Intuition (Part 1)

Have you ever had a gut feeling, only to talk yourself out of it? We all possess a profoundly potent built-in guidance system, yet most of us have learned to ignore it in favor of logic and provable facts.

In this episode, we are at once demystifying and celebrating the reality of intuition. We dive into the difference between intuitive messages and the frantic voice of worry. You'll learn how to tune into your body's unique signals and how to convince your conscious mind to stop fighting your intuitive instincts and instead start working with them.

Whether you’re seeking deeper clarity on your life path or simply want to navigate daily choices with a little more ease and alignment, this episode will help you reclaim the most powerful tool you already own.

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Chasing Starlight is brought to you by The Bell and Raven. If you’d like to explore more about who we are, including our workshops and educational offerings, our spiritual wellness retreats, and our one-on-one intuitive readings, be sure to follow us on social media: @thebellandraven or visit our website: thebellandraven.com.

Transcript

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Isabel Carrington 0:00

Intuition. What is it about this word that can mystify, petrify, and polarize people all at the same time? Intuition isn't some rare, elusive gift that only a chosen few possess. Guess what? We all have it. And that means you. So let's dive into exactly what it is and isn't and how you can begin to tap into it as a powerful tool to assist you on your path. It is your gift, after all. I'm Isabel, and this is Chasing Starlight. A few months ago, I was out driving and running some errands on a day off from work, as I do. And on that day, I had to go to all the regular places - you know, just typical errands: grocery store, gas station, post office, that kind of thing. Now, I have maybe two supermarkets that I regularly go to that sort of fit into my vibe check, my own personal comfort zone. I can't explain it. My husband, he has his own that are completely different from mine. Anyway, I just prefer the feel of these two over any other local grocery stores that I've tried. And I don't think I'm alone here. I I would venture to guess that most of you have your favorites as well. And it's probably not just grocery stores. Probably comes down to every kind of shopping experience that we sort of have to endure on a daily basis. But anyway, I had finished up at the grocery store that day, and that was my last stop before heading back home. And as I was at the light where I would normally turn right to head back home, that's the quickest route to get home anyway, from that particular grocery store. At the last minute, inexplicably, I just switched blinkers and turned left out of the parking lot. And when I realized what I had just done consciously, I mentally chastised myself. You know, Isabel, what why did you do that? Now you're going to have to turn around or take the long way home. And I wasn't in a rush. I I wasn't worried about getting home. I just wanted to get home. And so I ended up having to take this longer, more circuitous route to get back to my house, which involves smaller, winding back roads, more so than the normal route that I would take. And as I was on one of these back roads, I was approaching a curve, and as I came to the peak of the curve, I spotted something in the road, slightly off to the side from the middle, but still very well in the line of traffic. And as I got closer, I saw that it was a rabbit. Not a baby, but likely a juvenile, I think. And this little bunny was sitting upright, it was alert, its eyes were open, but it was just in the road. It was not moving out of harm's way. And so my car got a little bit closer, and I pulled my car over, put it in park, put on my hazards, and I got out to approach the rabbit as slowly and gently as I could. I didn't want to scare it, but it was also in a really dangerous position on this blind corner. And when I slowly approached it, it didn't move. And that made me a little concerned. It almost seemed like it was in shock or something. And so I knew that either way, I had to get it out of the road. So I grabbed a piece of cardboard from the back of my car and I carefully used it to encourage the rabbit to hop back over to the safety of the grass. And it did. After a bit of coaxing, it finally hopped over to the side of the road. And no sooner had I done that, a truck came speeding up behind me, swerved around my car, and kept on barreling around the blind corner and going on down the road. Well, I I looked at the rabbit, and the rabbit looked back at me for a few seconds, and then it finally hopped into the brush that bordered some trees hidden from sight. Now, every single time I think about this particular moment, there is no doubt in my mind that had I not stopped when I did, this rabbit would have met a very unfortunate and untimely end. If I had gone right at the light in the grocery store parking lot, which was fully according to my preconceived conscious plan, I would have gotten home as scheduled, but I would have completely bypassed a moment of pure aligned synchronicity. I know in my soul that my intuition guided me to go that route home from the grocery store that day. We all have these moments. I can think of so many times over the course of my life where I have had moments like this. And certainly my friends, my family members, they share different moments that they've experienced. I've had at my metaphysical shop, the Bell and Raven, complete strangers come up to me and share with me different