What is inner work?
Inner work is the psychological and spiritual practice of diving deep into our inner self for the purpose of self-exploration, self-understanding, healing and spiritual transformation.When we do inner exploration, we illuminate with the light of awareness our inner landscape, which is composed of the various layers of our mind: the conscious, subconscious and unconscious realms.Our inner self is made up of hidden feelings, memories, thoughts, beliefs, prejudices, wounds, shadows and other mental and emotional conditions that affect our ability to transform and feel whole at the core level. By doing work on ourselves, we will be able to overcome the fears, limitations, addictions, depressions, loneliness and feelings of not being whole that tend to plague us as human beings.
25 signs that we need to practice inner work
Here are some well-known warning signs:
- We feel lost in life
- We no longer know who we are
- We feel lonely and like a stranger coming into the world
- We often argue with others
- We are always able to please people
- We are not confident in being ourselves
- We have low self-esteem
- Our thoughts are almost constantly negative and self-critical
- We constantly feel unmotivated and “flat.”
- We are going through a spiritual crisis.
- We suffer from chronic health problems
- We can’t sleep well
- Life doesn’t seem real
- We experience a sense of hopelessness
- We experience a sense of emptiness
- We have bursts of intense anger or sadness
- We believe the world is against us
- We struggle to trust others (or ourselves)
- We keep repeating the same mistakes
- We keep attracting the wrong people into our lives
- We are self-destructive and self-sabotaging
- We have a strong addictive drive
- We have many strong emotional triggers
- We struggle with high levels of anxiety or panic
- We always want to be alone or surrounded by others (to escape ourselves).
The more signals we can refer to, the more we need to do inner work.