I wasn’t unguided. I was scared.
What if your intuition isn’t quiet, but buried beneath the fear?
I found myself, yet again, lost in the fog. I was searching in every direction for the path forward and hadn’t the faintest clue. What am I supposed to do?? I internally screamed it over and over into the nothingness. There were no signposts, no breadcrumbs to follow. Just the deafening silence. I felt abandoned - by God, by my guides, by Mother Nature… by my Self. My intuition had seemingly packed up and left me to fend for myself when I needed it most. And it had done this before. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for the moments when my life had reached a fever pitch to be the same moments that I felt most unguided.
So there I was driving around with no particular destination in mind, trying to think my way out. What had me a little hung up is that I was expecting my guidance to be wrapped up in a fuzzy bathrobe, with cucumbers on its eyes. It was supposed to be relaxed. My inner knowing was supposed to feel like calm in the midst of a storm. But I’ve since learned that intuition doesn’t actually show up that way. I’ve found it actually feels spectacularly… neutral.
Sometimes, we stumble upon the neutrality of our own intuition and it feels like peace, because it’s absent all the clamor of our anxious minds. But I find it’s more like this tiny pearl of neutrality that sometimes comes caked in a ball of highly unpleasant feelings. We’ve been told that it’s binary; it’s either fear OR intuition. Are you going to choose love OR are you going to choose fear? But I just don’t think it’s that simple. If we avoid the ball of fear gunk because it simply can’t be intuition… we may never uncover the tiny pearl of gloriously neutral intuition that was hiding inside it all along.
This lightbulb moment happened for me, when in the midst of my fugue, I was listening to a lecture by Caroline Myss and she said, as if she were speaking straight to me, if you want guidance, ask yourself what it is you’re most afraid is being asked of you. THWACK. It hit me right in my chest.
Often Truth feels like a ping to me. It pings and then flutters around in my psyche like a little lightning bug. Not this one though. This truth landed like a ping pong paddle to my sternum. I still remember the exact stretch of road I was on when it hit me.
I wasn’t unguided. I was scared.
I turned around and drove home. I sat down and waited until my anxious fidgeting stopped and I was able to be still. I asked myself what guidance I was most afraid to receive, and I journaled. Pages and pages filled with worries, grief, and tears. Until I finally reached that pure, tiny, neutral pearl of knowing.
It cracked me right in two. Not because the guidance itself carried charge, but because it was so startlingly pure, incisively compact, and devastatingly neutral - a chisel that, in one swift blow, fractured my illusions. I knew it meant I had to walk headlong into my fear, so I did.
This has been such a simple, yet life-changing practice for me, and it’s one that I return to again and again whenever the fog starts to roll in. It has helped me maintain a clearer and more honest connection with myself and my intuition.
If you’re in it right now, this practice might help. I’ve put together a guide detailing the journaling process, if you’d like to explore this in a deeper and more personal way.
I hope it unlocks something for you and, if it does, I hope you stick around. 🤍
With love,
Shannon