moments that they've experienced like this. And yet we often treat these moments as to quote the late incomparable Bob Ross, we often treat these moments as happy little accidents. We we brush them off as coincidences or strokes of luck or flukes of timing. But what if they aren't flukes at all? What if these subtle internal nudges are actually part of a highly sophisticated, deeply wired system that is within each of us inherently, biologically? Here's a fun fact. That's exactly what it is, and yet much of the time we are simply ignoring it on a daily basis. Why do we have such a hard time connecting with this internal guidance system as humans, or even acknowledging that we possess this system in the first place? The answer to that lies within an overarching philosophy that rules our modern world. First, let's remember that we live in a society built entirely on the foundation of strict materialism. And by materialism I mean physicalism, the notion that everything we perceive as humans is rooted in the physical, or to be more specific, in the five physical senses. It is the rigid institutional belief system that declares that if you cannot touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it, or see it with the primary five senses, then it likely doesn't exist. It is labeled as fantasy or worse, superstition or pseudoscience. The five senses. Five, that's all you get, at least according to Aristotle, and as much as he contributed to the world in which we live then and now, I have a little beef with him, because in naming the five senses, he stopped short just prior to the most powerful sense that we all possess. I would argue that it is more powerful possibly than all of the other five senses combined. And that is the sixth sense, and that is intuition. Now we are taught from the time that we enter into a classroom to worship at the altar of empirical proof. And don't get me wrong, I am the daughter of a scientist, and he was a brilliant one at that. I am the sister of several scientists and doctors, and the scientific method, I can remember learning about it in elementary school and thinking, yes, this makes sense, and I can see how this is extremely useful. And it is an incredible tool for building bridges and for helping to cure physical ailments and to map out the mechanical laws of the universe. But there is a major breakdown, a major divide, a major crisis that happens when we try to apply those same rigid laboratory boundaries to the vast fluid landscape of human consciousness. When we try to relegate everything that cannot be weighed on a scale or tracked in a lab or on a spreadsheet to the realm of pseudoscience, we end up cutting off a massive portion of our actual lived human experience. But here's the beautiful irony of the hyper-rational mind. I would be willing to bet a great deal. Everything I own, which is not much, but still, that even the most skeptical left-brained scholar, the kind who writes lengthy papers debunking anything remotely quote unquote intuitive, has had a moment in their life where they paused. I guarantee you they have had a moment in their life where they paused and said, I don't know why, but I think I'm going to take this other route to work today. And they did just that. And in hindsight, they're very glad they did. You know, when those individuals follow that feeling and it saves them from an inconvenience or worse, disaster, they will often call it a coincidence or or chalk it up to situational awareness. And I want to pause right here and talk about that for a second because situational awareness and observational awareness are very much real things. They are deeply important skills. Being keenly observant of your surroundings or recognizing a sudden change in someone's body language, these are vital tools for navigating the physical world safely and intelligently. We need our observational skills to thrive. But, and this is a big but, they are not the same thing as intuition, nor do they take the place of it. Situational and observational awareness rely entirely on external data, the things that you can physically perceive through those five senses, or historically remember. It is your brain quickly calculating the facts of your environment in real time. Intuition, on the other hand, operates completely independent of external data. My conscious observation that day at the grocery store told me that I was at a green light on a normal road. There was no visual or auditory data to tell me that a rabbit was in danger around a blind corner miles away. That was pure intuition. However, when you combine them, when you actively cultivate sharp situational awareness, keen observational skills, and a deeply tuned intuition, you create something extremely powerful. You create a kind of trinity of sensory and extrasensory awareness. When all three of these faculties are working together, they become a remarkably protective and insightful mechanism. In addition to potentially helping to keep you out of harm's way, they can open the door to incredible opportunities and aligned moments that you would have otherwise driven right past. So we need to start recognizing this internal guidance system and calling it what it actually is. It is the same exact internal guidance system that operated within that logical, physical, proof-based scholar who took a different route to work that day as the one that resonated within me on the day that I encountered the rabbit in the road. However, unlike me, when I use words like intuitive guidance, they end up using what they feel are acceptable or clinical words in order to give themselves permission to trust it, it being their