Intuition

I’ve had 3 occasions this past week when my intuition kicked in very suddenly and unexpectedly, just as I was going about normal life. What was interesting to me about this is not only how accurate I was, but that I immediately, in each instance, either discounted my intuition or tried to ‘figure out’ what it meant.

The most obvious example of this was that last Wed. I made plans to meet a friend for dinner on Saturday night. On Thursday morning I woke up knowing that the dinner wasn’t going to happen but not knowing why. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why–he has a sick relative, maybe that would be it. Maybe I’d be too tired after a long day at work. Maybe he’d have to cancel for some other reason. That is, instead of simply accepting the intuition, or even sitting with it in meditation to see if I received anything else about it, I tried to impose my meaning and structure on it, interpret it according to what I knew. And all my thinking was completely wrong–we didn’t have dinner together because there was a blizzard, not because of any reason my brain created.

The other 2 examples were similar, once when I knew something about someone I just met, then discounted my own knowing, then was later told I was absolutely right in my intuitive hit by someone who knew him. The other was when I was getting dressed one day and I knew I was going to see a particular friend that day. This I discounted because I wanted to see him but had no reason to expect that it would happen, and in fact had good reason to think there was no way I’d see him. And then I did.

None of these moments of intuition were of particularly earth shattering importance. Which actually makes them important–intuition doesn’t develop in the big areas usually, rather in the day to day moments of our life. In none of these situations did the knowledge help me in any dramatic way that I can discern–my world didn’t change, I didn’t win the lottery, nothing bold or even particularly meaningful. What it did do was show me how quickly I disown my own intuition, either by wanting to analyze it, or by discounting it for other reasons. I didn’t believe any of these hits because they didn’t make sense to my logical mind, and it was only afterwards that I was able to see how right I had been.

I think I want intuition to be magical–the lottery numbers, the unerring knowledge not only of the event but also the causes, the structures, etc. And it doesn’t work that way, at least not while we’re developing it. Instead, I think this week showed me how important it is to accept the information, as it is. Confirmation will come, and there is a place for the logical mind to make sense of things. But maybe not as we think it will come. Intuition has its own intelligence. Learning to recognize and trust that is as important as receiving the information itself.