I was involved in a discussion on social media recently; one of those totally random engagements with complete strangers whom I will never cross paths with again, yet had a compelling urge to connect to for a flash of time.
One of those.
I was hooked into this one by the curiousness of her statement. She stated that her intuition has told her to have a c-section ‘knowing her baby was too big to birth’. Doctors had refused, her labour halted and off she went for her section.
Well, a few of us jumped straight onto this. ‘That’s not your intuition, that’s your belief’. We petitioned her in numerous ways to explain that her conscious or subconscious belief that she couldn’t birth big babies was leeched into her by who knows whom, but that it certainly wasn’t an innate inner knowing that told her this, babies just aren’t too big to birth.
A belief is entirely different to intuition.
She was having none of it and was enraged that we were trying to squash her intuitive vibe, which had, seemingly, proved her right.
Then I heard it again a couple of days ago, someone describing their difficult interaction and judgements towards another as an ‘intuitive response’. They ‘knew’ with absolute assurity that a stranger was a particular personality because their intuition told them so, full stop, end of story. That person was then tried and sentenced based on that intuition.
It’s a hard one. I do believe that as a western society we are certainly low on the intuitive front, we prefer solid, hard and immovable facts over anything vaguely floaty or unclear. AND I think it’s sad how squashed and dampened our intuition has become. But what exactly is our intuition?
Mine was definitely hiding in some dark recess of my forgotten self, until more recent years when I have braved the fear and poked it into the cracks of light. What I have discovered about my intuition is that it is super subtle, so used to its banishment that it is quick to flee under any cross examination. But when it does rise up, it is a moment of knowing deeply, feeling without confusion and total clarity. It’s the moment when the words fall from my heart onto the page; when I know my child’s mood by the movement of their eyes; when a sentence pours from my mouth and brings healing to a client’s soul. Subtle, gentle, quiet….
What I have learned also is that my anxiety and beliefs can pretend they are intuition, giving me countless messages to listen to and to heed, added to which they name themselves as my intuitive voice: ‘listen, this is your intuition, there’s a car coming and it’s going to run over your kids’; ‘listen, this is your intuition, that person has hair like your old abusive friend, they must be an abuser too’; ‘listen, this is your intuition, no one will like your book, don’t bother writing it’.
Except that none of those, self proclaimed intuitive memos, are really my intuition, they are simply my fears. And my fears can come true, and they can prove me ‘right’, but they are still not my intuition.
Learning to distinguish between the emotional beliefs and the inner wisdom of our intuitive selves is like unraveling two identical, twisted and impenetrable balls of yarn, anciently meshed and knotted. They look the same, feel the same, but as they unravel, one leads to heartache and one leads to happiness.
Listen carefully. Which one is speaking to you?