consulting “The I Ching or Book of Changes” regularly, I’m convinced that that person makes it possible for actual miracles large and small to start occurring in their life. I know Carl Jung was a long time I Ching student, and if one is familiar with The Book of Changes and Jung’s work, it’s easy to see how it greatly influenced his research and finding. I touched on this in a previous post which you can read about by clicking here.

What it all boils down to is that when you start listening and accepting the lessons the Higher Self is trying to teach you and when you start actually learning and assimilating and applying those lessons to your daily life, miracles start happening. They just do. Even though the path to higher understanding might seem confusing at times, and even though there may not always be markers to tell us where we are or how far we’ve gone, when we trust our Higher Self it inevitably takes us to the right place at the right time so we can learn the lessons necessary to continue our growth. The Higher Self ALWAYS KNOWS. All we have to do is… let go of our fear, and trust in the universe.

That being said, I’m off to do an I Ching reading.

Fractal art: She Dreams in Digital