intuition. Call it whatever you want, but intuition is alive and well within all of us and it absolutely is a tool of survival. You can quote, and I will quote, I will quote right now, Albert Einstein, whose work, as we all know, reshaped our entire understanding of physics. He openly acknowledged intuition. He famously wrote, or at least is paraphrased to have said, that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, while the rational mind is a faithful servant. He really believed in this sacred gift of intuition, and he noted it multiple times through his work and in various interviews that are on record. And of course, we can look at Carl Jung to take this even further. Jung didn't view intuition as something flaky or unscientific. He classified it as one of the four fundamental psychological functions of the human being operating right alongside sensation, thinking, and feeling. In Jung's view, intuition is how we perceive the inherent possibilities and hidden corners of a situation, somehow jumping across the lines of linear logic to see what's coming next. And through his lens, it is an active, vital human faculty. To Jung, intuition is a form of intelligence that simply operates beyond the slower speed of rational thought. So all of that fancy jargon aside, in order to connect with our internal guidance system, we have to understand that our intuition is not separate from our core self. It is our core self. It is the voice of our deepest awareness speaking directly through the physical vessel of our body. When a person who begins to awaken their intuition realizes that this system was built directly into their biology before they even took their first breath, that is the awakening. That is the beginning of the connection to one's intuition, their own internal guidance system. So, how do we truly connect with it? The most common hurdle that I hear from people who are trying to practice connecting to their own intuition is very practical. They say, I want to trust that inner guide, but I don't know how to tell the difference between my authentic intuition and that loud, frantic voice of my own anxiety or stress or even wishful thinking. And let me just take a very gentle pause right here for a moment. When I use that word anxiety in this context, I want to be clear. I'm talking about those everyday racing worried thoughts that we all fall into. I am not talking about, nor am I in any way minimizing the very real medical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. If navigating clinical anxiety is a part of your daily human experience, please know that I hold so much compassion for that, and I would never want to belittle or oversimplify your journey. What we are exploring here today is simply the energetic frequency of fear and worry and how those specific emotions feel in the body compared to our deep inner knowing, the knowing with a capital K, as I like to call it. So with this in mind, when people say to me, how do I differentiate between my intuition and the, you know, the hammering sound of stress or worry, well, I know that this is where many people get tripped up when trying to connect with their intuition. And it makes sense because both of these energies create physical sensations in the body. It is very easy to mistake an old emotional trigger or a deep-seated fear for some kind of intuitive warning. But if we slow down and examine the specific energetic signature of these two voices, we find that they write their messages in completely different languages. First, we need to listen closely to the tone. When we're feeling worry or stress, those voices are almost always breathless. They're loud, they're frantic, and they love to repeat themselves in these exhausting, never-ending loops. It feels like this high-speed Keystone cops chase, like in some fast-paced movie with lots of frenetic car chases like the Italian job. But your true intuition has a completely different vocal profile. It is calm, it is matter-of-fact, it is resolute, and most importantly, and this is very important, it doesn't have any emotional spin, and it doesn't have any panic. Now, there may be an undercurrent of what feels a bit like urgency, depending on the situation, but really what that is, is certainty. Now hold up for a second, because when I say that the tone of intuition is calm, I don't want you to think that it's only useful for when you're sitting quietly seeking clarity or meditating on your general life path. What about those high-stakes fight or flight moments? We all have them. We all have those times when our Spidey senses kick in. But even in immediate situations when the intuitive message is highly urgent, like you need to leave now, or let's not go down that alleyway. Your intuition still does not scream in a panic. It doesn't have to. It delivers that urgent message with a cold, piercing clarity that kind of cuts straight to the point. You hear it and you feel it unmistakably. And I need to say this because it is so important. Always, always trust your gut in those situations. If your internal guidance system says leave, you leave. Even if it means you have to be abrupt, even if you have to be loud, even if it makes you look rude to the people around you, who cares what a stranger thinks of you if you're literally choosing the path of safety? Your intuition doesn't care about social etiquette, it cares about your survival. So give yourself full permission to drop the politeness and listen to the truth of your gut in those situations. The next thing we need to pay attention to is where the sensation actually lives in our physical form. Anxiety, stress, and worry are almost always a top-heavy