Intuition and The Harsh Voice

I think we all can recognize what that "harsh voice" that is constantly nagging at us.. saying "you should..", "you can't..", "you've got to.."...  This harsh inner voice is not our higher self, not our intuition.  This harsh voice comes from a cerebral place, a loud place in our brain.  It's constantly re-hashing the past, worrying about the future, finding something to complain about in the present. Our intuition comes from a soft place in our core, right below the heart.  Where the soul sits. Our intuition can get drowned out by the harsh voice if we can't quiet the harsh one. Our intuition waits for a space to speak up... like the wise, quiet student who patiently waits her turn to offer an insightful answer to a question. One of the great challenges in tapping into our intuition, which is there to guide us to our highest and best purpose, is to distinguish between these two voices that pop up. This takes some practice.  Here I go again with this - but honestly, truly, sincerely! - getting the mind to be still, through meditation, is how it starts.  Even just five minutes a day. Just 5 minutes. You can make time to brush your teeth each day... you just do it.  What if meditation were to become a habit just as ingrained as brushing your teeth?

PHOTO CREDIT: CHRIS KEMP WHITE

You may wonder... well, why do I really need to understand what my intuition is saying? What's the big deal?  The big deal is that our intuition keeps us on our path.  Helps guide us to what's best for us in our lives.  We can choose to ignore our intuition, yes. Or maybe we simply don't allow it space to emerge if the harsh voice is always dominating the conversation. We may see this through repeated patterns - the same pattern of bad relationships, the same pattern of jobs that don't do it for us, the same pattern of whatever variety of poor choices.  I had this experience myself, with a variety of patterns (relationships, jobs, etc.) until I learned that through meditation I could learn to break these patterns.  And allow space to work with emotions and thoughts that aren't always our friends... to identify those emotions and separate from them.  And then to move on to that vision of what our intuition tells us is best.

I took a big leap this week.. am spreading the word that I'll be leaving my day job to start this new project.  My harsh voice wants to freak out and tell me what a lunatic I am.  But it is not winning the battle...my intuitive voice is getting stronger and is calmly saying.. it will work out.  Trust and you will be fine.

I got an email to my inbox that synchronistically (this may not actually be a real word) arrived on Monday, the day I gave my notice at work.  It was a famous quote by Martin Luther King Jr:  "Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."  Boy, did that speak to me that day...

I like to think that this type of faith is fueled by trusting our intuition... and allowing the harsh voice, which may have served us at one point in the past, to fade off into the distance.