Do You Trust Your Intuition?
It all comes back to trust. When I went through my divorce at age 27 one of the big lessons I learned was that intimate love isn’t sustainable without trust. If you don’t trust your partner to consider your needs when they make choices that impact you, it disrupts the flow of love. Yet the root of trust is in our relationship with our Self. Recently one of my teachers put it to me this way, “You have to trust yourself to face and work through whatever life presents.”
It is not about the trustworthiness of another so much as trusting ourselves to make a good choice and to handle whatever life brings. An unspoken pain we feel when someone we trust betrays us is Self-doubt. Why didn’t I see that coming? We may experience love and trust most measurably in our response to others but we first have to trust our Self. Trusting our Self is an expression of Self-love.
To cultivate awareness and understanding of our intuition we have to start with trust. It takes trust to listen to the messages from our heart, soul and body, the gut feeling or sense of what is our correct path regardless of outside validation. We often over-analyze our intuitive insights by stacking the information up next to what we consider as facts; the provable data.
That provable data comes from past experiences, information the world tells us is reliable, evidence bent on helping us feel safe and in control of the outcome. This logic first approach is a natural survival response, assessing the potential outcome of a choice and our safety in the situation. Yet it undermines our inner-guidance.
Most of us can reference times in our life where we discounted our intuitive voice and continued down a path that had a less than desirable outcome. In retrospect we acknowledged that we knew that the path wasn’t in alignment with our truth but something stopped from listening to that voice. We let the facts create doubt, or made a comfortable choice rather than one that was a bit uncomfortable which would have offered us greater ease and less pain in the long run.
Another facet of learning to trust our Self is being able to decipher when we are projecting onto a situation our desired outcome, rather than seeing it clearly. I truly believe that we have aspects of destiny at play in our lives and to meet our soul’s mission we can either do so with ease and grace by listening to our inner-guidance or we can struggle through it resisting the less comfortable path. We’ll still get there but the journey through the lessons of our soul’s mission is more tiresome and painful when we don’t trust or inner-guidance.
Learning to trust our Self is as simple as listening to our intuitive nudges. Most often our intuition speaks gently to us and we have to slow down and intentionally listen to hear it. It is not a drill sergeant demanding we pay attention and act in accordance to its directive. Rather our intuitive-guidance is a resource we can choose to open up to. A partner in the path of life whom we can cultivate trust with just as with any relationship, through experience.