Inner work is important to free ourselves from the past. And I usually advocate going deep, working on our inner life, and healing the deeper causes of our problems to free ourselves from our old conditioning.

But not all inner turbulence we experience is old pain or inner wounds. And that is important to remember.

Sometimes the emotional pain and even physical symptoms we experience are guidance. They are signs from our inner guidance system that we need to listen to.

That guidance tells us when something is wrong, when we need to pay attention or take action, or when we shouldn’t be in an environment or around certain people.

The more we have freed ourselves from old beliefs, emotional patterns, and traumas, the clearer the inner guidance becomes.

At the beginning of our awakening journeys, it is more likely that the cause of the negativity we experience is internal.

When we haven’t done much inner work, there is usually a lot that we need to look at, heal, process, and let go of to hear our inner guidance and distinguish between old wounds and that guidance. And we can allow the negativity to guide us inward to work with our old pain.

But when we have come a long way on our awakening journeys and start to experience a lot of inner turbulence, it is more likely that the cause is external.

The feelings, symptoms, and reactions we experience don’t always have a deeper cause other than our situation.

And then, it is important to trust ourselves and what we experience instead of doubting what we feel or looking for a deeper reason.

When we have been on the path for a long time, we are used to taking responsibility for how we feel and working on the deeper issues. But we may need to recognize when it is time to stop working on ourselves and instead trust our inner guidance without questioning it.

We don’t do the inner work to stay in bad situations and try to make ourselves feel better about them, but to be able to choose better circumstances in the first place. Or to know when we have chosen the wrong ones and make changes.

One of the benefits of having done the inner work is that we can know more quickly when a person, a job, or a circumstance is not right for us – if we trust the guidance.