Trusting Inner Guidance When You Don’t Fit the World

For years, I felt like a misfit because my inner landscape didn’t conform to society’s expectations. When the world insists “look outside,” inner guidance becomes a lifeline for those of us who aren’t moving in the same direction as the rest of the world. 

In a culture of “outsideness,” my internal life was pathologized. It was discounted with the kind of certainty that made me doubt my own inner voice. I was told things like this:

“Human emotion can be reduced to chemicals. Everything has a physical cause. We're all just the sum of our body's chemical reactions, and the brain is a part of the body.” Or, “You’re just unable to accept life and face the world as it really is. You keep holding on to this idea of some numinous force underlying everything and insist that reality conform to your fantasy.”

The Myth of “Outsideness”

How do you learn to trust inner guidance in a world that worships the external? From the moment we first learn to use our eyes to recognize shapes and colors and our ears to distinguish sounds, our inner compass is increasingly pulled towards the events and objects of the outer world. We learn to respond to the environment around us and, in the process, separate our subjective experience from it.

As we adapt to that environment, we lose the sense that all children possess—that we are the creators of our experience. The outside world, which was meant to serve as our mirror, tightens into a cage. We no longer feel our personal power as the creators of our lives. We lose something crucial to our fulfillment and happiness as human beings.

Without this sense of our inner magic, we resemble birds that ache to fly but have forgotten how. Without it, we wage wars, jealously guard and squander our resources, judge each other, and live in states of insecurity, bitterness, and fear.

That's the central myth of our times—not Christianity, materialism, or New Age. Outsideness. “Look outside” is the credo of modern man.

As a lifelong misfit, I felt this split keenly. One part of me resolved that my spiritual quest, henceforth, would be to unravel this confused knot of erroneous belief, and experience again what I knew as a child: the magic underlying everything. Another part of me, frightened and cowed by the way the world's messages echoed my internal doubts, resolved to stow away all those childish illusions before they compromised my ability to live effectively.

For someone accustomed to living and thinking out of step with how the rest of the world moved, the consensus reality didn’t offer guidance; it sidelined my voice. That voice kept asking, “If existence has a purely physical basis, how does an ‘impersonal nature’ manage to populate a planet with thinking, feeling, dreaming, intuitive beings who love, long, ache, strive, and mourn?”

For any society to grow and evolve, it needs people within it willing to ask such questions. Misfit dreamers are the necessary “holy fools” who move history by daring to voice visions before the world is ready. 

We long to give voice to our inner sense of knowing here and now, as the world lurches towards some half-conceived ideal of what could be. Misfits are both impractical and necessary. We travel a thorny path, one that demands the courage to name our dreams aloud even at the risk of looking like fools.

When Your Inner Guidance Refuses to Give Up on You

To feel vital and alive, we need stories that make our minds vibrate with the timbre of our souls. We need beliefs that nourish expansion, freedom, possibility, hope, and love.

The world is riddled with war, tyranny, poverty, and disease. It's saturated with media that focuses on the tragedies and failings of our race, ignoring our valor. The last thing they want is for any of us to become the authors of our lives.

But did you ever awaken from an evocative dream, or immerse yourself in a magical story, and feel like the world was made new, as if there was so much more to life, so many more avenues open for you to express and fulfill yourself than you'd ever imagined?

Those sensations are not fantasies. They’re the voice of your inner guidance saying, “Maybe you’re meant to be out of step with the way the rest of the world is moving. No one belongs here more than you. Take my hand, and let’s answer your calling together.”