How many times have you gotten a “funny” feeling that something wasn’t right? You can’t put your finger on it but there is this gnawing sensation that keeps distracting you. You dismiss it at first but it keeps coming back. It’s not painful but becomes almost a pit or a knot in your stomach. Say hello to your intuition.
Many of us don’t understand the power of intuition. It’s like your own built-in radar system, an innate sense of knowing in your head without any reasonable explanation that something doesn’t feel right.
We spend so much time concerned about our stomachs for one reason or another. Bikini ready abs the ads shout at us. Buy this firming cream yells another one. It’s too big or maybe too flabby says our inner mean girl. One company marketed our intuition to us in the form of a razor. I definitely do not need to use my intuition to know when to shave my legs! All of this conversation is a distraction from a very, very powerful piece of equipment that is sending us warning signals. Ever get around someone and just felt sick to your stomach with anxiety? Not about the task at hand or a deadline but just an authority figure or person who was so unpleasant and your stomach would be upset? We need to pay strong attention when we get these messages from our bodies. They are trying to communicate with us!
Author and security consultant Gavin de Becker wrote in his book The Gift of Fear, about PINs or Pre-Incident Indicators. These are tactics that predators use to gain control over victims and usually victims will go along with them against their intuition because women are conditioned to be nice. Here are a few of the ploys they use.
Charm is one. Feigning to need help is another. Refusing to accept no as a complete sentence. (I think Oprah explained it brilliantly this way.) And saying things like, “I promise I won’t hurt you” actually indicates that someone is about to hurt you. Women sometimes do not want to ruffle feathers so we will continue an unwanted conversation for the sake of appearing polite. All of us need to be aware that these are traps and that even if your intuition says run and you hesitate and think, well, that’s crazy, he just said he wouldn’t hurt me, you are putting yourself in danger. Do not let your nice girl syndrome or prior abuse stop you from acknowledging your gut instinct about people, places and things that just don’t feel right. Picture yourself as an airport security person and think, how would they view this situation? Airport security in Israel rely on the human factor and looks for signs in conversation of anxiousness, intention and mood.
Think of it like the fan that comes on when your laptop gets hot or the airbag that deploys in your car. It’s a totally sophisticated safety feature of the human body. You might sweat, you might get the nervous stomach or think of a plan like, I could just avoid eye contact with the pushy person on the street and say loudly, I’m late. The trick is when your mind tells you what to do, don’t override your safety feature!
The cool part of all of this is that we can develop our intuition to be one of our most powerful tools to guide us though life, not just alert us to harm. I love what Gabrielle Bernstein says about fear. “Fear is a great teacher. The world is a classroom and people are our assignments.” So we need fear, but we don’t have to be ruled by it. Our intuition just needs to be acknowledged, nurtured and trained like a Spartan warrior. Before making a huge decision if you tapped into your intuition instead of your ego, do you think the answer might be slightly different? Oh yeah!
Intuition is linked to your soul, the authentic voice within you. When you get that gut feeling it is your innermost truth alerting you to something, which may be good or bad for you. Our ego is connected to that feeling of separateness that says we are better than or less than what we truly are. When you learn to shut down that little screeching voice, the soft whisper of the divine being within can emerge. This is when miracles occur. We can see things differently. Possibilities unfold. Often I have to pray or meditate to get my ego out of the way and ask for help. I ask to let me see my part in the situation, to be shown the solution and the patience to wait. This is when you’ll get positive signs from the universe. An email comes in with an opportunity. A chance to make an amends appears. God can work when we step out of our own way and be willing to receive direction. Having your stomach in knots or being ill at ease about something for an extended period of time is not peace. It means something needs to shift.
I must admit I have developed great respect for my intuition because it is usually right. It is on to something long before I am. I have developed a pretty strong sensation within my body that is correct about 90% of the time. The small knot in my stomach builds in tension, which ultimately influences my thinking, and then I take the right action. Sometimes it will have nothing to do with me but with someone else I know. I am inspired to call a person and check in on them. Recently a dear friend who is is living in Florida that had lost her husband came to be on my mind. The day he died, I got the most powerful feeling that I needed to call her. I sat with it a couple of days and then made the call. Indeed, her husband had passed from cancer. A very wise friend of mine has said to me, if you ever think you should call someone or send someone a card or give someone some money, you probably should. The universe is energy and we are constantly sending out positive and negative signals, back and forth. Thoughts are energy. Guidance is energy. We are sending and receiving information.
My intuition has been on overload lately. My brain and body are constantly devoting energy to try to resolve this question for me, processing hundreds of memories, incidents, thoughts and behaviors. Everyday I get these gut feelings about whether I should trust a certain person or not. Even though there is no clear evidence that something is being done wrong, my gut continues to warn me that things aren’t quite right. Are they actively doing something to hurt me or is it that they have the capability to do something to hurt me? Either way, I am being quietly guided to pay attention, looking for warning signs so I don’t get ambushed.
Let’s remember to lower the noise on low-level useless information clogging up the connection to the divine so that we have bandwidth to tune in to the stuff we really need to know. In a world of too much data, our intuition needs to be a clear channel.