experience. They tend to live in our body from the chest up. And this can come through in the form of racing thoughts or even an uptick in our pulse rate. Intuition, on the other hand, drops its weight way down into your core. There's a reason we call it a gut feeling. And intuition can also manifest as a sudden physical change in temperature in your skin. If you think of goosebumps, for example, or as I like to call them, intuitive truth chills, provided you're not standing near an open freezer. Goosebumps are the physical manifestation of your intuition aligning with your body to deliver a message. And third, look at the timeline that these two voices inhabit. I have always, always wanted to time travel, which is probably why I'm fascinated by quantum physics. And worry and anxiety are constant time travelers, but they're terrible ones. My sister has one of my favorite expressions. She insists that it's not hers and and she borrowed it from someone else, and that's fair. But because I heard it from my sister, I'll always attribute it to her. And that expression is worry is the least cool form of time travel. And it's so true. Nothing constructive can come from it. It is obsessively reviewing past mistakes or or projecting catastrophic, worst-case scenarios into a future that hasn't even happened yet and likely never will. It thrives completely on the phrase what if in the worst possible way. But your intuition doesn't care about that. It's not looking forward to tomorrow and it's not looking backward to yesterday. It is always grounded right here in the immediate current millisecond. That's all it wants you to focus on. Finally, notice the aftermath. If we are in the throes of a storm of stress or worry, it can leave us feeling drained and small or shrouded in a cloud of self-doubt. But when we receive a true intuitive hit, even if the truth it delivers is inconvenient or not what we were hoping for, we are left with a deep sense of inner certainty. We will likely even feel a momentary sense of peace through internal validation. To make this super easy to remember when you're out in the world, you just have to check in with three things tone, body, and timeline. So as a reminder, first listen to the tone. Is it frantic, breathless, and demanding? That's anxiety. Or is it calm, quiet, piercing, and resolute? That's your intuition. Is it spinning an elaborate fiction full of drama and worst case scenarios? Anxiety. Or is it delivering a simple and direct statement without any storytelling? Intuition. Then notice a location in your body. Are you feeling it from the chest up, like tight muscles in the neck and shoulders, or a racing mind? That's stress. Are you feeling it from the core down? Like a grounded gut feeling or sudden chills? That's your intuition. And finally check the timeline. Is this voice fixated on past regrets or future disasters? Anxiety. Or is it rooted completely in the present second? Intuition. Don't forget that worry and stress are authors of fiction. They require this elaborate, multifaceted, multiplot story to sustain their existence. They build a complex. Case, bringing in historical evidence from your past quote unquote failures. They paint an incredibly vivid picture of a future catastrophe as if they are a Hollywood blockbuster with a super extravagant budget. But intuition never tells a story. It has zero interest in drama, which is actually pretty refreshing. Intuition will deliver a single neutral statement, and then, and this is the key distinction, it will likely fall silent. And this is because, in essence, it is freeing up room in your mind for you to interpret the message and act upon it. And if you don't act upon it, well, don't worry, you'll likely be sent a reminder before too long. So if intuition delivers its single quiet statement and then retreats back into the shadows again, the real question becomes: how do we make sure we are actually quiet enough to hear it in the first place? How do we tune our internal guidance system to the right frequency? It starts with learning how to understand and quiet the conscious mind. To do that, I have an exercise, a visualization, that can aid in this process. And it has helped me along the path of awakening and enriching my own intuition. And that exercise is to imagine the conscious mind as a well-meaning and adorable but incredibly exhausting and demanding toddler. It is constantly clamoring for your attention. It's banging pots and pans, it's screaming about deadlines, throwing tantrums about all of those to-do lists. It is mirroring internally all of the frantic external noise in our lives. But beneath that chaotic racket of noise sits the deep, quiet wisdom of your subconscious mind. And you can think of the subconscious mind as the ripe garden in which your intuition is tended and nurtured. It's the old soul in the room who already has all the answers or knows exactly what to do, but who refuses to compete with the loud cries of the toddler. Now, you don't need to fight the toddler or try to force it to be quiet. In fact, I would urge you not to do that at all, because trying to do battle with your own conscious mind will likely just create more internal noise. Instead, we want to gently acknowledge it and yet still allow ourselves to be entirely in the moment. If your conscious mind lapses into time travel mode, you can gently quietly pull yourself back to the now. And this brings us to a really fascinating dynamic: the rivalry. Because they operate in such different ways, the conscious mind and your intuition can often feel like they are at war with one another, almost like they are rivals vying for your attention at