The part of you who knows.

There's a part of you, of me, of everyone, who knows what to do.

Maybe you forgot how to hear it - I know for me it's a process of remembering and re-remembering. Sometimes weeks or months go by when I just don't hear. It's an easy thing to do, forgetting how to listen to the part of you who knows. The world is full of voices telling you to listen to them, instead. Buy this, follow my ten step process, take these pills, read this giant pile of self help books. The external voices are loud.

The internal voice, the one that knows, can be quiet. And sometimes it tells us things that don't make sense in the context of capitalism. Go sit on a rock, it might say. I want to eat an ice cream and look for shapes in the clouds. I need to burn this life down and start a new one. So it's easy to discount it, or to not hear it at all. The messages it speaks can be uncomfortable. Take a week off, and then another one? I can't, I have to make money to pay for my life.

I know for me, when I stop listening, that's when my life gets harder. That's when depression kicks in, or anxiety spikes, or I start to feel like I'm invisible, drowning, or struggling to keep up in a world that keeps going faster and faster. When I do listen, even a little bit, that's when I find the ground again, and feel my feet more firmly on it.

It's a tricky balancing act, because it's true - we do need to earn a living in some way, there are external pressures we need to meet. But it's not an all or nothing equation. Either I listen only to my inner voice or only to the world. If the part of you who knows is telling you to burn your life down and move to Paris and start a new life as the owner of a second hand bookshop specialising in fairy tales, what might 1% look like? Perhaps you buy yourself a second hand book of fairy tales and read it out loud to yourself each night, wrapped in blankets in bed, before you go to sleep.

What's your 1%?

It's easy to discount small steps. 'All or nothing' thinking is everywhere. 1%? What's that going to do? Too small, too slow, pointless. But what if you did 1% one hundred times? You might not end up in Paris, but you might just end up in a life that fits you better than it did before.

If you've forgotten how to hear the part of you who knows, making art is a simple way to reconnect with it. You can do it with a colouring in book and a set of pencils. As you choose the colours - how do you know that bit needs to be red, that bit needs to be green? Maybe you're colouring in a tree and trees are supposed to be green, but why'd you choose that particular green? Only got one green? Well, why is it a green tree and not an autumn coloured one? If you find yourself colouring things because that's the colour they're 'supposed to be', that's good information too. Perhaps you'd like to question that, and look at where that 'doing it because I'm supposed to' thing shows up in the rest of your life.

The page is a wonderful low-stakes place to notice and start to change some of the patterns you create in your broader life. I see it in every online art group - people hearing the part of them who knows, so they can draw a map of their emotions, or doodle a pattern, or colour in a mandala.

In art group, I deliberately leave the instructions fairly loose so that part of us has lots of space to speak. And every time, everyone there knows how THEY do the exercise. There are no rules, no right or wrong. And every image is different. Much like life - there is no right or wrong, and every life is different. Every life is a creation of the person living it. Regardless of how much you currently hear and act on that voice's information - be it a little or a lot - what if you let the part of you who knows have more of a say?

So your mission for the week (and for the rest of your life), if you choose to accept it, is to reconnect (or connect more deeply) with the voice inside of you who knows what to do. Perhaps try first on a page. Draw how you're feeling - spread some colours around, scribble, see if red jumps out at you, or blue, or yellow… and scribble until something else starts feeling more right, and then do that.

And then see if you notice that feeling of knowing what comes next in your life outside the page.

This is something you can do on your own, or if you'd like to try it out with me and other creative people, come along to the next art group :) Click here for more info on that, and to save your spot if you’d like.

Make friends with the part of you who knows, and let that voice have a say in the choices you make and see how your life starts to feel…