Intuition's Internal Guidance System

This is an old post but I wanted to share again, as it reminds me of how important it is to listen to our intuition, when faced with difficult decisions. It also highlights the "primal instinct" that resides in all of us, and when we ignore it, could have dire consequences. I hope you enjoy:

My niece and her three close friends visited me at my lakehouse in New Hampshire. I was listening to a CD by Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra. A comment was made by one of my niece’s friends that her mother likes Deepak also. As she shared her comment about her mother, a funny feeling came over me, one I couldn’t ignore. I made a mental note to mention this to her mom the connection between her and Deepak when I see her next. We saw each other the following week, and I inquired about her daughter’s comment.

She proceeded to tell me her story of when she was only 14-years-old, she became very sick with a 105+ temperature and was rushed to New England Memorial Hospital in Medford, Massachusetts. By the time she arrived, she had slipped into a coma, her pressure had dropped, and the hospital staff stripped her down and put her on ice. She was suffering from Meningococcal Meningitis, a bacterial infection that resulted in swelling and irritation (inflammation) of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. The doctor on call at the time was Deepak Chopra.

He remained by her side all the time, and couldn’t believe the fight this little girl had in her. At first, it looked fatal, and then the best prognosis was she was going to make it, but probably be in a vegetative state. She remained in a coma for two days, swollen, bloodshot eyes, broken blood vessels, and blisters throughout her body. While one of the nurses was by her side, all of a sudden, she sat up. She miraculously woke from the coma and started to come around.

A miracle had occurred that day, and 32 years later, there isn’t a day that goes by she doesn’t count her blessings. It has always been her wish to reconnect with Deepak to personally thank him.

As I heard this story, I set my intention and started looking into possibilities of how I can make that happen. The following week, I received a flyer in the mail from the Massachusetts Conference for Woman. It was for their upcoming conference in Boston, and Deepak Chopra was one of the keynote speakers!

The universe had delivered him at the perfect time! I purchased two tickets for my friend and me. What if I didn’t listen to my intuition in the car that day, and just wrote it off as nothing? Intuition is a natural part of being human, but its power lies dormant in most of us, and when it does surface, we have no training on how to recognize it, so we ignore it or write it off as some random crazy thought.

There are those times when intuition speaks in the clearest terms to us, and it gets through, but we may still seek an outside opinion before we’ll listen to ourselves.

In Gavin DeBecker’s groundbreaking book The Gift of Fear he writes:

“At just the moment when our intuition is most basic, people tend to consider it amazing or supernatural. A woman tells a simple story as if it were mystical:”

"I couldn’t believe it! I absolutely knew when the phone rang that it would be my college roommate, calling after all these years."

DeBecker continues: “Though people act as if predictions of who is calling are miraculous, they rarely are. In this case, her old roommate was reminded of her by reports of the explosion of the space shuttle. Is it a miracle that both women happened to watch the same news event along with a billion others? Is it a miracle that their strongest association with space travel was the angry belief they shared in college that women would never be astronauts? And a woman astronaut died in the space shuttle explosion that morning, and two women thought of each other, even after a decade.”

If you’re new to this whole intuition thing, you should be on the lookout for thoughts, feelings or messages that are not familiar to you. If you’re reading something, a newspaper or magazine, and certain words jump out at you, notice that. When you get the notion to call someone, pay attention to that. If you unexpectedly get invited to something you normally wouldn’t look at, this could be a sign, providing direction for you.

The same is true for feelings that show up as warning signs that something isn’t right. DeBecker explains this throughout his book and writes: “A woman could offer no greater cooperation to her soon-to-be attacker than to spend time telling herself ‘But he seems like such a nice man.’ Yet this is exactly what many people do — ignoring their own intuition.”

Trusting your intuition takes practice. It means acknowledging your “vibes” as readily as you acknowledge red lights, green lights and stop signs. Start paying attention to how you are feeling and how that affects you. There will be times when things make no logical sense, but you feel there's more to explore. That’s a sign you're receiving an intuitive nudge to seek out answers.

You may not move forward because you want all the answers before you act, but you’ll find that you’ll be much happier when you move forward being inspired, being guided intuitively step by step through the process, even if you don’t know for sure what the next step will be.

As for my friend, she was thrilled to meet Deepak personally at the conference to thank him. He remembered her as well and was thrilled to see she was doing so well.

So the lesson here is to be authentically you in everything you do, and your intuition will show up for you to serve you in wonderful ways. Start paying attention to your thoughts and ideas, and act on them if it feels right.