1. Name the question or issue. Articulate for yourself and the universe the thing you want to discern.
2. Frame the parameters of your discernment (i.e., specify the guidance you are seeking as specifically as possible)
3. Slow down, in any way possible. Try to build quiet time, even five minutes, into every day. It can also be tweaking a current routine to provide a little more stillness and calm than you would otherwise experience. My personal example is making an intentional commitment to have total silence in my car when I drive. I haven't QUITE gotten my kids on board with this one, bless their bones, but after daycare drop off or on the way to pick them up, and any other moments I snag alone in the car, I avoid distractions (phone, radio, whatever) and do my best to sneak some zen.
4. Mine for information. Use any techniques accessible to you to spend time in specific reflection on how you got here, what that process was like, and draw strength from the fact that you've inevitably been at crossroads before. Harness those moments of stillness to try and look back on seminal moments, questions, people, or events that might help you distill your thoughts or feelings about a particular situation. Julia Cameron has some amazing exercises in her fantastic book The Artist's Way. She encourages people to go back as far as childhood as we seek to understand more completely our impulses, hopes, fears and inhibitions. Excavating your initial impulse in many situations can be key in helping us understand where we are now and were we hope to go.
5. Train your inner eye. By this, I mean rather than going backward as in mining, try to develop a way to begin gain, articulate, and project a vision for the future. One common way is by actually creating a vision board with images and/or text that you feel represents the direction or destination you are seeking. I love just forming a visual track in my head, like a film short, of the situation I am in, but deliberately resolved in the most perfect way. I imagine with precision a day in the life I am heading toward, and it is an awesome and calming and inspiring way to end the day. It's also picked me up when I've been in the doldrums.. I believe getting our brains in gear (literally) and having our neurons spend time in that happy and fulfilled place is a powerful tool and can also provide us an ongoing stream of information about our current situations as well as articulating specific desires about the future we desire.
6. Keep a record. Writing things down helps. Period. The intentionality of getting something out of your brain and onto the page is so helpful. And it can be a great processing tool over weeks, months, or years as we come to love the journey that discernment is. How amazing to have a record of the powerful yet sometimes slow process of enlightenment!
7. Train your outer eye. Jung calls it synchronicity, but lots of us just call it paying attention. These are the moments when you feel that things, people, events, or random occurrences in the world around you are "dropping bread crumbs" on your path to the future. Hopefully our futures will turn our much better than the proverbial Hansel and Gretel, though admittedly most of us will get similarly stuck (hopefully not with a cannibalistic witch though) sometime along the way. The crumbs may be as small as a relevant song playing on the radio, or as big as a surprise inheritance dropping in your lap the day your tuition is due. From scoring a long shot interview to noticing the weird moment that the sun shines on you, there is so much to see and consider. And as a side note, I think training your outer eye can also be quite painful. Sometimes we finally see something we couldn't before. Not always easy, yet equally important to acknowledge.
8. Remember that risk is always rewarded. Once you feel like you have even a small inkling of the direction you are headed, go ahead and take at least a small step. The experience and the feelings associated with moving in a direction will teach you so much. If you feel drawn to a person, ask she or he out. The worst they can say is no, and then you've discerned something with much greater clarity than you had before. On a the journey towards discernment, risk is our friend, rewarding us with better and deeper knowledge than before, and that's even in the worst case scenarios. In the best case scenarios you have more information AND a solid step in the direction of your dreams.
9. Keep moving. Remember it's a process, and you have to take things one step at a time, but you also have to keep those steps coming to actually move forward. So don't let up even when the next decision is made. The process will continue, and the more you can maintain your flow, the faster you will find yourself in the latest and greatest iteration.
10. Learn to embrace the fullness of time. This one is the hardest for me but also the most poignant. I tend to wait for no decision (nor man, nor child, but that's a different thing). But the longer I live and try to do the work I feel called to do, the more I realize that things will manifest and materialize with the fullness of time, and we have little to no control over when that may be. All we can do is be faithful in our process of seeking out direction and clarity, and be willing to sit with questions while diligently staying awake to the world and the resolutions therein. I suppose the up side is with all that waiting also comes the beauty when peace and clarity finally do arrive, in whatever way that occurs. In the meantime, the promise of that fulfillment keeps the waiting game fresh.
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