The importance of establishing strong inner foundations

Featuring insights from Women’s Empowerment Coach, Sally Jane Douglas.

Sister, you are being called on a journey—to build upon your inner foundations for strength, abundance and joy. Your inner foundations are your internal emotional and spiritual core from which you create and experience life. When these foundations are strong, your worth is not conditional to anything happening outside of you. It provides you with a solid, deep-rooted knowing which you can confidently rely on to guide you through life, and help you cope when things don’t go as planned.

Sally Douglas, Women’s Empowerment Coach, has been called to share with you about a powerful somatic experience where she received a very clear download of what she would call her inner foundations: Love, Trust, Knowing, Truth.

“When these four words came to me on repeat during this spiritual journey, I deeply felt they were here to guide me, however, I didn’t realise the potency of them until recently, one year on, as I’m navigating through an awakening and up-levelling of self. I invite you, sister, to try on these inner foundations and see how they fit and support you in your life.”

The Support Provided by Strong Inner Foundations

The truth is there are many ways in which strengthening your inner foundations can serve you in your day to day life. One such way is allowing yourself to follow what’s on your heart and do so from love, rather than from fear.

“I feel that strong inner foundations allow a deep sense of surrender and release of the misleading concept of control,” says Sally.

“Inner foundations of love, self-worth, trust, etc allow us to enjoy life in every dimension – the highs and the lows – while knowing that at our core, we are love and with love, we cannot be ‘misguided’ or choose the ‘wrong’ path. For myself, I have long believed that everything will always work out for me when I follow a path of integrity and service. This has enabled me to believe in and follow my wildest dreams which others believed were crazy or ridiculous.”

Many of you will relate to this experience of uncertainty and receiving judgement, either from others or even yourself due to a lack of self-belief. In contrast, when you have a deep-seated love, trust, knowing and truth in everything you do, it results in what is essentially faith in your own decisions, journey and being. A lack of doubt provides clarity, and it can create a deep sense of joy and fulfilment, through allowing yourself to feel content within the moment you’re currently in and enjoy the journey of where life will take you, without second-guessing your path. Although it does not mean that there won’t be challenges along the way, having these strong inner foundations in times of hardship enables you to evolve, knowing that these challenges bring you the experience you need to grow.

Sally explains that, “with each life lesson we are presented with, we have the opportunity to ignore its teachings and offering to grow, or to lean into what the experience is here to teach us and choose to instead go through the experience and feel it all, in order to embody the learnings which in turn strengthens and builds upon our foundations.”

“Having strong foundations allows us to navigate through what can often feel like muddy waters, stress or despair, and to come back to our innermost knowing of love and trust. This doesn’t mean we will avoid pain or turmoil, quite the opposite, we will experience this simply because we are human beings,” Sally continues.

“However, when we allow ourselves to drop out of our heads [into our core, our hearts] we will eventually land on our inner foundations that is, love.”

The Result of Disconnect from Inner Foundations

Without strong inner foundations, it’s often difficult to navigate your path and make confident decisions for yourself. You’ll likely experience a disconnect from your intuition, and struggle to set goals that are intrinsically aligned to your soul.

“Without inner foundations, we can be distracted by today’s society guiding us to experience ourselves as less than and not enough. It is our inner knowing and foundations that centre us and remind and reassure us that our sense of self comes from within. Without strong inner foundations, it could be easy to relate your sense of self with the external,” says Sally.

Unfortunately, there are too are many reasons why you or someone you know may experience a disconnect from their inner foundations and start defining their worth through external standards.

“Often it’s our most painful and traumatic experiences in life that have the power to shape how we perceive ourselves and our level of trust in ourselves,” says Sally. Difficult situations and unpleasant experiences also impact our willingness to trust, let go and be guided.

“It comes down to two choices. We either lead with love or fear. We choose to follow love or fear. We believe in love or in fear. And what I’ve experienced over and over again is that love leads from my body, my heart and my truth, and fear leads of my head, my ego and fictional mind stories. Love always wins simply because love is our truth.”

Tips for Building and Utilising Strong Inner Foundations

Now sister, this next step is yours. Here is Sally’s advice for building stronger inner foundations.

1. Feel the feelings that we prefer to avoid and aren’t commonly celebrated

Some examples are sadness, shame, fear, uncertainty and grief. Many of us are much more comfortable with feeling love, lust, joy, fun, and excitement making it easy to welcome them. You can learn from these feelings, of course. However, you can also learn so much from the feelings you deem negative, the feelings that feel uncomfortable, the feelings that aren’t readily welcomed.

“It is here we learn our triggers, what scares us and what we are attached to. We must be aware of all of this and understand it in order to override with self-love, trust, self-acceptance and strengthen our inner foundations. Remember, it’s in our darkest moments that we get to truly rely on ourselves and our foundations. We cannot avoid challenges in life. Likewise, we cannot avoid pain and seek only joy. When we suppress the uncomfortable and welcome only the comfortable, we are actually turning away both. When we reject one feeling, we dim all others.”

2. Trust that everything is happening for you, not to you

Although this can be more easily said than done sometimes, with the knowledge that everything is unravelling for you in divine time and sequence, it is easier to trust and confidently lean on your inner foundations within yourself.

“Choosing love over fear. Trusting everything is always working out for you. Knowing there is no wrong turn on your path. Allowing love and truth to guide you. This deeply strengthens our inner foundations,” says Sally.

3. Connect with soul sisters who support you, hold you and see you

When you are surrounded by people who love you and accept you for who you are, you are reflected back love which can help you to develop self-belief, self-acceptance and self-trust.

“A trusted social circle of women can nurture us home to ourselves and empower us to embrace ourselves and see our own light.”

Once you have implemented these steps to grow and build stronger inner foundations, utilising them will become easier to help cope when life happens.

“Practice and trust is the way. We cannot avoid the fact that ‘life will happen’ and there will be hard times. When these challenging times arise, we get to call on and remember it’s in these hardest and often darkest times that we get to truly rest on our inner foundations. And with every challenge comes a beautiful unravelling and a deeper understanding of self, which strengthens us and our foundations. And so it goes.”