Connecting to Your Innermost Self

I’m pretty tired myself

Hi. If you don’t mind, I want to speak to your soul today. How are you doing, soul? I’m pretty tired myself. Life takes a lot of energy if you know what I mean. There are so many things that need doing just to get through the day: so many responsibilities, obligations, and distractions.

I know your soul is sitting there waiting quietly for you to attend to it. The noise of life drowns out that inner voice, but it’s still there. I know it is. You don’t have to be a childhood trauma survivor to struggle with connecting to your innermost self. But being one sure adds another layer of difficulty. In addition to life, an undercurrent of emotion swirls around the soul, keeping it distant, keeping us from connecting, keeping us separate from the deep places of the heart.

A type of world-weariness sets in. Have you felt it? Have you felt it at a soul level? I have.

The behavior of splitting off from your inner self continues for the rest of a person’s life if they do not do the work of healing

The innermost heart of a person is the most sacred place there is. Childhood trauma is an assault on that space. That is why the damage from early life trauma is so far-reaching. The only way a child can protect that innermost self is to disengage from it. To separate. Because this pattern occurs at the very foundation of life, the behavior of splitting off from your inner self continues for the rest of a person’s life if they do not do the work of healing.

Being disconnected from our inner self is the trauma survivor’s default setting. We do it automatically and may not even be aware of how pervasive this behavior really is. Cultivating a disciplined life where we give ourselves time to leave all the noise and furor of the world behind is difficult to do. Take the news cycle. It encourages obsessive watching. Promoting fear and distress, it calls to us, and we search it to try and find a sense of safety. We’re searching in the wrong place.

Our jobs, our families, and our life responsibilities all clamor for attention. Financial pressures, obligations, and even friendships add to the pressure. And underneath it all is the current of our emotional lives as survivors. Over and over, I find myself falling into the trap of the daily grind, ignoring my inner emotional life.

I’ve always ignored my kitchen knives the same way I ignore my inner self. You need knives in order to cook. You need to keep them sharp in order for them to work. That’s not how I roll. Some of the knives in my kitchen have been there for forty years. Not once did I ever bother to have them sharpened. They were horrible, but I made allowances and ignored them. I got used to having dull knives. And then I got a text from a friend.

“Rebekah, I found a guy that will sharpen all your knives for $2 each. I’m dropping mine off tomorrow. Do you have any you would like me to drop off?”

Sharpen my knives? Do I ever! Every knife in the drawer needed it. I gathered them all up, and my friend picked them up. A week later, she returned with knives that were so sharp I cut off the tip of my finger, slicing a tomato. I’ve never seen so much blood. It was so painful I nearly fainted. I’d never, ever worked with sharp knives before. You have to be careful around them. You can’t even pick one up from the bottom of the dish pan to wash it without calculating how to avoid being sliced by the blade.

I am often no more careful about my innermost self than I have been with my knives. I’ve ignored it, thrown it in the drawer, adjusted, and moved on with life. When I do that, I do so at my own peril—deep calls to deep. Our innermost self is calling to us, but the only way to hear it is to be quiet. Be still and defy trauma, embrace joy.

Photo by Savernake Knives on Unsplash

You can reach Rebekah at her website, defy trauma embrace joy.com, or email her at [email protected]

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Rebekah Brown

Rebekah Brown, a native of the south, now resides in the Great American West. Surviving a complicated and abusive family system makes her unique writing style insightful as well as uplifting. Rebekah is the proud mother of two and grandmother of four.