“I can’t believe I listened to my intuition, and it was right!”
This is a sentence from my travel journal that I reread the other week. It made my heart hurt. I had started the journal because I wanted to document my first European backpacking trip, and the first entry was an impromptu visit to Philadelphia due to bad weather and flight cancelations. My flight had been canceled until the next evening, giving me the opportunity to explore Philadelphia and grab a cheesesteak. After a miserable attempt at sleeping in the airport, I set out at around 6 a.m. to explore the city until I needed to be back at the airport later that day. I have a lot of ancestry in Philadelphia, I’m descendant from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and this history was something that was important to my grandmother and I felt I needed to explore it since I had the opportunity. The problem that I faced was, I hadn’t planned this excursion out. This was a couple years before the days of being able to whip out a phone and find something to do. It was 2005 and I didn’t even bring my cell phone with me because it wouldn’t even work in Europe. And because it was very early in the morning, there wasn’t anyone at information desks, so there wasn’t anyone who seemed friendly enough to ask, so I decided to just hop on the train, take it somewhere, and hope for the best.
I had no idea which stop to get off on. Looking at the rail line map, I picked the Market East Station to get off at (it’s now called Jefferson Station) because, “well, I like markets…” It felt right and I had time to kill, so that’s where I got off. And it was exactly where I was trying to go. It was close to the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and a few other sites I had wanted to see. And I couldn’t believe that I knew how to get there.
Part of me still can’t believe it. But nearly 14 years have passed, and knowing what I know now, the other part of me isn’t surprised at all. I can feel my ancestors and I know they were helping me find where I wanted to go. I have very strong intuition, but I haven’t been able to trust it until the last few years of my life. In 2005 I didn’t have the connection to my body that I have now. I wasn’t able to listen to the sensations I had to help navigate my life. I didn’t even know these signals were ones that were trying to help me, I had always thought that there were parts of me that were trying to sabotage my life and what I had thought I was “supposed” to do. I mistrusted my intuition, and only gave into it this day because I had nothing else to do.
Our intuition is a powerful source we should listen to more. Intuition is frequently gendered (women’s intuition) when anyone can develop it for themselves. It just takes the ability to reflect on one’s self and be aware of one’s own emotions and body sensations. Our bodies can know what is right or wrong before our minds do. The Iowa Gambling Task demonstrates this through a study where participants were given instructions to go select one out of four decks of cards to go through. Each card would either reward or penalize the participant with (fake) money. Players were instructed to select cards one at a time and try to lose the least amount of money and win the most. Two decks were stacked with more penalizing cards and the other two decks with more rewarding cards. Participants were hooked up to sensors on their skin that measured their stress levels. The researchers found that participants’ stress levels in their bodies reflected increased amounts of stress when they flipped cards in the decks with more punitive cards at about 10 cards in, when many of these participants didn’t make a conscious decision to try another deck until they were about 50 cards in.
Being able to listen to our intuition is important for many reasons. It’s additional information that can help us make important decisions. Have you ever felt like you knew you shouldn’t have done something, but couldn’t explain why, and then wished you had listened to that inkling afterwards? That’s intuition. Or intuition can also keep us physically safe and help us improve our health when we listen to it.
What does this have to do with the Taurus New Moon? Taurus is all about comfort and stability, which can grow into stubbornness and controlling natures. This is a good day for being grounded, which is the first step to take when you want to strengthen your intuition. What are some ways you can connect with your body today? What is a way you can tap into your intuition instead of brain?
If you do nothing else today, see if you can determine what a “yes” and a “no” feels like in your body. Find something that has a lot of different options for your to choose from, such as Netflix or an art book. Plant your feet firmly on the floor, take as many deep breaths as it takes for the chatter in your head to subside enough to check in with your body. Mentally scan your body from your feet, feeling them on the floor, all the way up your body to the top of your head, taking note of any sensations you feel along the way like stiff muscles or an anxious stomach. Then, flip through your set of options one at a time and do another body scan as you look at your option. What differences do you feel in your body? Take note of where you are feeling these sensations and which stimuli you were reacting to. After you do a bunch (try to do at least 10), see what patterns you can see. Did you feel the options on Netflix that excite you in one place and the options that didn’t excite you somewhere else? Note where these places are. Then find something else that you know is a “yes” and a “no” and see if these places in your body are triggered by those. This might not work the same way 100% of the time, but it’s the first step to learning how all of this works in your body and begin to trust it.
Lapis Lazuli and Uva Ursi are our allies for today. Not only are they fun to say together, but they can help in connecting to our intuition. Lapis Lazuli will help encourage self-awareness and aid us when finding our inner truth. It will help bring awareness from mundane levels to the heighted levels of our intuition. Uva Ursi helps with heightening our psychic abilities, connecting to our inner strength and ancestral knowledge.
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