Listen to Yourself
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
“For to be wise is only one thing—to fix our attention on our intelligence, which guides all things everywhere.” - Heraclitus
You’ve seen this pattern often enough that it no longer surprises you, yet it remains the central tragedy of human life.
A patient sits across from me with newly diagnosed hypertension or diabetes. They nod. They understand. They repeat back the instructions. Fewer sugars. Less inflammatory food. Take the meds. Walk daily. Lose some weight. Sleep better. And somewhere inside them, a wiser voice agrees. It knows this is manageable. It knows this is reversible. It knows what’s at stake.
Then months pass.
They stop the medication. They skip reviews. They get back to old habits because change feels demanding and discipline hard. You only live once, right? We usually call this laziness or stubbornness. But those words are too weak and inconclusive to my liking. They don’t explain why a rational person would willingly destroy the only body they will ever own.
The writer Steven Pressfield gave this force a name- Resistance.
Resistance is an active, malevolent force. Pressfield himself succumbed to its allure for 32yrs before writing his first novel. It’s the invisible gravity that kicks in the moment you try to move from a lower level of existence to a higher one. It doesn’t just want you to stay still; it wants you to sleep. It wants you unconscious to your potential.
And years later, the cost arrives- kidney failure, a stroke, a silent heart attack. Often fatal. Often preventable. The tragedy is never ignorance. You knew what to do. The main problem is disobedience to better judgment.
Ignoring the problem feels easier than reorganizing a life around it.
This is how what Carl Jung called the Shadow self works everywhere, not just in medicine.
Jung famously warned, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
When you ignore the wiser voice in your head you’re feeding this Shadow. This is the dark, repressed side of your psyche. When you deny its power over you, it doesn’t disappear. It just goes into the basement and lifts weights. It grows stronger in the dark.
The Shadow argues for readiness. It promises comfort. It whispers, “You can start tomorrow.” But it’s lying. The Shadow knows that tomorrow is the code word for never.
Listening to your higher self feels strange because it often contradicts what you want in the moment. It asks you to choose action before motivation appears. It asks you to inconvenience yourself now so you don’t suffer later. It feels unnatural because it requires planning, restraint, and consistency. And yet it’s the only voice that has ever wanted your long-term good.
This is why rituals matter.
You don’t rely on morning willpower when you plan your day the night before. Clothes laid out. Tasks chosen. One clear priority set. You wake up into motion instead of negotiation. You reduce friction so reason can lead. Before social events, you set an intention- to listen more, to speak with care, to love, to leave people better than you found them. You don’t improvise virtue. You prepare for it.
Philosophically, this voice has always been known. The ancients called it your daimōn. Not a mystical force hovering above you, but the rational guide within you. The part that sees farther. The part that knows the order of things. The part that urges you toward growth, responsibility, and service.
When you ignore it, life becomes chaotic and reactive. When you follow it, life grows fun, intelligible and workable.
Over time, obedience to this inner guide produces something rare. Something wonderful. You trust yourself. You stop creating avoidable crises. Health stabilizes. Relationships improve. Work compounds. Peace arrives as a byproduct of alignment. Joy follows effort well spent. Prosperity grows from consistency.
Your daimōn does not promise you ease. In fact, prepare for a life of strife. What it does is promise you meaning. And if you listen, it will indeed shape you into someone capable, someone interesting, someone eminent- as you were destined to be.
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P.P.S: Most people loved the series on How to Deepen Your Friendships, Part I, Part II & Part III. Also check out the practical entries on How To Deal With Toxic People, How to Process & Overcome Grief & How to Prevent and Overcome Burnout. Happy reading!
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It’s is very true
Many times sickness comes from silencing ourselves. When we don’t listen to who we truly are, to what we really want to do or say, when we make ourselves smaller just to fit into the community, the body speaks instead.