365 Inspirations—111: Awakening Intuition

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don't know how or why."—Albert Einstein

I'm doing a self course in awakening my intuition. To be honest, I'm a highly intuitive person, but I am trapped in a body and mind that has been trained not to trust or follow this side of myself completely. I'm now realizing that there is no other way I can live. Following my intuition is my path. All other paths are not the ones I'm supposed to be on!

I know this at a very deep level, yet I fear the outcome of following my intuition completely. There's a sense of security (It may very well be a false sense of security) I get from following a comfortable, known path, even though I am quite sure that path doesn't suit me anymore.

So I'm back and retraining my mind. I'm reading Penney Peirce's book The Intuitive Way. I'm reading it step by step. I'm scribbling in the margins, I'm underlining things and I'm really listening and paying attention to what I'm reading. I need to absorb this information and live it completely. This is what I know and feel.

Penney asks in her book "Could it be that just beyond the Information Age in the Intuitive Age?"

She goes on to say

"Intuition, I'm convinced, is where the other 90 percent of our brainpower lies. Through intuition, we get the big picture, the simultaneous understanding that puts us and all the facts in our proper relationship to something beyond us."

I've been feeling so many gut instincts, deep in the core of my being,  to follow a new path, but I'm hesitating to do so. Much of it is fear related to security and comfort. Also, there are some financial things to consider. I believe I'm moving in the right direction and am still applying my rational, linear mind and not completely abandoning reason.

I think that is a good balance.

But truth be told, for too long I've ignored signs to do something new and eventually, I believe, if you ignore your gut instincts, they will keep resurfacing in some form or another until you have no other choice but to pay attention to what this intuition of yours is saying.

And this time I'm listening. Really I AM!

Do you always follow your intuition or gut instincts? Are you doing what you want to do?

365 Lessons-Lesson 47: Awaken your Intuition

My husband, Seong Yoon Lee, is a believer. What does that mean exactly? He believes in what he is doing so much that he is willing to make very bold statements. Sometimes his statements scare me. When we were living in South Korea, he used to say things like, "Quit your English teaching job and teach yoga full-time to Koreans." This was his suggestion to me when I was at the end of my rope with my teaching gig in Korea. I just looked at him with wide eyes and an opened mouth. All I could think of was How will I do that? Well, I did it. I quit my job, got my yoga teacher's license in Colorado and started teaching yoga to agile Koreans while trying to speak Korean. I'm sure I chopped up the language a bit, but it went quite well. For those of you who have just arrived at this blog, my husband used to be a Buddhist monk. After we married, he left the monastery and opened his own yoga school. This was not an easy leap and it's one I am writing about in my book Lessons from the Monk I Married.

Flash forward to 2009, my husband hasn't stopped making these bold statements. Sometime during the past year he said, "I'm going to teach yoga at Microsoft." Guess what he's doing? During the same year he said, "I'm going to open my own yoga school." Now this one I couldn't believe. I mean, we didn't have any money for this..how would it be possible? It's expensive to rent business space, how would we pay for everything? I couldn't wrap my head around it. When I asked him directly how this would be possible, he answered, "I have no idea, I don't think, I feel it."

In early December, I went to a 10-day silent meditation course. When I came back, Seong Yoon had a business partner who wanted to invest his time, energy and money into opening a business with Seong Yoon because he too believes it will be a great success. I thought jokingly, "It's contagious, more and more people are becoming believers." They will open Yoon's Yoga Bliss near Seattle on February 26th. When you are around this kind of energy, you can't help but start to believe in your own inner feelings or intuition.

I asked my husband just now, "What does intuition mean?" and he said, "Message from inside." Most of the time our insides are so jumbled, it's hard to hear anything clearly. Meditation has helped me immensely in tuning in to what I am meant to do.

I have spent periods of 20, 30 and 45 days in silent meditation. All of this time was not wasted; it was training me to hear myself from the inside out. Unknowingly, I have also come to trust my intuition. It takes training to hear what your inside has to say.

My inside is telling me to connect with as many people as possible and share with them the fact that everyone has this possibility of hearing themselves. Meditate, feel your breath, practice yoga, take a walk, get out of your head..all of these are helpful. The most helpful thing I can pass along is to live moment to moment because living in the moment is where you will find your answers. If your mind is racing to the future or falling back to things that happened in the past, you will miss what your intuition wants to tell you. You will miss now and if you keep missing now you will miss your life.

In the evening before my husband and I go to bed, we like to read to each other. I always grab a random book from the stack by our bed and say to my husband, "What page?" The other night he said, "Page 76." Whenever he tells me a page, I say, "You always say that page." He starts to laugh, he knows this isn't true and that I'm playing with him. Then, he lies flat on his back with a peaceful look on his face and closes his eyes. Then, I start to read the page to him.

The gist of page 76 was about struggling to find the answer to something or to remember something. Only when you completely let go of your efforts, do you find what you are looking for. Like when you forget an actor's or actress's name and it comes to you in the middle of the night when you are no longer focusing on finding the answer.

I believe that when you set good intentions which are helpful to you and others and you release those intentions into the universe, without being attached to them or attached to the results, good things will happen. It's the law of nature. The key is to be opened and remain in this moment. I know this to be true as I have seen unbelievable things happen with my own eyes which have caused me to become a "believer" too.