Step Two Hundred and Forty-Seven

Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (1893), Diogenes Ulysses Maillart

Step 247. I Will Listen To My Inner Teachers Today.

Listen to your inner teachers, for they have wise counsel for you. Accept their counsel and work with it, realizing that only by following counsel will you understand its meaning and its value.

Take time upon the hour to remind yourself that your Inner Teachers are with you. Look forward to those two times in meditation today when you will be free from external obligations and involvements to spend time with your Inner Teachers. They will speak to you this day and help you to learn to listen and to discern their voice from other voices that plague your mind. They represent the one true voice that will speak unto your soul. They are not the substitutes that you create to keep yourself stimulated in fear. Therefore, extend your trust to them as they have extended their trust to you, for they are entrusting you with Knowledge in the world—a greater form of trust and acknowledgment you cannot imagine. For you to be the vehicle of Knowledge in the world, you must bear witness to the greatness of your origin and heritage and the greatness of God’s estimation of you.

Therefore, in your two deeper practices this day, in stillness and silence, turn your listening inward. Listen intently. Allow yourself to become receptive and you will know your Teachers are standing in the background, observing you, loving you and supporting you. And they will speak to you this day of things beyond the world and things within the world. They will remind you of your purpose and your function as you learn to listen this day.

Practice 247: Two 30-minute practice periods. Hourly practice.

Here you will find the entire book free for download http://stepstoknowledge.com/

Here you will find pointers for getting started if this is your first encounter with this practice: Taking the Steps to Knowledge.

January 23, 2014 Round One: My inner teachers speak to me in so many ways. I commune with them directly when I enter Stillness and feel their presence and their counsel, I can do this at any time and in any place. They reach me in other ways too. Sometimes I am pondering on issues, wondering about certain things, maybe seeking answers to particular questions, and I open an email to find something that addresses the very thing I am pondering, or something in a book I am reading jumps out with the answer, or someone I am talking to says something I resonate with. This happens too often to be a coincidence, I am tuned into these things and know them to be the answers to what I am seeking, answers provided by my Teachers who are always with me and supporting me, and I trust them. Just as Marshall said during the Vigil today – "to trust me is to trust what is true within you." I trust what I hear my teachers telling me because it rings true within me. I accept this and the Knowledge they are entrusting me with as a great gift. I listen intently to hear what I am being told.

Another Steps student, Douglas, said: "I have the tendency to attribute some of my own thoughts and ideas to my inner teachers." 

This is something I think about a lot too and wonder - am I only projecting onto my inner teachers what I want to hear? But what I am becoming more acutely aware of is that messages from my inner teachers come before I have a chance to start thinking and they feel true and they stick. They seem to come from somewhere beyond my mind and they make me feel warm and good. Hard to explain, but I feel the difference.

April 10, 2015 Round Two: I am seeking the counsel of my Inner Teachers today and do not wish to attribute my own thoughts or ideas to my teachers. I wish to be clear about the true messages from my teachers. I feel I am, since my inner state of wellbeing and joy, my feeling that all is right and true, leave me beyond doubt, dispel my confusion. But when all is said and done, only time will tell. The counsel I feel I am receiving from my Inner Teachers shows its veracity in time. If what I thought was counsel from my teachers is not counsel, this will become clear to me as I take the steps, as I live with the situation and see what comes of it. This is so pertinent to me today as I take the steps to move to the country. The wisdom of this move will only become apparent as events unfold. This time I have the luxury of living in this environment without investing money. I am basically being handed a country house on a platter to see whether I am cut out for what it entails or not. My heart sings, I have no anxiety or misgivings, so far, so good, but only time will tell.

March 12, 2019 Round Three: And time has told. I am cut out for what country life entails, in fact, I have found my True Home on earth. And now I am working towards having my own place to live on a plot that just feels so like home to me. Living temporarily in the house provided for us in the interim has proven to be a stepping stone to having my own home and a home for my children in the future..