Greetings to my beloved Wild Heart Creative Community,
I have another round of my online intuitive painting class, Painting With Fire, coming up in a little more than a week and as much as that class is about claiming the freedom to make art in your own way, it’s just as much about reconnecting with your innate intuitive knowledge and wisdom. So my plan is to spend this week exploring some themes related to intuition.
And of course, to entice you to sign up for the class!!!
I’m also going to add a couple of writing prompts at the end of each article to encourage you to begin to explore your OWN relationship to your intuition.
Here’s the first installment. Enjoy!!
If you’ve been in my world for more than five minutes you know that I am a huge fan of intuition.
My Creative Juices Arts studio was also known as a Temple To The Intuition and the painting process I teach is called Wild Heart Intuitive Painting. I’m on the intuition bandwagon BIG time, madly waving pom-poms in service of honoring the process of intuition every chance I get.
So I wanted to begin a conversation about how I think about intuition and why I believe it is such a critical component of our mental, emotional and spiritual health.
Intuition is a primary branch of our overall intelligence and is that aspect of our soul and psyche that knows things without having to go through a linear and rational mental process in order to get to that place of knowing. Intuition moves incredibly quickly and is able to generate snap judgments. It’s the part of us that can make decisions and assessments about things without having all the information that the more analytical part of the mind thinks it needs.
Intuition speaks to us primarily through our bodies, our emotions and our imagination. One way that people talk about their intuition is as an experience of having a “gut feeling” about people, places or situations. That gut feeling might be a sense of uneasiness or a feeling of coming home. But it’s something powerful and unmistakeable when it happens. A particular place or landscape might simply make you happy or you might feel either an instantaneous “click” or a back-pedaling aversion with a person upon meeting them for the first time.
The thing with the intuition is that it is just so immediate. You might be able to figure out later why you resonate so deeply with that person or place. But in the moment it doesn’t always make sense. You just know you’re getting a strong message that something important is happening here.
Everyone … and I mean EVERY LAST ONE OF US… has an intuition. It’s part of the basic operating system of being human. When people say someone has a strong intuition what they’re really referring to is that persons relationship to their intuition. People with a powerful intuition developed that power by listening to and paying attention to their intuition. They believe in it and trust it and give it a place of respect in their lives. Intuition is a living energy and like any living energy, responds well to positive attention. Simply stated… if you listen to it , it will talk to you, and if you don’t it will get very quiet or go underground until you’re ready to listen again.
So why DON’T we listen to our intuition more often? And THAT is the 64 million dollar question!
The bottom line is this… We don’t listen to it because we live in a culture …otherwise known as the patriarchy… that denigrates intuitive processes. It makes fun of the intuition. It indoctrinates us to believe that the intuition either doesn’t exist or if it does that it’s a distraction or a weakness or a weird anomaly of the human psyche.
People that ARE intuitive are also seen as less than. As kooks or weirdos and certainly NOT to be taken seriously. We’ve all gotten the message that if we want to fit in or be accepted and valued by our culture we either need to squash our intuition entirely or keep it well hidden because to do otherwise means risking censure and ostracism.
Nobody likes to be laughed at. We all want to belong. And belonging in this culture means treating the intuition like a second rate sideshow that has nothing of importance to bring to us or the world.
We are taught to buy into the patriarchies disparaged version of intuition from the time we are born and even if on a conscious, adult level we rebel against that story, that early conditioned mistrust seeps into our unconscious and makes it hard to allow intuition to TRULY be front and center in our lives. Which is where it is meant to be.
The patriarchy doesn’t like it for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is because it IS connected to our bodies and emotions. Which are also brutally discounted in the patriarchal world view.
So reclaiming our relationship to our intuition also means reclaiming our relationship to our blood and bones and heart. And beginning that healing journey of becoming whole again by deeming as worthy everything we feel and sense and know and are.
Journal Questions:
1.) What did you learn about intuition from your family or culture?
2.) What is your relationship to your own intuition like? Do you value it? Listen to it? Allow it to guide you?
3.) If you do … Congratulations! And if not, why not?
4.) How would you like your relationship to your intuition to be different or better?
From my wild heart to yours,
Chris
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