When I heard that Oprah’s Monday Lifeclass was about listening to your OWN Whispers, I knew that it would be worth tuning into…and carefully listening to.  Like a whisper itself, these lessons are speaking and teaching with lessons that will stay with me…with all of us.  Speaking to us with whispers from other lives, Oprah makes it easy to understand that whispers don’t always come in voices.  Call it your inner voice, an instinct, a gut feeling, your moral compass…this is your whisper.  It is there…but sometimes the noise of life drowns it out.  Still yourself.  Read these notes.  Love yourself…enough to change your world.  Wake up and listen to your whispers.  Here are the notes…

• Listen to the whispers. It will change your life.
• Realize that your life is speaking to you all the time. All your experiences all day are speaking to you in whispers.  If you don’t get the whispers or hear what they are telling you, it gets louder in other ways.  It becomes more like a pebble or the thump upside the head – which usually presents itself in your life as a problem.  If you still don’t hear it, it presents itself like a brick upside your head – this would be something like a crisis. If you don’t pay attention to the brick, it becomes a disaster and then, the whole wall falls down on you. This is why it’s important to listen to the whispers.  It can change your life – help you avoid the thump and the brick.
• Case Study: Jaycee Dugard.   More than 60 times parole offices came to the house where she was being held captive and NOBODY at anytime felt the energy of that house or cared to look a little deeper into it.  It was not until 2 women on the University of Berkley campus were visited…and they heard the whispers and felt the energy and they DID SOMETHING about it.  It took 18 years and these two women who paid attention -University Police Officers Alison Jacobs and Lisa Campbell of the Berkley University Campus.  Lisa noticed the 2 young girls with the man and noticed “something’s not right.”  LESSON:  A whisper is not necessarily something in your ear and actually telling you something, it’s the FEELING that something’s not right. (hmm…that feels out of place.  wonder what’s going on.)  That one phone call that one of these women made changed Jayee Dugard and her daughter’s life – it freed them.
• A whisper is that gut feeling that something is a bit off, just not quite right. Listen to the feelings when you feel somethings not right…and listen to when your gut asks you, what was that?
• Instincts. Listen to them! Everybody as this gut instinct. Anybody who pays attention and who is an observer of the life around them has the ability to go inside and feel what they are feeling in any giving situation instead of being “numbed out” and walking through life and not paying attention to what is going on around you.
• Listen to your life’s guidance while it’s still a whisper so the brick wall doesn’t crash down on you.
• Case Study: Tracey Gold. In 2005, Tracey was arrested for driving under the influence. She had been at a Labor Day BBQ. At the end of the night, it was apparent her husband could’t drive home and she didn’t listen to her inner voice – and she drove home.  She didn’t listen to her own whisper.  Her code is that she doesn’t drink and drive AT ALL but on this night, she broke her own code.  She lost control of the car, went down the embankment, the SUV rolled over 3 times and one child was thrown from the car.  Injured in the car accident was her husband and 2 of her 3 children.  She was lucky.  “I didn’t listen to my inner voice because my own code of ethic is that I don’t’ drink and drive,” Tracey says.  “I didn’t listen.”
  By the time something like a car accident happens – this is the brick wall. Oprah asks her, “What was the original whisper? For this to happen in your life in this way means that it’s been whispering to you and it’s been coming and coming…in other forms and you did not pay attention and this is what it took for you to pay attention.”  Her answer:  “My inner instincts and my inner voice are good and when I listen to them, they lead me down the right path.”  LESSON:  Pay Attention.  Learn from other people’s mistakes.
• Oprah’s NO Phone ZONE: Texting and Driving.  How many people have to die before we get the lesson?  Don’t text and drive.  Make THIS your whisper.
• Our lives are filled with signs coming from all around us. Don’t ignore the things that tug at your attention.
• Everybody has whispers.  Everybody has that…”Hmmm” feeling.  The voices of the world – and that is everything you’re doing, all your stuff, all your to-do list, all the things that have to get done – the voices of the world will drown out the whispers, will drown out the voice of your intuition, the voice of God, if you let it and when that happens, that happens to show you that you are off course – you are off your life course – you are not paying attention because that is your real job – to pay attention to your life.
• Case Study -A Bad Relationship: Appearing on Oprah in 2006, Sheri told us that it took a lot of whispers and lessons before she began to suspect that her husband was secretly trying to poison her.  Married for 14 years, her husband was trying to poison her with rat poison in lots of different ways.  Ignoring many many whispers, she said “I didn’t want to think it was true.  He was my best friend. I ignored the signs.”  Listen to your WISE self.  Listen to the “hmmms” in your life. Trust  your gut. It it doesn’t make sense, it DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.
• Wake up and pay attention in life.  Everything that happens is signalling you to be a better you. The answers are there. Pay attention.