Feeding our Intuition
/“What does one feed intuition so that it is consistently nourished and responsive to our requests to scan our environ? One feeds it life- one feeds it life by listening to it. What good is a voice without an ear to receive it? What good is a woman in the wilds of megatropolis or daily life unless she can hear and depend upon the voice of La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows.”
I am revisiting themes from a year ago, partially because in preparation for retreats I have been returning to notes and travel journals from the same offerings I led this time last year, but I believe also because these themes need revisiting. In Spring, in a time when we are emerging from our Winter hibernation, we move from a place of stillness. We start to stretch the cobwebs in and around our bodies and invite the seed that was silently stored in cold darkness, integrating, to push up and act upon the past year’s learnings.
A woman’s intuition, according to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, needs to be fed in order to become strong and reliable. This Spring I am honoring the journey of feeding my intuition, and recognizing the growth that has happened while being gentle with how much more lies ahead. Just as we do not expect a toddler to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, so too would it be wounding to our intuition to expect it to immediately be fully formed with a confident voice the moment we decide to start paying attention to it. We have to be gentle with ourselves, and acknowledge how good it feels when we DO listen to our deep inner knowing, and to even celebrate this amongst a group of our closest friends who seek the same goal.
Imagine, rather than gushing to each other about all that we don’t know, all that we are getting wrong in life, all of our self-criticisms, what if we highlighted all that we DO know, all that we are getting “right”, all of our successes and moments of flow and alignment. And to from that place of seeing ourselves more fully, aren’t we then more able to fully honor and celebrate our friends without the weight of comparison.
As we plant our seeds this Spring and pay attention to the first buds on the trees, can we also listen quietly, and notice the subtle first greening of our intuition, our deep inner knowing, and feed it with our attention, carving out space so that it is seen and not passed over in the hustle towards summer.