The challenge of intuition
Trusting and becoming skillful with your intuition is the same as trusting and becoming skillful with your truth.
Most of us have either subtly or profoundly adapted our truth to fit our culture, society, parents, siblings, peer aspirations or work environment.
Simply put, the more you live in your truth, the more soulful you feel, the more complete life feels. The more you live in someone else’s truth, the more disempowered you feel, the more uncertain.
There can be a difficult balance to strike. We are all social human beings, we all wish to cooperate and interact with each others. However for a whole host of reasons we often find it difficult to stand in our truth whilst communicating in a socially appropriate way. For instance, if someone identifies themselves as being ‘nice’, those parts of the personality that do not fit this model of ‘nice’ will be ignored, tucked away, repressed and eventually forgotten. These parts will then tend to surface in phenomena such as dreams, strong emotional responses, addictive behaviours or somatised ‘illness’. The ‘nice’ persona thus risks dominating the more truthful and intuitive one.
As we move towards standing in our truth more, many people’s first response is as if a raw wound has been touched. This wound is often the reason why we tucked away this truth in the first place.
This is the critical point with two possible pathways, and for me the junction into the more advanced classes with herbs:
(1) On a wound being touched we can react, be consumed by an emotion relevant to the wound (e.g, fear/anger/grief) and hit out in what is a deeply instinctive protective response. This hitting out is called projection, and can take many forms, but generally something of the shape ‘You did this to me….’, ‘She is a really angry person….’, ‘The world did this to me…..’ The mind will tend to grab on to a situation that is percieved to have caused this responce – sometimes very much in the present, sometimes a figure from the past.
As long as people are in this reactive stage and unable to internalise and own their emotional response, the next stage in growth is to fully understand and be willing to move from this reactive reflex to a more inner-reflective one. This can be supported by mindfulness practice, psychotherapy or 1:1 sessions with a skilled therapist who can help you navigate this.
(2) On a wound being touched we can react, consciously allow ourselves to enter into the emotion relevant to the wound, and explore the internal reality of this place. This can be difficult at first and requires skill and practice. It requires us to stay in our vulnerability and trust that others are there and willing to support us, even though all our programmed reflexes might tell us differently. As we deepen our skills with this we become able to self-regress, embrace the story that the body is holding, and in the embracing let go of it.
The advanced classes provide support to do this self-regression (which can be very difficult alone), but only once you have made the conscious and empowered choice to go to these places – this is a choice only you can make.
To summarise:• Developing intuition is equivalent to living in your own truth• As we move into our truth, the barriers that have stopped us doing this before appear• These barriers can be scary, and if we react to them by projecting outwards, the possibility for going inwards and thus develop greater self knowledge can be lost• If we see this barrier and choose the unknown path through it, we can walk deeper into our own truth and thus our own intuition.• The more we remove these inner barriers, the more intuitive wisdom is available to us..