Intuition is Subtle While the Truth Often Hurts
Discerning fear from heaviness, ego from the heart, and becoming more intuitive beings
I’ve been writing about such things as the Illusory Truth Effect, Cognitive Dissonance, Truth Bias, and Misinformation with the remedy being to cultivate intuition. When I look back I often think, how would things have been different if someone had come along early in my life and shared with me about how to cultivate intuition?
Would it have made sense to me then? Would I have perceived myself as capable of it? Would it have made a difference?
I honestly don’t know. I might have continued with the same trajectory. And so, this is where we talk about regrets. Do I regret my life and my decisions? Which is an even harder question, because while my life has not been easy I wonder (well, more than wonder) that it was the difficulties that led me to where I am today.
For example, had I not spent 19 years in a painful marriage to my first wife I would not have proclaimed a clear intention for a very specific kind of relationship that led to my marriage with Maria, which has been beautiful, fulfilling, and healing. Had I not struggled with insecurity and self-doubt I would not likely been so dedicated to emotional and spiritual healing work. And had I not made so many (seemingly) wrong turns in life I would not be so passionate about the cultivation of intuition.
Could it be that our repeated wrong turns are the training ground for learning intuition? And maybe the whole point of it is to make lots of wrong turns so we learn what it feels like to dismiss intuition so we can decide differently next time.
Yes, and yes.
But only if and when we practice presence so that we can actually feel the feeling. So much of our culture is designed to constrain the flow of emotion through distraction, inebriation, and constant busyness. And it is in a state of constrained emotion that the voice of intuition is muzzled.
Maria and I finally started watching Brené Brown’s HBO special Atlas of the Heart, based on her most recent book of the same name. In the first episode she references a study her and her team conducted of 7,000 people who were asked to identify the emotions they felt as they felt them. The conclusion is that of 7,000 subjects, they were only able to identify three emotions: “happiness, sadness and anger.” This came as no surprise to me, as I spent a few years mentoring and facilitating group sessions with teens. Imagine me asking a group of boys with raging hormones to talk about their feelings in as simple of terms as, “What do you feel right now in this moment?” Most would say something like, “Well, um, I guess, I feel . . . good.”
Then when it was my turn I would say something like, “On top I feel a little excited. Underneath I feel some vulnerability mixed with fear and sadness.” And they would look at me like I was speaking a different language.
We aren’t trained to articulate our emotions because we’re too busy to feel them. And for men, we’re taught that feelings are weak and unmanly, and don’t you dare cry in front of anyone.
And yet, our emotions lead us to intuition. Inviting them, processing them, exploring them leads us to what many refer to as “emotional intelligence.” For example what is the difference between jealousy and envy, or fear and apprehension, or infatuation and love, or joy and happiness, or excitement and passion? There are distinctions, but few can discern them. What if we went to school for emotional intelligence? What would that look like? How would that change us?
A big obstacle to robust intuition is ego. When I feel excited about moving in a particular direction, is that my intuition telling me that this is the best course to take, or is it my ego in love with the idea of self-validation? Will it make me look good in the eyes of others, or is this really my path? Sorting out the ego is a lifelong journey and has a great deal to do with how effective we’ll be at discerning and trusting intuition.
Another obstacle is our comfort zone. Often our intuition prods us to move in directions that scare the hell out of us. In the first week of my relationship with Maria there was the normal excitement of the newness of it all, attraction, romance, companionship, and so on, and there was also a lot of fear. I didn’t want a repeat of my first marriage. But it only took me a week or so to cycle through the fear and realize that this relationship was right for me. And it has been and is.
And yet fear works its way into us in all sorts of ways. Fear can be misinterpreted as a kind of heaviness, which is what it also feels like when our intuition is telling us to move away from a particular direction. So is the heaviness our intuition talking to us, or fear? Is my ego driving the ship or my heart?
These are the questions we must learn to answer as we cultivate intuition, and such answers can take a lifetime for most of us. But it doesn’t have to.
Children are naturally very intuitive because they are rooted in emotion. The problem is that we are so afraid they will be hurt that we pound fear into them at every juncture, as we assume that if they have a healthy amount of fear of people, places, and things that they will make better decisions and stay safe. There is also the mantle of authority that parents have over their children, and the power dynamic that quickly grows in children, which supersedes their natural instincts. By adulthood our natural intuition has been mostly suppressed.
Then we make decisions — some good, some not so good — and the journey begins. Women used to be hanged and even burned at the stake for being intuitive, for speaking their minds. Isn’t that crazy? How gullible we have been to grab the hook of deception and believe that a neighbor, even a friend, is a witch and must be burned alive. That’s how hard we (and in this case men) have worked to suppress intuition.
I recently wrote about Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network (FNN) and how FNN’s top leadership knew there was no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and yet they supported the theory because they feared a mass exodus of viewers to other outlets that were running with the narrative. A cadre of Trump lawyers speaking authoritatively of the theft of the election whipped Trump followers into a fury, and those followers looked to their News personalities to validate the narrative. FNN merely followed suite like many others giving credence to a false narrative.
We are so, so vulnerable. So much so that we used to burn women healers alive, that presently we are splitting a country apart, that we’re indicting women for abortions, and cultivating hate toward transgender people. We are so willing to throw our intuition out the door and glom on to the nearest theory or version of the truth that supports an energy of hate that we have forgotten who we are.
Which leads me to the reason for which we create this madness. Forgive the cliché: The truth hurts. Or as Jack Nicholson famously said in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!”
The truth is difficult. It means we are compelled to leave jobs, careers, friendships, relationships, habits, and patterns of thinking. It means we need to grieve what we’ve lost. It means forgiveness. It means loving our enemies. It means loving ourselves so fully that we see past our shortcomings to our true gold, and in so doing acquiring the ability to love others unconditionally.
It means vulnerability. It means feeling all our emotions — the joy and the pain, peace and rage, serenity and grief, gratitude and envy.
This is why we run from intuition, because it means living our truth, and it’s much easier to binge another show with a glass of wine (or two), post a selfie, check social media, eat some more gelato, smoke a joint, or whatever it may be that quells the deeper emotions that seek to make their way to the surface.
Living truthfully is difficult. Seeing ourselves in others mirroring back to us all that we have yet to heal from is painful. Listening to a loved one describe how we have hurt them and being willing to perceive the truth in their words is agonizing. But it’s the truth.
So how do we cultivate intuition when we run from it at every juncture in life?
Answer: We stop running!
We face into it. It’s the greatest and most simple change we can make. Facing into our intuition means becoming gradually more willing and able to face into the truth. We stop running from the little voice inside that prods us toward a different kind of life. We stop running from our fears. We stop running from what we know to be true. We face reality. We face the difficult, hard, scary, challenging stuff of life. We face the emotions that have been working tirelessly to push their way to the surface. And we heal.
This is how we learn to discern fear from heaviness, ego from the heart, and become more intuitive beings.
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