When my oldest started preschool, I started asking her every day at dinner how her day was. At first, she would just say, "Pretty good," and when I would try to elicit more information about what happened during her day, she could never remember anything. After some trial and error, I realized she just needed an entry point to access her own memories. Asking about her whole day was too broad. So I would lead her through visualizing her day. I knew they started with circle time, where they would sit on the floor on their little carpet squares and sing some songs. So I would ask her who she sat by and what songs they sang, then what happened right after circle time. Eventually she understood the level of detail I was looking for, and entered into the habit of narrating her entire day from start to finish. She is now in college and still does this when I ask how her day was. I cherish it. And her little sister was born into this habit and does the same thing.
As they've grown, the problems they encounter in their days have become more complex, and it is such a privilege to enter into the details of my children's lives to help them with making decisions. I have an acute sense of being a guide or a sherpa to them, helping them in a loving and supportive but somewhat hands-off way to think through their choices and to understand their roles to various people in their lives. Doing so helps me to clarify my own beliefs, because I have to explain them simply and clearly. One of my guideposts for them (although I'm also trying to still learn how to practice this fully myself) is that when you make a difficult decision, your heart, your mind, and your gut should all agree. That is simple enough conceptually, but how do you ask your heart, your mind, and your gut what they think? And how do you hear the answer? That is the hard part.
I think that for most people, the mind speaks the loudest; it is the most concrete of the 3 voices; it speaks in the language of logic. It feels unimpeachable. But its dictates are meaningless if not aligned with the quieter, even wordless languages of the heart and the gut. So how do you learn to listen to them, align them? The answer may be different for everyone, but for me, writing my thoughts out is perhaps the most reliable method. The mind is not absent from this process, and it doesn't need to be; alignment involves all 3 voices and they cannot be separated from each other. But the heart and the gut also step forth in this process and modulate the message in a way I cannot fully articulate. But I know they do.
Running has also taught me something about asking myself questions and interpreting the answers. Whenever I set a new goal for my running, the goal is a question that I pose to my body. The question is always, "Can you do this?" It is in attempting to accomplish the goal that I pose that question to my body, and its performance is my answer. I adjust accordingly.
I think that asking your heart and your gut what you should do in a certain situation is like that. Sometimes you simply ask them by trying a course of action and seeing how they respond-- then you have your answer. Sometimes you have to live your way into clarity.
