Using your emotional and intuitive guidance systems
Our deepest, highest self is who we are at our fullest, most magnificent, most energetic and fulfilled. And it’s the job of our emotional and intuitive guidance systems to keep us as closely aligned as possible with that deepest, highest self.
Emotions shows us in each moment where we want to go, and where we don’t want to go. They give us immediate feedback on our thoughts and actions. In alignment? Feels good. Not in alignment? Feels bad.
BUT – emotions can only do their job if we heed them in the moment. Not suppress them for later. If we suppress them for later, they come out unhelpfully and confuse us – and others – when we’re responding to life.
And if we’re not aware that we’re suppressing our emotions? Boy, we’re in trouble further down the line! This holds for emotions linked to trauma, emotions that can be re-triggered later on by similar circumstances to the original trauma. But that’s a whole other area.
Emotions, real-time emotions that respond to the here-and-now situation, are said to take only 90 seconds to be fully experienced. 90 seconds. To feel, to let it pass through, let the emotion’s message be heard, take appropriate action (decision, speech, thought, or act) and release.
When we’re doing something that aligns us well, we feel positive, energised, happy, joyful, even blissful. When we’re doing something that misaligns, we feel meh, sludgy, cruddy. We struggle to do things that intellectually we’ve committed to, because we know, deep down, that it won’t serve us to do it.
Intuition comes in when there’s an opportunity out there in the world that might be open to us, if only we get to the right place at the right time. Our intuition somehow communicates with what’s beyond us and our usual experience and awareness, and it gives us a hunch.
Intuition is the spinball: it’s the random thought that prompts you to widen your search, even though it wasn’t what you’d had in mind, and you hit the jackpot, unexpectedly. It’s the feeling that you’re saying “yes” to the wrong thing, even when on paper it looks fine. It’s the unexpected urge to go a different route to normal, which leads you to bumping into just the right person, at the right time.
A danger of a strong intellect is that the emotions and the intuition get ignored. The mind has thought it all through, checked the decision against the tickboxes, and says yes. But the emotions and the intuition know better. They know that the logical, rational route you’ve chosen will not take you where you want to go. They know that even though you’ve answered all your questions well, there are some questions that didn’t make it – questions that would seal the deal in the exact opposite way to your current selection.
If you’re lucky, the emotions and intuition will kick up enough of a fuss to make you feel uneasy about the wrong turn you’re about to take. If you’re unlucky, you’ll shut them down or blank them off – depression and minor or major addictions do the trick very nicely here.
Whether lucky or unlucky, you have a choice: you can choose to pay more and more attention to your emotions and intuition, to listen your own inner guidance systems, and learn from them. They’ll love you for it :-)
How do you best tune in to your inner guidance systems?