If you aren’t sure how to identify the voice that comes from Spirit and/or your higher self, the easiest way to tell is by evaluating the feelings that come with it. Messages from Spirit and your higher self will always come with a sense of peace. You may have a “what-if” response that causes you to feel fear and anxiety, but the message itself will never have those feelings attached to it. Messages from Spirit and our higher self always come with feelings of peace and well-being. Even if they guide us to be cautious about something, it will still come with a sense of peace and protection; their message will never be that we have something to fear.
For instance, we may feel nudged to do something out of our comfort zone. Our ego will likely react fearfully at first, but the original message itself is not one of fear. Our ego may respond with self-limiting beliefs and concerns about risks and those are the statements that cause to feel fearful.
This can be difficult to discern at first. We spend so many years running from ourselves that we have a habit of ignoring what’s happening in our mind, so we tend to reflexively act in accordance with our ego’s direction without registering the thought(s) that happened between an event and an emotion (positive or negative). We perceive that the event is what caused our emotion and react to that thing accordingly when the actual cause for our emotion is the thought we had (and ignored) about the event. This habit has become ingrained in most of us to the point that we progress from event to reaction so rapidly that there’s little opportunity to even observe all the steps in the process, much less evaluate them before reacting. This habit is what creates instability in our inner and outer worlds, as well as confusion and regret about choices we make. “Why did I do that?” we wonder, because we aren’t aware of all the little steps along the way.
It takes some effort to change this habit, but again, not as much as you might think. We just need to slow ourselves down, turn inward, and notice the thoughts we’re having that precede the emotions. Then our higher self can evaluate them, remind the ego that it’s safe and cared for, and help us shift our thinking to what’s true and serves our highest good, rather than the fearful assumptions that typically leads to self-defeating and self-sabotaging choices. This change was too difficult to make when we were afraid to look within, but now that we remember who we are and understand the truth of what’s happening within, it’s no longer frightening to look at it.
Conscious awareness is an extremely useful technique here (my personal favorite teacher about this is Eckhart Tolle). Once we’re receiving ALL the information and evaluating it wisely, the difference between the voices becomes very obvious. We are now empowered to make our choices with confidence and the improved outcomes we experience reinforce our efforts, allowing us to quickly form new habits. Even when circumstances occur where the ego is significantly triggered and reacts before we’re able to handle the situation the way we’d prefer, our new skills and habits that we developed with small challenges enable us to reign ourselves back in pretty quickly. We prevent the escalation we were so familiar with in the past, and any problem we’ve created with our hasty reaction can likely be solved without much difficulty (especially with our higher self driving, since unlike the ego, its sense of self is not threatened by admissions of wrongdoing nor diminished by apologies).