Do you value intuition?

CW: brief mention of domestic violence and harassment by strangers

Trusting intuition is one of my highest values.

When I realized this recently, I was pretty amazed. I even chose to marry my husband based on this 18 years ago.

I had this awareness as a flash of visions and realizations. I saw all the important people and spiritual teachers in my life and realized what I say to describe them to others is around their amazing intuition. I believe that everyone and everything around us mirrors ourselves; it struck me like lightening- my highest value is trusting intuition. It is how I place my highest regards. I wondered, what is this about?

Why would this be the value that I base falling in love with my husband (who just yesterday had our 18th anniversary. It’s simple, I believe that trusting your intuition is our connection to that something larger than ourselves in our “higher self,” our soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it that expansive part. It is connected to the part of us that is human AND our connection of divine wisdom that can guide and support us, and be experienced through our human form.

This is co-creation at its best!

When in the flow of intuition, then there is more clarity than confusion, there is empowerment, confidence, and ease in making decisions. This to me is the key— it opens everything up.

It took a long time for me to get here- to trust in my intuition. I lived with the desire and the doubt of my intuition for decades.

I’ll be real. It was a struggle not to trust my intuition. I remember with my first born. She was 6 months and I was trying to get back in shape. I decided to go for a run with the new jogging stroller, and to take a lap around the block. When I got to the end of the street something struck me— not to go down that road. Instead I rationalized, Why not? It’s perfectly safe; it’s daylight, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary. So I didn’t trust it.

I continued with my jog, meanwhile, 2 cars came speeding up from behind. Both cars were filled with a bunch of high school kids. The first group jeered at me. The second group flicked a lit cigarette into my daughter’s stroller and drove off laughing. Luckily it went into the storage basket under my daughter’s seat.

I ran back home blaming myself, shook up, terrified, and feeling ashamed of putting my daughter in harm’s way. (This was amongst my struggle with Postpartum Mood Disorders that had my fear and anxiety around my daughter getting hurt on high alarm most of the time.) My run— a failure. As a mom— failure. Trusting my gut— failure. But is it?

It took me a long time to understand the importance of this failure, and just how powerful it was. See, whether I followed my intuition or not, this incident actually validated my intuition. This “failure” made it easier to trust my intuition next time. Why? Because building trust in our intuition is not about our intuition being right. That’s where most people get it wrong. People wonder, is my intuition right? A better question to ask is are you willing to trust it?

What we really need to trust our intuition, and to be able to validate your intuition to yourself. You can do this by following or not following your intuitive hits. As you build up this skill of self-validation, the choice to trust it becomes easier. This really is the key. We will talk more about how to validate next time.

For now, why is this important enough to be my highest value, I wondered, that I would choose my life partner on it?

Maybe its because I choose my first husband by intentionally ignoring my intuition (yes, this is a simplification, but my very first hit was strong, and I chose to ignore it) and that turned out like the jogging except with bruises all over and even more PTSD.

I had powerful evidence that choosing not to trust my intuition led me down some dangerous interactions— ones that took several years to process and heal from. I had the experience that following the rational mentally reasoned decisions doesn’t always work out well, especially when going against intuition. Put simply, I struggled to trust my intuition for a long time, so for me, I was amazed and looked up to those who did it. I learned everything I could from them, and realized it was tuning into my intuition that actually guided me home, to my soul, to the innate wisdom within.