INTUITION MONDAY No. 4

“I feel there are two people inside me - me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.” – Kim Basinger
#intuinionmonday

Life can be easy. And life can be hard. It happens so that life dishes us up a plateful of really challenging situations, but we can make those even harder still, or we can do what is needed and get through it in the simplest way possible. Sometimes what seems like a hell of a challenge leads to a heavenly surprise. And it can happen too that something which seems heavenly, a dream come true, can turn to a hellish disaster.

How do we navigate a life filled with these sorts of dynamics? How do we tell which is which? What is a good avenue to follow, and what is a door to close or a bridge to burn?

If we live in our minds, the mind between our ears, we can not differentiate between a good road or a bad path, we need to trust a far more multifaceted perspective than the mental analysis and understanding that we can fathom with our heads. Mostly, and especially in the Westernly trained world, we follow the logical ways of understanding and decision making. And mostly we end up getting burnt by bad repercussions to our choices. And to deal with this we turn to escaping through food or drink, shopping or sex. We expect our partners and loved ones to absorb the shock and tell us we’re still ok, and then we take another one of the anxiety meds or headache tablets the doctor (or the actor pretending to be a doctor for the TV ad) prescribed. It kind of works, but it doesn’t. We don’t really see an improvement in this way in our personal lives, and the world is no better off at the end of our life cycle.

Unless we follow another way, a way that we know is the right one because we can feel it in our other brain, the brain of the gut. In this gut-brain gets made more brain chemicals than our head-brain. It is so vital to our bodies’ functioning and it also has a guidance system which is integral to a life of value.

Living by the way of the gut can seem very contradictory to ‘common sense’ at times, it can send you swimming in the opposite direction to all the other fish in your pond. But it brings you to exactly the place you desire. With this navigation system you can narrowly escape the most dangerous situations, but you need to keep your attention in the present and on this gut-brain’s direction.

Think about the extreme driving classes. I’ve never gone, but I have been told that the process they take you through is hair-raising and rather grueling. Split second decisions make or break your ability to keep yourself on the road with the wheels at the bottom of the vehicle where they belong. At some point the instructor intentionally makes the car lose its traction and you’re flying at a brick wall. They teach you that in this situation what you do is to look to where you want to go and not at the wall. Generally, when we perceive ourselves flying at hair-raising speeds straight for a brick wall, humans look at the wall that they’re flying at. But this is the point of the training: do not look at the wall! Look, instead, where you wánt to go.

And so it is in life’s ultra fast paced challenges. When shit comes flying at you at lightning speeds, do not stand there looking at the shit! You will get a mouthful! Move away and look at where you want to go, and let that place be where the shit is not reaching. Get out of shit range and, whatever you do, focus on what you dó want.

Your gut-brain will tell your head-brain what to do next. And I pray that your head-brain is integrated enough to listen. I pray that for us all. Life is too short to just stand there and eat shit!