2. Embrace Intuition
"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."
- Jonas Salk
When you're trying to design a life you love it can be difficult to decide what to do, decipher if you're on the right path, or know where to look next. As ideas and opportunities present themselves, we have the option to explore them further or let them be. How do you know what to choose?
We're often told to use our intuition, trust our gut. But what does that mean exactly?
Intuition is often described as something we feel in our gut or something we just know. How can we learn to recognize this elusive feeling, believe in its power, and learn to trust it?
Let's start by taking a look at goes on physically in the gut and the brain during times of intuition.
THE GUT
We've all experienced gut feel. It's that sensation in your stomach/heart area that tells your brain something feels very right... or very wrong.
Too often we disregard these feelings because we can't really explain them. It can seem a bit too touchy-feely for our rational and logical world. But the feeling is quite real. It's a physiological response assisted by the vagus nerve.
Latin for wandering, the vagus nerve travels from your cerebellum and brain stem, down to your heart and all other essential organs, branches to your stomach, until it reaches the depths of your abdomen. This nerve creates a major mind-body feedback loop, sending messages from the brain to the rest of the body and messages from the body back up to the brain.
Let's take a moment to appreciate the body as a symbiotic and complex system. Without your conscious awareness, your vagus nerve fibers are constantly sending information from your brain to the rest of your organs to keep them functioning, and your organs send information back to your brain about their health and well-being. All without us knowing about it. Trippy.
The vagus nerve is also responsible for sending survival signals to the brain: to rest/digest during times of safety and to engage in fight/flight/freeze during times of danger. We recognize these as visceral reactions to and gut feelings about stimuli in the world around us.*
While we no longer need this feedback to avoid the daily threat of being eaten by a predator, our instincts remain. As our brains have adapted to handle increasingly difficult tasks, our collective mind-body has refined the art of sensing stimuli beyond mere survival.
We have adapted to navigate the intricacies of human life by perceiving all matters of thought, interaction and experience as safe vs. dangerous. This is your intuition at work.
THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MIND
The conscious and unconscious are not actually anatomical locations in the brain. The terms are used more as a type of shorthand to refer to the complex psychological phenomenon of thoughts we are aware of and those we aren't.
The conscious mind represents the thoughts we can directly control through logic and reasoning, about 10% of our mental process. We love using this linear, rational and analytical part of our mind. It processes slowly and we can literally feel ourselves thinking. It feels productive. So satisfying! It's fun to overthink things! This is the monkey mind we strive to quiet during meditation and other mindfulness practices.
The unconscious mind represents the part of your mind that you can’t directly control, which comprises the remaining 90% of our mental process. Our unconscious not only controls basic biological functions, it also influences personality, behavior, feelings, creativity, habits, and beliefs.
While the primary source of all human behavior is generated by the unconscious, the processing happens so quickly we don't even realize it's happening. In fact most of our mental processes happen without our conscious knowledge.** Super trippy.
The unconscious is an interesting and mysterious place. It's a vast repository for all the experiences, memories and data we've collected over the years. It's a treasure trove of information to draw upon. We tap into it when we meditate, when we dream, and even when we take a relaxing walk in nature.
Here's where things get really interesting. Without our direct knowledge, our brains are constantly sifting through those piles of seemingly unrelated information and detecting patterns.
When we just know the solution to a problem or just know what decision to make, that's the unconscious at work. A pattern has been spotted and communicated to your conscious mind. That's intuition. Mind. Blown.
BELIEF AND TRUST
Gut feelings are an instinctual response to stimuli, provided for our survival. And over time our instincts have become so finely tuned that we can literally feel out any situation and detect if it's safe or dangerous.
And our unconscious minds are constantly making connections between vast amounts of stored data, without our conscious knowledge, but it's all accessible through intuition.
Sounds like a pretty compelling system of naturally-occurring, ready-to-use information. A sixth sense. Turns out it's not magic, but it is quite miraculous.
So why are we hesitant to trust our intuition? Because humans are obsessed with control. By it's very nature we can't control intuition, and we probably won't ever understand exactly how it works. So we're skeptical.
Simply knowing that it's not hocus pocus helps. Understanding that it's a natural part of our biology can allows us ease into intuition and allow it to tell us where to look next. We just need to relax a bit and let go of our conscious mind's desire to overthink everything.
If we let go of our perception of control long enough to understand the tools we've been given and let belief set in, we can learn what intuition feels like. With practice, trust is gained.
INTUITION IS THE KEY
Embracing intuition is essential on the path to self-discovery, meaningful decision-making, creativity, cultivating purpose and living a life you love. Trying to reason your way through life's big questions only leads to obsessive overthinking, rumination and anxiety. Many of us waste years of precious life on that path.
Purpose and meaning can only be discovered by revealing your authentic self and unlocking what you already know somewhere in the depths of your gut and unconscious mind.
* How Does the Vagus Nerve Convey Gut Instincts to the Brain? Psychology Today, Christopher Bergland
** Unconscious or Subconscious? Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, Michael Craig Miller M.D.