Credit: Inner Voice Designs

It is the challenge of a lifetime to access and honor one’s own inner voice.

Hopefully, we become aware of the need to identify the messages perpetuated by our internal chatter, the static that keeps us from accessing our own well-spring of knowing.

This week’s ‘inside’ women writers delved into some of the internal voices that claim their attention on a regular basis.

We utilized a line from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ well-known book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, about how wolves in packs do not try to be what they are not…

I deeply appreciated LS’s piece in which she breaks out her myriad voices of admonishment competing for attention:

TRYING TO BE WHAT I AM NOT

Pushing, pulling, like children fighting over a rag doll.
Do this, do that.
Why did you do it this way?
Why did you choose that way?
Where did you get that idea?
I didn’t tell you that!
Did I give you permission to think,
to step in that direction,
to step at all?
Why do you possibly think that would work?
Well, it didn’t the way I thought it should.
I think…I think, I think too much,
or not enough, or maybe just too much for you,
and not enough for me.
OK then!  Think for yourself.