The Evolutionary Path of Intuition
Summer is in full swing, and the desert is hot. In the 100s before 9am. Rushing around is not an option, although the newer energies moving out here these days seem to be hell bent on overriding the slow summer pace and maintaining a constant gogogo...but that’s another story for another day perhaps ; )
This is my ninth summer in the desert, and I’m feeling the intensity this year. But one of the things I value about the summers here is how the density of the extreme heat and its enforced slowness roots me firmly back in the ground of my intuition- that neutral, dynamic and embodied guidance system available to each and every one of us.
Sunset, and still in the 90s
And after all these apprenticeships with the desert summer, I can safely say that when I’m not grounded in my intuition, the universe (aka, my greater Self) sends me instant feedback so I can pivot my way back Home.
If you know me personally or professionally, or both, you’ll know that I love to swim in the waters of the symbolic, the mythic - and that I unequivocally trust the wisdom of the soul-body - or intuition, beyond anything else. Following its guidance precipitated huge transformations, not least, bringing me here to this mythic desert all the way from England.
What that means in practical terms is that I place more significance on Truth gleaned from subjective experience than from any so-called objective systems of mandated belief.
(We’re all perceiving and most importantly, interpreting, the world from our subjective, localized consciousness lenses, so all those terribly serious people saying that their particular ‘empirical’ construct of reality is the only correct way, and everything else is ‘misinformation’ makes me sigh-giggle.)
If you know me, you’ll know that the way I navigate the world - and use as the touchstone of my own work with others - is becoming adept at trusting and living what feels right for you - in the words of Audre Lorde.
Simple, you’d think. But we live in a world where trusting our subjective felt-sense, the wisdom of the soul-body’s intuition has been under relentless assault for at least the last two millennia.
We’ve been colonized into mistrusting our native wisdom. The European Renaissance, and its bonkers decree that matter + spirit are separate - which then became the tap root of materialist science - cemented this fallacy into dominant culture and collective consciousness, creating a painful schism.
Martín Prechtel, the Mayan-tradition shaman, activist and educator puts it powerfully:
“Every individual in the world, regardless of cultural background or race, has an indigenous soul struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment created by that individual’s mind. A modern person’s body has become a battleground between the rationalist mind — which subscribes to the values of the machine age — and the native soul. This battle is the cause of a great deal of spiritual and physical illness.”
If you know me in any capacity, you’ll know that I live my life in devotion to the evidence-based feedback of my intuition. And the times that I haven’t, the times that I’ve allowed conforming mandates of fear-based dogma to sideline me, the feedback from the universe has been “oops, that wasn’t the correct way for us, love.”
(Hint: intuition doesn’t try to scare you or get you to make decisions from a fight-flight-freeze response. In cases of clear and present danger, our sympathetic nervous systems elegantly, automatically take the wheel. But we’re not supposed to live consistently from the threat response of our sympathetic nervous systems, creating the maladaptive normal of always being “stressed out”.)
Intuition comes from Nature Her Self, and She’s got a way bigger vantage point than the myopia of force-fed fake news.
Intuition is peaceful and neutral, unattached to you following its guidance - and most definitely not shouty and belligerent. Intuition is always accessible to us, but most effortlessly so when we’re in the ease of our parasympathetic nervous systems, which is our natural and most nourishing state.
And intuition is subjective: what’s right for me, and the magical mystery tour of my soul-body isn’t necessarily what’s right for yours.
What my soul and her consciousness came to explore in this incarnation may not be what yours came to explore.
Our quest, as humans participating in the ever-evolving process of the Great Flowering Yoni of Mystery, is to start paying attention to what feels right for us.
And to go that way.
The path isn’t always easy. We often risk disapproval, shaming, censoring, canceling/burning at the stake, etc. But our souls didn’t come here to be patted on the head, approved of and given prizes for being obedient.
Our souls know themselves to be inherently part of Nature, which is in a perpetual process of evolution. The language and guidance of intuition is the way that Nature communicates with us, supporting our soul’s individual evolution which is inseparable from Nature’s, much like our fingers are inseparable from the rest of our bodies.
Because intuition speaks through the felt-sense, it’s non-verbal. Actually, it’s pre-verbal - which is also the language of Nature. It’s a calm, unequivocal inner-knowing that sometimes goes against the grain of familial and societal conditioning, that occasionally asks us to get out of stagnant comfort zones in service to our/Nature’s evolution.
The othering + marginalizing of our intuition and of Nature has brought us to a place of subservience, where we’re forced to look for approval, answers and meaning from systems built on the lie that matter + spirit are separate; that in fact the whole notion of spirit + soul are just far too crackpot to be entertained in serious objective, evidence-based circles.
Meanwhile, the universe sigh-giggles. If you slow down enough to really tune into your intuition, you may hear it whisper that Cosmic Consciousness is almost done with exploring that dream of fragmentation, that dream of being matter and spirit’s separation.
This is what my intuition has been whispering to me, in any case.
If you have deliciously weird, subjective intuitive nudges or would like to create more capacity to receive and be guided by their magic, you might be interested in joining The Light Gets In on Sundays the online drop-in space where we practice techniques designed to get your nervous system attuned to the evolutionary path of your soul-body's wisdom.
And if you’re interested in diving deep and doing this transformative work 1:1, feel free to reply to this email to book a free Discovery Call to find out more.