5 Signs You’re Disconnected From Your Higher Self

Our spiritual journey spans our entire lifetime. There will be moments when you feel fully connected with your Higher Self, but there will also be spans of time when your connection to your highest calling and greatest potential slips from your grasp. This sense of having lost the thread can appear in many different ways, some of them so subtle that we may not even be aware that we have wandered from our purpose.

Thankfully, the Higher Self is a source of consistent wisdom that is always available to us. Below we’ll highlight some of the instances where we have disconnected from that wisdom and the ways in which the Higher Self can steer us back to our center.

Related: What is the Higher Self?

1) Feeling lost, without direction or purpose

There are times in our lives when we feel in touch with our purpose, potential, and path. We can have months, even years of feeling like we are riding the momentum of our life with skill and direction. If this sense of fulfillment goes on continuously for a long enough time, we may even forget that not having that sense of clarity is a very possible reality of existence.

Any number of occurrences can derail us from our path: the natural conclusion of a given arc of our life, a shift in external circumstances beyond our control - even a healthy dose of personal growth can force us in an entirely new direction.

This sense of disorientation can appear in our lives as a spectrum of feelings. We could be experiencing a creeping sense of anxiety, or conversely, we may feel listless and ambivalent. Whatever the symptom, the cause is a general sense that your life, in its current state, is not set up in service of your life’s greater purpose.

How the Higher Self Can Help: One of the central benefits of working with the Higher Self is that the insights you receive are deeply, intrinsically, and undeniably unique to you. The Higher Self, being part you and part Source, does not speak in generalities that work for the many but rather provides you with a distinct, often quite practical, understanding of your specific path. Your spirit has a higher purpose in this world, and should you lose the thread of embracing or uncovering what that may be, your Higher Self will be there to serve you in revealing its invaluable higher truth.

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2) Repeating the same negative thoughts and habits

We all know the moment when someone close to us expresses, either affectionately or through sheer annoyance, that we are, in fact, doing that thing we do. Perhaps, before we even made the incriminating statement or took the more careless action, we ourselves knew that we were firmly carrying out a pattern that in another moment we would have worked to overcome.

Why in some moments do we feel so capable of growth and expansion and in other moments do we feel so unwilling to embrace personal growth? Patterns wouldn't be patterns if they didn’t repeat themselves. They can be insidious in nature, sneaking back in right when we feel as though we have vanquished them.

Related: 5 Meditation Techniques to Stop Negative Thought Patterns

This sense of having succumbed to a negative thought or behavioral pattern can create a sense of personal defeat that then perpetuates itself. Once we step back into our old tendencies, we may enjoy the comfort and ease of not having to challenge ourselves, even as those around us perhaps become more and more frustrated with our stagnation.

How the Higher Self Can Help: The Higher Self is your number one cheerleader.  Because the Higher Self is committed to embodying your greatest potential, there will always be a flame shining in service of the best version of yourself. Those with experience working with this tradition may share that the Higher Self has a way of working that is so supportive and joyful that you cannot help but want to do your very best.

At the end of the day, the Higher Self is here to remind you that no matter how “good” it may feel to let the old pattern come back to roost, the feeling of growth, expansion, and maturation is in some ways, the ultimate human experience.

3) Feeling busy all the time

The study of Buddhism defines boredom in two ways - hot boredom and cold boredom. Cold boredom describes the sensation in the way we are most familiar with, a kind of depressive, lazy, disinterested feeling. Hot boredom, however, occurs when we create a world of tasks, distractions, and complications in order to mask the discomfort of not feeling engaged or challenged in our world.

The mind is far too willing to create a world of obstacles to protect us from feeling anything that could cause pain to our delicate, sensitive ego. Of course, there are moments in life when our world becomes flooded with tasks, and our time for self-reflection becomes limited; but chances are that with a touch of self-reflection, you will be able to tell the difference.

True engagement with a world that is busy and full would be packed with sensations both nuanced and intense. Should you notice that your business feels contrived and dull, your mind may be using “hot boredom” to avoid what is perceived as threatening or unpleasant emotions.

How the Higher Self Can Help: The Higher Self is nothing if not a well of compassion and care. As your ultimate guide and advocate, your Higher Self is eager to move you through life’s challenges with compassion and gentleness.

When our guard is up, it can be difficult to get to a place where we are willing and able to receive support of this nature. Ironically, this is exactly when we are most in need of our Higher Self’s loving wisdom.

However brief the moment may be, allow yourself to touch into the vulnerability that allows you to accept help. From that place, see if you can clear the air of busyness and work with the Higher Self to get to the root cause of whatever it is you are avoiding.

4) You don't make time for the things that bring you joy

Today’s world is full of sorrow and heartbreak. If you’re paying any attention at all, it can be easy to get lost in the despondency that occurs as we go through our lives in these seemingly impossible sets of modern circumstances.

It’s easy to take the attitude that because suffering abounds in the world, we should not allow joy into our personal experience. This is a false equivalency, and in fact, by closing off our life to joy we are in some way contributing to the despondent energy that haunts our times.

Higher Self Yoga founder Nanette V. Hucknall frequently speaks about the importance of connecting with joy. As a landscape painter, the combination of nature and art fills her with a sense of possibility and lightness. When we are avoiding the joy of life, it is possible that we are once again, mitigating our experience in order to bypass some aspects of our world that we are not willing to feel.

How the Higher Self Can Help: Your Higher Self wants you to experience your absolute best possible life. While this may mean that there are challenging, even difficult moments where you are moving into new areas of personal potential, it does not mean that you are tasked with living a life without joy. On the contrary, the Higher Self will guide you into an existence where you're able to regularly and easily access the joys of everyday life.

Connect with your Higher Self and ask, What brings me joy? Chances are, the aspects of your world that truly bring you happiness are not grandiose, external circumstances, but basic, nurturing norms that feed your creative, awakened spirit.

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5) Feeling bitterness or resentment towards others

When we are unhappy with our own state of being it becomes second nature to turn a cold eye to those around us we perceive as having it all. Rationally, we know that everyone is given a specific set of challenges and that it is impossible to know what those around us have or will experience in their lifetimes. But in the moment, it's very easy to project our feelings of dissatisfaction onto those around us.

How the Higher Self Can Help: One of the beautiful but also sometimes challenging aspects of working with the Higher Self is that your Higher Self is singularly interested in working with you, about you. Your work with the Higher Self is not in service of making others more considerate, more accessible, or more compassionate.

The motto, you can’t change other people, you can only change your reaction to them, would definitely apply to the tactics of the Higher Self. If you are feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with yourself and your life, the Higher Self is here to guide you in how to address that issue.