Everyone has a voice within that is fresh, strong and free. Conditioning is the barrier to its expression. Conditioning around gender inhibits the freedom to be who we are, for both women and men. This post about how women can use writing to move beyond the conditioning they experience.

If women have been raised to believe that they don’t have the intelligence, power or place to make the big decisions required in life; to express views that run contrary to the dominant culture; or to unsettle; then they are silenced – from within. These learned unconscious beliefs form a restrictive mindset through which women’s personal thoughts are shaped and expressed. It also interferes with hearing innate wisdom in important realms of life, whether that be in regards to parenting, keeping safe, expressing creativity or developing financial independence.

Thankfully, wisdom emanating from the quieter corners of ourselves can at times be loud, loud enough to be heard, and hopefully loud enough to be followed. These ‘flag waving’ moments point to the existence of a powerful stream of thought, unpolluted from conditioning, that for most is unknown and untapped.

Over the years, my relationship with wisdom within has become more direct; my ability to recognise the interference of my conditioning more astute; and my courage to follow thoughts I previously discarded greater. Insights from wisdom within can come at any time, but in my experience can be cultivated through conscious journalling, whether that be to nudge my ‘mouse in a wheel’ thinking aside, to see the pervasiveness of a deeper belief in my life, or to explore new frontiers of understanding.  Below, I offer a few pointers to help women use personal writing to become more conscious of their innate uncontaminated stream of wisdom, the source of all positive change and true liberation.

Practise going deeper through writing. Practise ‘brain dumping’ the type of thinking you do all the time and ignoring its seriousness. Practise feeling for thoughts that feel heavily pregnant with newness, freshness and rightness. In personal writing that takes you deeper, you are not deliberately creating new thoughts or regurgitating those of others (although you may refer to them), you are allowing your own untapped potential to unfold. By opening up (discarding the thoughts you usually do), something new naturally surfaces. You simply have to wait, feel, listen and trust.

1. Write when you feel troubled, something in your day ‘sticks’ with you, when you have a question, or when you have an ‘aha’ moment and see something more clearly.
2. Write what you know – what you see, think and feel. Stay with what is real. Give voice to what you know fearlessly, with no critic, no thought police – just write your truth. You want to get into a stream of writing that feels like it gets closer and closer to the voice of you without the voices of your acquired conditioning.
3. Accept what you have written and don’t engage with self-doubting thoughts that arise. Experiment. Leave your writing at that point and go about your day living in the acceptance of that truth.
4. Don’t fall into justifying your truth. You don’t need to. Your truth is valid.
5. Write about what is right for you and stay out of writing what should be or would be right for others. If you stay with writing about what is right for you, your mind will naturally go deeper into a depth of you previously unexplored. We become richer human beings through tapping this unique vein. Deviate into writing about what you think is right for others is simply a learned habit that takes you away from you.
6. Go deeper into what feels right for you. If questions arise that relate to you, follow those threads, but again, don’t deviate into writing about others. Accept what comes.
7. If your usual ‘mouse in the wheel’ thinking is so strong that you can’t move beyond it, then vent it on the page. This type of ‘brain dump’ can serve to ‘unblock the pipes’. But it is not where you will discover something new from within which when revealed, leaves you with a deeper sense of who you are. Like a water diviner, you want to get below the surface, locate the ‘mother lode’ that is you and tap it.

I hope these ‘pointers help. They represent what I have learned over decades of journal and personal writing enhanced through an encounter with an understanding of thought, innate wisdom and feelings of peace and presence as universal human ‘divining rods’. Slow down, go within through writing, and slowly your life will change. Probably not along the fast, consumer-driven pace of life that society espouses, but assuredly along innate unique truths that support human health, compassion and contentment.