A quirky urge. A quiet murmur in your head. A queasy feeling in your gut. A subtle sense of foreboding. A subtle sense of foreboding or a profound yet explicable knowing that “this feels right”. That was the feeling I had soon after I began going out with my husband nearly twenty years ago (which I’m glad I listened to!)… and it’s the feeling I still rely on to help me make the big decisions today. And some smaller one’s too. Like to believe my seven year old son this morning when he said he couldn’t go to school because his tummy hurt. If I had a dollar for every time my kids fed me that line I’d be bathing in milk, but I had a gut feel this morning as I jockeyed my kids out the door that this time I needed to believe him. I handed him a bucket. Two minutes later it was put to good use. Ah… mothers instinct served me well. My floor rug too.
Uninhibited by our biases and judgments, wired only to perception, it can lead us to predictions we often marvel at. “Somehow I just knew,” we say later about a hidden danger we just knew to veer aware from or an opportunity we spontaneously seized despite knowing little about it. Beyond our conscious awareness, we read miniscule untaught signals, that point us to pay attention to something… or someone.
Sometimes our intuition gives rise to an acute feeling of fear. A primal emotion that exists to keep us safe, genuine fear is intended to be brief, not to hang around for a long period of time. So people who move through life constantly on ‘high alert’ for danger – whether in the form of killer viruses, catastrophes, or predatory people – have no capacity left to pick up the signals their intuition may be feeding them. Their anxiety keeps them from tuning in to those ‘gut instincts’ that truly do signal us to pay special attention.
The notion that “A little worry never hurt anyone” is simply untrue. Worry is a fear we manufacture. Of course if you like being a worry-wart, go for it. But do so knowing that [Read more…]