InnerTuition

I suddenly knew. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew I would be living in a different country. One I didn’t feel the urge to visit, and one I couldn’t name.
It came to me while sailing, which was often when I got hunches in those days, hunches that informed me differently than my trusted brain would. I was fully immersed in a happy existence with a husband, a busy sailing schedule, my career based at the airport with a perfect set-up a stone’s throw away from our boat, and in a country I felt absolutely in tune with. I had no plans or thoughts of changing my life 100%.

A few months later I was on a business trip to Bangkok, and in the most unlikely way I met the person who started the whole process, a process we were not pursuing. It was when he visited us in Copenhagen and joined our weekly sail race that he proposed, in strong winds and with the boat keeling over, to hire my husband to work for him in Novato, California, for a job in a field he had no even remotely related experience. Long flavorful story short, soon an apartment was made available to us in Greenbrae and the date was set. We sold our boat, something that would have been a ridiculous thought a few months earlier, rented out our condo, announced to our families we were moving to California for a year, and traveled from our little island outside Copenhagen directly to Greenbrae, California. Fast forward 35 years – we are long divorced, still friends, and both still living here.

You have to look away to see it.
You have to let it go to catch it.

Intuition often speaks to us the loudest when our minds disengage, when we’re not trying to look for new ideas or solutions. If we don’t listen or are not tuned in to our “gut feelings,” we may miss signals from our intuition that can guide us.

The best definition of intuition I have seen goes something like this: accessing and retrieving information that is buried deep within. We constantly pick up information that we are not aware of on a conscious level, and it gets stored in our subconscious. Our hunches are formed using our past experiences and knowledge, much like a mental matching game.

David Lynch calls it the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired.
Steve Jobs called it “more powerful than intellect.”

Whatever it is whether we see or hear it, it is always there. Like the water tap or the electricity, it is there whether we turn it on or not.
It comes as nudges, silent messages, observations, clues - verbally, visually, or kinesthetically. Something outside of us may trigger it like a facial expression, a smell, a word or tone of voice.
It’s like a second mind, it moves around in our bodies and can send the signals through our chest, stomach, fingers, even outside the body.
It’s an intelligence just like a musical or visual intelligence, one we can train and develop.

When we try to attach meaning to our hunches, that’s when things can get sticky. We may be attached to a certain meaning, or maybe we even feel smart or wonder if we have special abilities.
Intuition is another level of knowledge outside of us that we can access quite easily. To take advantage of this infinite source of personal guidance, we just have to trust it by listening and getting out of the way. We must allow what the gut tells us to interact with our conscious thinking.

This is how I do it:
I have a little troll (I am Danish after all) that I have given a unisex name. It lives inside me somewhere and represents my intuition. I visualize it coming up to me when there is something I need to know (when I feel a nudge or a hint). It whispers, I must lean forward to hear it. It is like my little wise sibling, lifeguard, and guardian angel all in one. My job is to listen and know whatever it says, it is always right. Whenever it has whispered in my ear, I rise up again and know what I must say or do, because it said so…

Who is your troll?