6 things you need to know about your inner genius

Becoming one’s true self means revealing one’s innate genius. — Michael Meade

1.

You have one.

She goes by many names. Inner genius. Deep self. Intuition. North Star. Inner voice. Muse. Spirit. Creative intelligence. Higher Power.

I like ‘daimon’, myself.

The ancient Greeks saw the daimon as a spirit who lived deep within the human psyche.

Mythology has it that each soul comes to earth encoded with a special mission, which it forgets as soon as it enters the stratosphere and must spend its life-on-earth rediscovering. The daimon is a kind of cosmic travelling companion and spiritual familiar meant to help the soul stay on track. She can be a force of creation or destruction (she can get seriously pissed), depending on whether the soul heeds or denies her subtle instructions.

She’s a badass.

(Over time, the daimon divided into the angel who sits on one shoulder and the devil who sits on the other.)

You don’t actually have to believe this stuff. Treat it as a metaphor for your unconscious. At any given point in time, your unconscious is processing a zillion bits of information that your conscious mind can’t handle. It’s blending things together and making loose associations and working over problems and figuring out what you should do with your life, based on the information acquired from your experiences and the way those experiences made you feel. Its aim is to point you toward what feels good (hot fudge sundae, love, meaningful experience, doing what you’re good at) and away from what feels bad (anything that might eat you).

2.

She communicates in code.

Your daimon does not believe in straightforward communication. That would just make things too easy.

Your daimon is like that really hot man or woman who casts you alluring glances and disappears into the shadows, beckoning you to follow, because she totally likes to play mindgames like that.

The soul has to figure out its special life purpose on its own. That’s the only way it can grow and evolve and learn whatever it needs to learn in order to fulfill the sacred contract that brought it here in the first place. In that great lesson, that growth and transformation, lies the meaning of your life.

The daimon won’t do your work for you. You have to actively co-create your own existence – and make your own meaning.

The unconscious lives in the part of the brain that has no language. It is nonverbal, nonlinear, big-picture: it flashes on the forest all at once, instead of walking from tree to tree to tree. When it wants to get your attention, it puts a dream or an image or a hunch into a mental bottle and lobs it up into your conscious. Or it filters incoming stimuli so that you will, as they say, see signs: things in the outside world that seem to link together in uncanny ways, creating a pattern of meaning just for you (Jung called this ‘synchronicity’).

3.

The day-to-day world gets in her way.

There’s the story embedded deep in your soul – the story of your real, true life – and then there’s the story that everybody else would have you live out.

At any given time, we face a choice: to forge our own path, work out our own story, or fit ourselves to the agendas of others.

The soul would have us find our singular purpose.

Mass culture would deny that purpose and promote the same goals for everyone.

To find and follow your purpose, you have to turn down the volume of the culture.

The kind of creative thinking that draws from the wealth of the unconscious happens on a different frequency than practical, everyday thinking. The alert and vigilant and (somewhat) focused state of mind that daily life requires to complete that to-do list is not conducive to creativity.

If anything, the creative state of mind (dreamy, loose, slow, relaxed, absorbed) and the pragmatic state of mind are polar opposites.

To get out of ‘pragmatic’ and into ‘creative’ requires a downshift in brain waves. It’s why meditation is so helpful. It’s why naps are a good idea. It’s why so many of our best ideas and insights pop off when we’re zoning in the shower, or driving or running or doing some other repetitive activity that puts our conscious minds on automatic. When the conscious mind settles down, the mental gatekeepers get off work and the unconscious comes out to play.

4.

She will take you away from what you know.

Every hero’s journey starts with a separation. To follow your calling, you have to leave the ordinary world behind and venture into uncharted territory. The old idea of you, shaped by external voices and internalized as your own distorted view of yourself, has to die so that a new reality may emerge.

You can’t find yourself if you never get lost.

Tara Sophia Mohr points out in her post 7 Surprising Ways to Discover Your Calling that one way to recognize your calling is when you don’t have everything you need and you aren’t yet the person that you need to be.

That’s kind of the point.

You have to start before you’re ready. You have to get beyond your comfort zone. Only on the journey can you overcome the obstacles and acquire the skills, knowledge and self-knowledge that will get you to your destination.

The journey owns you.

And that’s a good thing.

5.

You will resist her.

If it was easy to create cool epic shit, to be authentic and original, then everybody would do it….

6.

She demands discipline and mastery.

…which is why you need a disciplined mind. Caroline Myss says that your inner creative badass, your daimon, is always speaking to you, guiding you, telling you what actions to take.

And they’re often little actions.

Sometimes they don’t even seem all that creative.

They’re about sending that email or taking that seminar or cleaning out your closet or paying your bills or any of the other mundane activities that, left unfinished, clutter up your headspace and distract and annoy you. They scatter your focus. They prevent you from getting to your real work.

Creative work also happens in little actions. Writing that page. And another and another until eventually you have a novel. Small actions, taken consistently over time, that don’t seem to be making any difference until they accumulate into something extraordinary: the so-called big bang, overnight success, quantum leap.

Listening to your daimon about the small things, and training yourself to complete those tasks one after the other after the other, is a practice. It strengthens your willpower and attunes you to your inner voice.

So when your daimon has something big to say – you can hear it.

And when she points you to the challenge of your life – you’ll be ready.