Intuition

in·tu·i·tion
noun
1.
the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
“we shall allow our intuition to guide us”
synonyms: gut feeling (I added that) instinct, intuitiveness

“Can you use that word in a sentence please?”

Isn’t that one of the questions spelling bee participants ask?
I love the sentence Dictionary.com came up with: We shall allow our intuition to guide us.”
Wouldn’t it be great if we all REALLY did that?
I’d like to live in THAT world!

When’s the last time you said: I shouldn’t have trusted my intuition? 
Probably never.
Here’s why: Intuition is your internal GPS. She hold the maps, she has all the directions.
Your intuition has access to all your wisdom, all your talents, all your hopes and dreams.
Even the ones that are buried so deep you don’t acknowledge them or show them to the world.
Then, she has access to wisdom and talents that YOU didn’t even know you possessed.

The thing with intuition is: she’s got your back.
You have to really know that in order to trust her guidance, 
because when you can quiet the bullshit, she will be your North Star.
She will guide you to exactly where you should be.
Where you need to be.
You just need to listen.

Intuition is that voice that keeps repeating.
It is calm but insistent.
You’ll try to talk yourself out of it, there doesn’t seem to be reason to its request.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense.
OFTEN it doesn’t seem rational.
That’s the thing, it isn’t reasonable, it isn’t rational, it’s intuition.

Mothers have it IN SPADES!
“Check the baby”.
Calm, but insistent.
“Check the baby”.
There is no mother on earth that ignores that voice.
They go check the baby, damn it!

Intuition has conviction, it has that knowing.
I’m going to add that to the definition: having a knowing…just KNOWING something.
There’s never a question mark at the end of the request.
If the thought starts with “should I “? Or “What if”. That’s not intuition.
It says without a shadow of a doubt “Don’t marry that man”.
End of discussion.
Shit! We know that voice is telling the truth, we just don’t want to hear it the night before the wedding.

There are some people that risk looking foolish to obey their intuition.
People get off planes that then crash.
There are the stories of people that didn’t go to work, didn’t go back in the building or were “late” on 911.

“Get that mole checked”
That’s intuition. It’s not asking you, it’s telling you.
Whether it’s telling you to get off a plane, see a doctor or leave the ass hole at the altar. It’s trying to guide you and possibly save your life.

My husband and I follow intuition’s instructions every time we get on the motorcycle. We’ve gotten really good at it; because we want to live to see another day.
On our long distance trips we schedule a stretch break every two hours so our butts don’t permanently fall asleep.
Several times, just because one of us has gotten that “hit”, we have pulled off a road to check a map or get a coffee way ahead of time, and it has saved us.

I can remember two times in France. Once we missed a ten car pile up by about a minute. Another morning we left early, just before a sniper opened fire from a bell tower, on the plaza where we were staying in Tours. If we had stuck to our original time, we would have been having coffee…in that plaza…at that time. Guaranteed.
I’m not kidding, we are probably alive because we deviated from our plan, we both had a gut feeling to leave early.

In March of 2010 on Oahu, my friend was teasing me because I was convinced there was going to be a tsunami. I was drinking umbrella drinks and obsessing, so he Googled the frequency of tsunamis in the Hawaiian islands.
Rare.
Didn’t matter.
I heard the voice that kept saying very calmly, but insistently: there’s going to be a tsunami. If Oahu had been an airplane, I would have grabbed my carry-on and gotten off.
Well, it never occurred, we left the next day and I forgot about it.

The next year my husband and I were invited to Maui to stay with friends.
On the drive from the airport to the condo, there’s that voice again.
“There’s going to be a tsunami”.
So I blurt it out over the bad music on the radio.
We then had a spirited debate on which was more likely to happen, a tsunami or a giant volcanic eruption? We both end up on Team Volcano, because THAT makes sense.
It’s reasonable and rational, unlike a tsunami…and we forget about it. 
I do have to say, I did pay attention to the fact that we were six floors up. I know I wouldn’t have stayed beachfront. No way.
So you can imagine my husband’s face when 10 days later CNN breaks in with coverage of the huge Tsunami in Japan, and a few minutes later all the Islands are put on Tsunami Watch! 
Intuition had my back. She had OUR back.
She just had her dates wrong the first time, she was ahead of herself by one year.
Or was she?
XoxJanet