Nudge vs. Noise
I started this year thinking that 2020 would be the year that I gave myself the treat of trusting my intuition.
I said it out loud.
I told my coaching cohort that was my focus.
I asked for help.
Then, like most of the world in March and April, I got scared. Being scared allowed me to get quiet. Quiet helped me understand that the first step to trusting my intuition was to learn what intuition sounds like and feels like.
Glennon Doyle, in Untamed, has a wonderful way of describing this process of meeting our intuition and what happens when we do.
“Like a gymnast able to stretch deeper after each training, I began to feel myself dropping lower. Eventually I sank deep enough to find a new level inside me I never knew existed. This place is low, deep, quiet, still. There are no voices there, not even my own. All I can hear down there is my breath. What I really needed to do to save myself is let myself sink.
I could sense something there I was not able to sense on the surface. There in the deep I could sense something circulating inside me. It was a knowing.
When I pose a question, I sense a nudge. The nudge guides me to the next precise thing. And then when I silently acknowledge the nudge, it fills me. The knowing feels like warm liquid gold filling my veins and solidifying just enough to make me feel steady. Certain.
What I learned, even though I’m afraid to say it, is that God lives in this deepness inside me. When I recognize God’s presence and guidance, God celebrates by flooding me with warm, liquid gold.
The knowing would meet me in the deep and nudge me toward the next right thing one thing at a time. That was how I began to know what to do next. That was how I began to walk through my life clearly, solid, and steady."
And for anyone that doesn't feel they have time to really get quiet, to pull back and to learn to listen, Doyle's words: “10 minutes a day is not too long to spend finding yourself.”
My confessions: There are two things my intuition has been telling me for years:
Neither makes much sense because I have time for neither piano playing nor book writing.
But intuition knows much more than I do. Intuition is the wise Sage of our lives whose view is 50 years...not 5 minutes.
Intuition, Doyle says, is like a playful guide. It wants us to keep coming back to play with it, so it only gives us little bits at a time.
And, usually those 'bits' are multi-layered. What it is supposed to mean and why you have it isn't on the surface. But, the meaning is revealed only later...several layers further into the story.
Yesterday, while speaking with a friend about a job she was interested in applying for, I said, “Sometimes the ‘thing’ itself isn’t the point. Like applying for a particular job turns out to not be about the job at all. Your interest in that job was actually just the catalyst for you to clean up your resume so you’re ready when the real job you're supposed to have pops up six months from now.”
But, you've got to take the nudge. You must apply for the job in order to clean up your resume so that you're ready. Don't get too wrapped around whether this is the right job...that might not be the point.
So, it occurs to me, the piano may not be for me at all. Perhaps my son will fall in love with the music he's able to create and my role in this is simply to bring it into our home.
Maybe the book is not about having a book, but about learning the process of publishing so I can be useful to someone else in their journey to bring their words to the world.
We spend so much time forcing the what’s next – the planning, the making-it-happen. When, actually, if we’d just chill-the-heck-out, the what’s-next will find us.
We spend so much time letting our head tell us what makes sense. When, actually, if we'd trust the nudge and the liquid gold, we'd have the clues we need to live the life we're meant to live.
All we need to do is wait open-handed to receive it. To be available. To be quiet enough to listen.
And, to be in-touch enough with the way our intuition speaks to recognize the nudge over the noise.
|
