Trusting the Inner Teacher

Written by Noel Coakley
Listening to your gut is underrated in a culture that glorifies intellect and external validation.
A good teacher’s real job is to help you recognize the wisdom already present in your own heart and mind. Your real teacher is your own natural state of mind. The job of the ‘external guru’ is to point out the internal guru of your own buddha heart.
When you are working with a teacher, teaching, or community and your gut is telling you that something isn't quite right, it is worth trusting enough to, at a minimum, consider it further.
Looking back, I can say that every time I ignored a gut feeling, I wish I had tuned in sooner before intellectualizing myself out of it. I’m differentiating this from the expected challenges that arise when we challenge our habitual patterns. This can be incredibly uncomfortable and destabilizing. This, however, is a different feeling than when that gut check fires off.
There is a helpful perspective from attachment psychology that is worth naming here. As young humans, we have two major survival needs: keeping our caregiver relationship intact and working, as well as listening to our own gut and wisdom.
In other words, we depend on maintaining a situation in which others remain interested in taking care of us and we need to listen to our own body and wisdom to know if we are in danger, if we need food, if we need rest, etc.
An unfortunate dilemma can arise when staying connected to a caregiver requires us to ignore our own experience or suppress our needs. Typically, maintaining the relationship wins out. Over time and repeated instances, we habitually turn further and further away from listening to our own instincts, needs, and intuition and habitualize trying to meet the conditions we think the world needs of us to remain lovable. This continues on through school, jobs, adult relationships, and so forth.
Many of us have lost familiarization with our own wisdom and authenticity. Capitalist, productivity driven society doesn’t help. This can also arise, and often does, within the context of working with spiritual teachers and communities. Healthy trust of a long tradition of practice can veer too far into a complete lack of trust of our own wisdom.
So, yes, we need to lean into the teachers and examples of human potential. We need to lean into the wisdom that has been passed through the ages. We need to lean into the community of folks going through something similar to support one another. Perhaps above all, we need to lean into and trust the innate wisdom and instinct within each of our own hearts and minds.