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 few more days 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.
One of the most weirdly mysterious ways that the intuition operates is in how it knows about things that are GOING to happen. And tries to prepare you for and sometimes even protect you from future eventualities.
To be honest, this is the place where I struggle with it the most. My intuition will warn me about things or make suggestions about something I should or shouldn’t do and I will blithely ignore it because the messages I am getting from it just don’t make any sense to me. At least in the moment. Of course, in hindsight I am always saying to myself… well, DAMN… it did it again. It gave me a really helpful heads up and I overrrode it with my rational mind.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
If you’ve been following me for awhile you know that I have been offering a teacher training program every year … and sometimes twice a year… like clockwork since 2008. It’s a huge part of my income and something that is deeply meaningful to me. Which means it’s also something that I wouldn’t let go of doing very easily.
The teacher training program always begins in the month of May and lasts for 10 months ending the following February. It consists of four week long in person retreats that are scheduled throughout the 10 months of the training. I advertise it all year, but I generally get the bulk of my students registering between the January and April before the program begins. So I was really shocked and dismayed to hear my intuition very clearly tell me in December that I should not offer the program in 2020. This suggestion did NOT make me happy. And actually kind of freaked me out because of financial concerns. But it was SO insistent. And so unequivocal.
Like I said before, I don’t always listen. In fact I OFTEN don’t. But for some inexplicable reason, this time I did. And Boy Howdy am I GLAD I did because three months later we were all in lockdown as a result of covid-19. If I had gone forward with my original plans I would have been in the terribly uncomfortable position of having to cancel the training and refund a ton of money or figure out how to reschedule the training dates. Plus I would have to cancel or reschdule the venue and the caterer and the insurance and all the other stuff that goes into putting together a big event like this. It would have been a shitshow of major proportions. I have quite a few friends that are in the retreat biz and they were dealing with a TON of stress when the quarantine was issued. Stress that I gratefully dodged because my intuition steered me in the right direction.
Now, the thing that’s hard about listening to your intuition under these circumstances is that it doesn’t give you the whole story. My intuition did NOT say to me.. “Hey Chris… you really need to cancel the teacher training program this year because we are going into a global pandemic and you’ll have to shut down your studio and it won’t be possible to do retreats safely for a fairly long while.”
Of course, even if it had said those things I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But my point is that there was no WHY given in relation to it’s suggestions. There’s no context and no “good reason” specified for following its recommendations. It just gives me incredibly clear and often ridiculously simple directives with no other explanation and leaves the rest up to me.
This is the ultimate experience of your intuitive self knowing something without you knowing how you know it. And where the attitude you need to develop to get the most out of this knowledge is learning to implicitly trust in it’s wide ranging intelligence and uncanny wisdom. Which is incredibly challenging because this is another place where the dominant culture has no way of valuing information or knowledge that doesn’t come through logical and linear channels. And so we learn not to value it either.
This particular story is an example of my intuition saving my butt in a big and dramatic way, but I have had a number of smaller scale experiences over the years, and I wrote about one of them here:
https://creativejuicesarts.com/blog/what-i-learned-about-trusting-my-intuitive-wisdom-by-refusing-to-buy-a-salad/
And having had a number of experiences where I DIDN’T listen and paid the price in stress or unhappiness or simple discomfort meant that I have learned the hard way the wisdom of paying attention to it when it whispers in my ear.
In my last post about intuition I referred to it as Intuition As Wisdom. But this aspect of the intuitive process is Intuition As Oracle. Like any oracle, you can’t force or demand that it give you information about what may be coming down the pike. But it’s always there to help you when you really need it. IF you’re willing to listen and follow its directives.
Journal Questions:
1.) How do you feel about the idea that your intuition might be able to give you information without you having a clear idea where that information is coming from?
2.) Have you gotten directives from your intuition in the past that you’ve ignored? And what did you learn from that process?
3.) What gets in the way of your trusting the oracular nature of your intuition?
From my wild heart to yours,
Chris
Hi
I couldnt find contact us page. I want to join the paint with fire. But I am afraid somehow. If i joined and saw first two or three videos not for me can i cancel and refund? Please advice as it is 129$
I have zero painting ability or exp
Thank u