the exact same time. Why does this happen? It happens because your conscious mind demands proof before it will let you take a step. It wants the spreadsheet, it wants the risk assessment, it wants the full analysis. Your intuition, however, often demands that you take a step before it will reveal the proof. Or a better word would be that you trust. Your intuition asks that you trust without necessarily having all of the answers on a conscious level. So you can see how this creates a massive internal conflict. When I was at the grocery store that day, my conscious mind had the route mapped out perfectly. You know, turn right, save five minutes, get home, put the cheese in the fridge. It had the data. When my intuition suddenly said, turn left, it offered absolutely no logical data to support that demand. It just offered a feeling of certainty. And then it fell silent. And in that nanosecond, my body acted upon this inexplicable message, inexplicable at the time, of course, but well understood, not 10 minutes later when I came to the curve in the road. Now, if we aren't careful, the loud, logical conscious mind will always bully the quiet intuition into submission simply because the conscious mind has, quote unquote, the facts. But as we've learned, those materialistic facts only account for a fraction of reality. The aim here is not to shut one out in favor of the other. We don't want to become so purely intuitive that we lose all our grounding in reality, and we don't want to become so purely logical that we lose our internal guidance system. The goal is to create a balance or a partnership. We need to be able to hold space for both, considering the unique wisdom and value that each contains. So when you feel that rivalry bubbling up, when your intuition says, go this way, and your conscious mind panics, try bringing them together. You can just say to your conscious mind, I hear you. Thank you for doing your job and analyzing the data, but we are going to follow this gut feeling for a moment and see where it leads. And by doing this, you validate the conscious mind. You're keeping it calm while officially handing the map back, at least in this moment, to your intuition. So that is the first thing that we can do to tap into our intuitive gift is to honor that balance. But to tap into it more, to open that line of flow between us and our intuition, we actually give ourselves another gift. We take ourselves somewhere slower, somewhere quieter, where we can just enjoy the silence, to quote a favorite band of mine. So try this the next time you have a few moments to yourself. And whatever you have to do, reclaim those moments. Take them. You own them. You've earned them. You don't even have to earn them. They're yours. And find a place where you can be relatively undisrupted. Maybe that's indoors or maybe it's outside if the weather is nice. The quieter the better. But remember, it doesn't have to be a vacuum of total silence. Maybe you can hear birds or or or cars passing by or music wafting over from a neighbor's house, and that is perfectly okay. Let those sounds exist and then still let yourself draw back to the current moment. Because right here, right now, that is all that we have, and that is all that we need. I know it sounds super basic and it probably sounds much too simple, but let me ask you this. How often do you allow yourself to be still? Please allow yourself to be still. Allow yourself to sit in silence or as close to quiet as is possible for you. Practice this whenever you can. Just a few moments a week to start, and then maybe a few moments every day. Do this, and you will be putting your foot on the pathway to intuition. Because once we practice sitting in that space, we open the door to the deeper mechanics of our internal guidance system. In our next episode, we're going to dive into some specific and really accessible ways to tap into our intuition. And we'll talk a little bit about how to acknowledge and decipher what really constitutes a true sign or message. We'll also look at the unique language that your intuition uses to speak directly to you and only you. And we'll also talk about how energetically your intuition is directly connected to universal energy because you are universal energy. And that is where the really awe-inspiring magic comes in. I love talking about it, and so I hope you'll tune in. Connecting with your intuition does take a commitment on your part. You are committing to placing your trust back in the biological and spiritual energies of your own being, trusting those internal energies over any external opinions or uncertain and biased narratives. Because here's the truth your intuition will never, ever steer you wrong. So tonight, when you are about to go to sleep, try letting the external noise or external input rest for a moment. Take a few deep intentional breaths into the core of your being and take note of what you feel when you find yourself there. And ask yourself, are you ready to tap into this intuitive guidance system that you have always had? I hope the answer is yes. Because after all, it's yours. So why not use it? Thank you so much for joining me today on Chasing Starlight. Remember to stay curious and to look for the wonder that is all around you. And I look forward to meeting you back here on the path next time. Chasing Starlight is a podcast brought to you by The Bell and Raven. If you'd like to explore more about who we are, including our workshops and educational offerings, our spiritual wellness retreats, and our one on one intuitive readings, be sure to follow us on social media @ The Bell and Raven. Or visit our website, thebellandraven.com.