Why Your Destiny Seems Unclear

Destiny

Whether you believe in the concept of destiny or not, one common denominator to anyone’s destiny is that your self (inner self, soul) wants you to do what is right for you. Therefore, destiny can also be translated as that what you align to when you follow your inner truth. Where that ends up is less relevant than what you do in order to follow your inner guidance.

Many of us struggle to find that inner guidance or to attune to it continuously. Therefore, in this article, I describe one super simple way that can help you tune in.

Loyalty first

You practically have two choices when it comes to inner truth: You either ignore it and get frustrated, feel hurt about your ‘destiny’ (or about not knowing your destiny), or you can be loyal to it. So basically, you either say yes or no to your destiny in life. When you are loyal to it, you are willing to keep tuning into your inner compass, even when you don’t know where it will lead you.

That loyalty requires strength, dedication, courage, and perseverance. And those things can arise from something you may not expect: Kindness to self.

Kindness to self

Self in this context points to your higher self, your true, authentic self, as it is beyond all the conditioning and beliefs gained over a lifetime.

Kindness to self is founded on the ability to always treat yourself well at any time and in any circumstance.

It starts by acknowledging this: You need to take care of yourself in the way you truly deeply desire to be treated. A treatment you most likely have not received from anyone else. Because your inner self longs to be treated in a way that is fully unconditional, all the time, throughout your whole life. So with zero exceptions.

If you can be kind to yourself in the way your self needs from you, you’ll find the strength, dedication, courage, and perseverance you need to follow your inner truth.

You need to be willing to acknowledge that the care you truly, deeply desire cannot be given to you by anyone else. The only person who is capable of fully attuning to your needs, and caring for yourself at all times, is YOU.

Don’t delegate the fulfillment of your needs

Accepting this may be painful at first, as we often (secretly) hope for others to fulfill our needs or desires. Yet it is also comforting because we do not need to depend on others to get this care. When we keep thinking anyone else should give us this, we may get lost in hurt, disappointment, and frustration, which means we are hurting our selves.

If we take responsibility for good self-care and stop consciously or unconsciously delegating this to others we become incredibly resilient.

Giving space for your destiny to unfold

This resilience is needed when you decide to be loyal to your destiny and start to follow your inner truth. Your inner truth needs kindness to self to show itself to you. It will not force its way out into your consciousness most of the time. It often waits for you to be ready. When you start to listen to yourself, to what you need from yourself, you create a safe space for it to come up.

What we need

First of all, we need to get to know what it is we need. If we do not know what we truly need, we can’t do the things we need to do to take care of ourselves. One thing our self needs, regardless of who we are, is our unconditional love. It needs total commitment, attention, and loyalty from us. This starts with our willingness to find out what is good for us. And practicing kindness to self will do just that.

Where to start

It all starts with awareness, becoming aware of when and how you are, or are not, kind to yourself. This can be done in a very simple way:

Take time at the end of the day to write down how you have been kind to yourself. So open a notebook, and write down: How have I been kind to myself today? Now write down all you can think of. It does not matter if it’s big or small, don’t make anything irrelevant. Examples can be:

· I felt tired and took time to rest a bit before getting back to work after lunch

· I walked around the block when I felt I needed to go outside

· I proposed to my friend that we have a phone call next week, as I feel like being a hermit this week.

· I listened to calming music when I felt anxious

· I prepared a delicious meal

· I took time to check in with myself on what I needed

· I did some stretching

Simply doing this will bring you three things:

1. You raise your awareness of how you treat yourself. You notice how often you show yourself kindness and how often you do not.
2. You show yourself you are paying attention to how you treat yourself. You show yourself that you care.
3. Because of the former two points, you automatically will start to tune in more to your inner guidance, to what you need, during the day.

Self-care and Self-leadership to create continuous attunement to your inner truth

There is some part of us that feels that life should just flow, run like clockwork, all by itself. We should be able to take good care of ourselves just naturally. Therefore we often avoid truly investing in this. We assume we know how to be kind to ourselves. We assume we know what it means, even though, most likely, we never learned. Or we keep feeling ‘entitled’ to receive good care from others and therefore fail to take responsibility for it ourselves.

To follow our inner truth, we must let go of these assumptions, take responsibility for ourselves, and commit to ourselves. If we want to continue to deepen our ability to attune to our inner compass, we must prioritize self-care and self-leadership.

As mentioned, kindness to self can be the basis of this. You already know and can feel what is right more often than you may think. You notice when things feel ‘off.’ You feel it when you are deviating from your path. For instance, when your mind thinks to know what’s best, but you feel an inner conflict inside of you, there is something inside of you asking for your attention.

Self-leadership means that you act and react to those hunches. You show yourself you are willing to take the actions needed to take care of yourself, to listen to yourself, and to let your inner truth unfold.

Kindness to self is a form of art

Kindness to self requires openness, embracing the unknown, and constant attunement to our inner guidance. It is like dancing or painting. The art of kindness requires constant creativity, taking breaks, waiting to take action, or taking action and not waiting. Most importantly, it requires your willingness to see and feel what is happening inside you.

You are not getting there with the self-care routines you may have used so far. Therefore we need to know what these routines are and gradually replace these with new, constructive patterns – releasing the old. This is what you’ll start doing when you implement the routine I described.

Your path is fluid

One reason we do not dare to follow our inner truth is that we so often feel that deciding to do something at this moment is a forever decision. While it is just a choice, and choices can be made every time, in every moment. However, we may be afraid it is seen as weak to change our minds – so we rather push away our inner truth and try to make things work for us without making the change WE / our SELVES really want. Or we wait to make choices, hoping first to get certainty or hoping life will make a choice for us so that we feel less responsible...

I call it ping-ponging through life

I listen to my inner truth, move there, and when I find out after one month (or a year, or whatever time) that there is something else to do, I move on. It does not even really matter if the reason I ‘need’ to change direction was that the first direction was ‘incorrect’ or not. It can be that the first direction was still somewhat influenced by conditioning, fear, or things outside of me. Or it was simply a step I needed to take to get ready for the next.

A beautiful way of embracing self-care and self-love is to BE DEDICATED to finding the inner compass and attuning it more and more to your inner truth along the way.

All that matters is that we make a choice; to feel what is right and go do that, commit to it fully. Not sobbing and feeling sorry for ourselves for having to make a change. Not clinging to how we think we would feel better if we were to go elsewhere or do otherwise. All it takes is trust in and commitment to self.

This helps us to live a life of gratitude. The moments we can make a choice - to do what is right for us -  our SELF is grateful and shows this in many, many ways.