How I Surfaced the Voice of My Soul

Hello, I’m Maggie Battista. I’m a storyteller, strategist, ritualist, facilitator, and mentor.

I am also an advocate for surfacing the voice of your soul, or the inner voice. It’s a beautiful and ancient tool that exists within you to help you grow, to help you heal or remember your wholeness, to help you find closure, to help you hold yourself through change, to help you find or allow all the answers that you’re looking for outside of yourself, to help you allow those answers to surface from within.

The voice of your soul is the calm and all-knowing wisdom and language that surfaces from within when we get quiet and listen.

Today, I’m sharing how I surfaced the voice of my own soul.

The short of it is, the inner voice will rise to the surface when you choose to listen. It is up to you to get quiet. It is up to you to still yourself and allow breath and energy to move through the body so that you may remember your own soul’s voice, which is also the voice of your original self.

The surfacing of my soul’s voice has happened in stages over a lifetime but I promise it will not take you that long to surface your own inner voice. I have prioritized surfacing and studying the voice of my soul over the last seven years and it’s very easy to surface. In fact, it’s just waiting for you to listen to it.

I want to give you a little background on me to understand my journey.

I have been a writer since childhood. I’ve always been connected to my imagination and to the various voices within my body.

Once I hit puberty though, my mind's voice ran my life and it did so for a very long time. The mind's voice is one of fear, trauma, worry and concern for our wellbeing. And in my life, my mind had every right to be concerned.

The mind is impatient and urgent and anxious and also strategic. It is not bad but it does seek to predict and control the external to try to maintain peace internally. And my mind has run most of my life.

But seven years ago, I heard a call to reconnect with another voice within, not the voice of the mind, but something else that wanted to rise. The voice was what I learned to call the inner voice but what I now call: the soul’s voice.

I studied the voice of the soul through working with various teachers, reading various books, and most acutely with Jess Lively who provides inner voice facilitator training. But I’ve taken this practice, my practice, in a slightly different direction to guide my healing, my homecoming, and my rising.

It began with stillness and journaling, just like any of us do today. If you’re watching this video, you may journal frequently too. But the words that flow onto paper during a classic journaling session, the first words, they are not typically from the soul’s voice; we most often journal from the mind, to rid the mind of unnecessary or complicated thoughts, to work out those thoughts.

My journey to surface the soul’s voice involved three distinct steps:

First, I began writing to the inner voice, asking it questions. I would write a question onto the page. And then, I would close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, ask the question aloud, and allow the response in the form of words to surface behind my eyes. At the start, it was often just one word replies.

“Yes”

“No”

“Yes and No”

In fact, I first saw the replies to my questions in my head, written on lined paper, the sort we’d write on in elementary school. The soul’s voice showed me words written in cursive hand writing on those lined pieces of paper in my mind.

Second, I went out into nature. I was actually called to be alone in nature, and that's when I heard my inner voice speak voluntarily for the first time. Now, it didn’t speak aloud. It spoke within me, I would hear its words in my head. On that first walk, it welcomed me to the awareness of it and invited me to be with it often.

Third, and eventually, I more easily distinguished between the mind's voice and the soul's voice and could speak between those voices. And I naturally allowed the inner voice to lead that dialogue.

First, it was in my head, and shortly thereafter, I spoke between both voices aloud. It was as if I was carrying out a conversation between the parts of me, just out loud with language.

Through it all, I learned that the soul's voice is kind and compassionate, like a warm blanket ready to hold me or a gold platform ready to uplift me and launch me toward adventure.

The soul’s voice is discerning but it doesn't judge nor hold you liable for fearful or weird or tender thoughts. You are always innocent to the inner voice, always, and it will treat you as such. It will hold you with kid gloves. It is delicate and careful.

If you hear anything that is not delicate nor careful nor compassionate nor calm, it's likely the mind's voice. That's the clearest way to distinguish them at the start. Now, after lots of practice, sometimes, the soul’s voice can get more direct or pointed or blunt, but that comes in time. It doesn’t always begin that way. It often wants to start tenderly and become grand and wise as you allow it.

Generally, my inner voice offers or channels messages directly from my soul quite easily. But I've been doing it for a long time. I often know there's a message wishing to rise, to surface, when there's a feeling that needs to get unstuck in the body or, in my case, when I feel tears come to the surface and want to spill from my eyes.

The mind may sense a feeling in the body and build a story around it to strengthen it. The body may feel tears which often represent a type of contrast between what the mind believes and what the soul knows.

Either way, however it presents for you, the feeling could be a strong emotion or a kind of pain or an old trauma from this lifetime, a previous one or your lineage. The inner voice invites you to breathe into that pain, into that emotion, to allow the out-breath, the exhale, the elongated exhale, to break it into smaller pieces or to move it completely so the truth, a true message, a kind of wisdom, may surface.

And that message or wisdom may be as simple as “This is painful,” with no further meaning. Or you may unleash an aria, an opus, a novel, a long message of wisdom and tenderness.

As that feeling arises, as the inner voice helps you move that energy, you get unstuck or unclogged or freed or liberated and in a tiny way, you heal.

And if you do it enough times, you can heal yourself. I know that to be true because it happened to me.

Now, ideally, in addition to surfacing your soul’s voice, you also bring in other supportive nervous system practices to encourage the process along and build a deep bench of modalities to support your healing, your home coming and your rising.

Some of the other modalities in my bench are:

Body movement (of any kind, from walking to yoga to dancing)

Breath work

Meditation

Therapy, any kind that resonates with you like cognitive behavioral therapy or somatic emotional release therapy

We don't do these practices to numb out or distract (like one may go to gym to distract the mind, another may go the gym to work through thoughts in the mind) but we do it to continue to move energy, to always be moving energy, Always Moving Energy, AME.

And moving energy so my wisdom or truth may rise from my soul’s voice, well, that feels like one of my full time jobs now.

Today, my inner voice shares messages when there is pain, when there is emotion and/also when there is simply curiosity or a desire for greater understanding or perspective. It often shares messages when there is magic or a synchronicity to notice, too.

And just to be clear, I sit down and journal to hear my inner voice less frequently, though it does still happen. Recently, I was in another country and my inner voice came through with long lessons and messages only through journaling, so I carried paper and pencil with me everywhere.

But more so today, I will be in meditation and I will feel or hear that the inner voice wishes to offer a message. I simply take a few deep breaths and invite the voice of my soul to speak and it speaks aloud.

And I gotta say, I still am surprised and delighted when I ask it to rise and it rises with such tender and compassionate words, often with phrases I may not have put together with my mind, but it's always perfection even in its imperfection.

It always chooses the right words. It’s me but better.

I’m sharing a lot more about the voice of the soul. I’m doing this because:

It has changed my life.

It has helped me remember my wholeness.

It has helped me come home to myself.

It has helped me rise or become my truest self, my most authentic self, my most integrated self.

It has shown me that the answers for any question are always within me.

It has taught me to trust me, completely, to trust the highest intelligence within.

And, it has launched me toward adventure and a far better life than I could have ever imagined.

And now, I live a life almost entirely guided by my soul. And I will tell you about that, too.

Thanks for reading. And I’ll be back again very, very soon.