Your Sixth Sense

“The universe is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
– Eden Phillpotts

How close are you with your intuition? 

Brené Brown has a passage on intuition—and why we avoid it—in her book The Gifts of Imperfection. She’s found that our need for certainty silences our intuitive voice. “Most of us are not very good at not knowing,” she writes. “We like sure things and guarantees so much that we don’t pay attention to the outcomes of our brain’s matching process.” You know those times when you ignore a strong internal instinct, and instead become fearful and look for assurance from others, asking “What do you think?” “Should I do it?” “What would you do?”? That’s exactly what she’s talking about.

Brown explains another example of how our need for certainty sabotages our intuition in those moments “when we ignore our gut’s warning to slow down, gather more information, or reality-check our expectations.” This happens when we say to ourselves things like:

“I’m just going to do it. I don’t care anymore.”

“I’m tired of thinking about it. It’s too stressful.”

“I’d rather just do it than wait another second.”

“I can’t stand not knowing.”

Ultimately, she defines intuition this way: “Intuition is not a single way of knowing–it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, reason.” Intuition allows us to wait in the vulnerable space of not knowing and allow for things to emerge to help us decide mindfully what we need to do.

For me, being able to trust my intuition and use it as data has helped me live a life that’s larger than anything I could think of or think I’m in control of. Learning how to identify and use my intuition has been a journey, and it’s led to a way of being that’s allowed me to reap heaps of big magic in my life. 

Wanna give it a go? Here’s a practical recipe for more magic in your life:

When it comes to having a life filled with more magic, there’s a part of us that has to be awakened to be able to tune into it. It’s like our eyes and ears, mind and heart, need to have a wider aperture to let it in. That wider perspective, rooted in our bodies in the most embodied sense, leads us to see more than we expected, allows us to linger in wonder, and helps us take advantage of our creative imagination as we feel into possibilities. Our creativity has space here, and so does our intuition. 

As much as our patterned behaviors and oft-trod reaction pathways might get squinty-eyed on the topic, our hearts know the way of magic. In fact, dropping into the heart is the keystone move to a life lived on the pulse of magic. 

What does it mean, in practice, to open up to more magic in life (and work)? Let’s break it down to a few life-affirming ingredients: 

Learn about your fears, and loves.

In order to learn what the truth of your heart feels like somatically, in your body, you have to know what your fear signatures are. Fear will narrow the pathways of our perceptions. When we’re scared, our hearing range narrows, our field of vision becomes smaller, and our bodies either want to run, fight, pass out, or curl up into the fetal position as a means of self-protection. Generally, with fear on the scene, there’s a contraction type of feeling. That really is no place or state to be in when you’re facing life’s big challenges and decisions. Learning to work with your fear is a critical step. 

On the flip side of fear, we have another response that is innate to us. What does love feel like in your body? “Love” here can be a full body yes, or an opening or pull towards something we’d like. Often, there’s a more expansive feeling in your body, perhaps in your chest or throat area. Learning this distinction by tracking what’s happening in your body gives you a good litmus test that’s with you always. Playing with this gives you more capacity to trust these signals as you sense them. 

This practice also gives you a key to your intuition. When you feel the expansive feeling in the face of a decision or solution pathway, that is often a nudge towards something (even though your over-rational mind may furrow its brow at the option). 

Increase Your Capacity for Good Things. 

How much amazing can you handle? When life starts to get really good, or when things are good and calm, are you one of those people waiting for the other shoe to drop? It’s interesting how much the life we want and long for can give us anxiety, but that is a clue to begin to work on your edges around how much of the good stuff you can handle. Your internal “life is good” thermostat has a setting based on how much good you’ve been able to handle in the past, however, life has imprinted you. That is a setting that can be adjusted as your body learns to integrate more and more of the good stuff. Learn what shows up for you when things get good: what feelings or sensations arise? If you feel your nervous system shift into a contracted space, what can you do to shift back into a more expansive space? 

Dance with Uncertainty.

Working well with the unknown is like having the keys to the universe. Opening up to the creative flow, to magic, miracles, and wonder,  allows you to trust something – the groundlessness. It asks you to let go. to surrender control. It helps you relax into not-knowing and stand in the flow of presence – in connection to the phenomenal world. How can we trust the unknown or the moments of not knowing? We always have a choice, writes Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: “We can limit our perception so that we close off the vastness, or we can allow the vastness to touch us.” 

Get into Your Body. 

There’s always more going on than what you see and what’s in your head about what you see. There’s a big ol’ world out there that includes a lot of magic that you are most likely not paying attention to if you’re stuck in your head.

“Mind-bottling. You know, when things are so crazy it gets your thoughts all trapped, like in a bottle?” – Jon Heder & Will Farrell in the movie “Blades of Glory”

When you’re mind-bottled, it’s not just your mind that’s stuck in a bottle. Being there is one of the ways in which you create your own reality. In other words, how what you think affects how you feel, and how that affects what happens in your life is often a cause-effect. Being mind-bottled limits our full range of motion mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We can be so committed to being right about our own reality that we can miss things that could be more generative if only more of us were available for it. In relational spaces, and even with ourselves, when we’re not present we can fall into projection, withdrawal, or even withholding. All of these things happen in our minds when we sense fear of some kind. Once we get sucked back into our mind-world out of fear, we get trapped in the mind bottling until something pulls us out of it and back into engagement with real life. 

Learn What it Feels like to be Present, and How to Get There. 

Shifting from fear to being curious and relational is stepping back into meeting life from a place of love. That often looks like a nervous system that knows how to find regulation. While we are given the incredible sensitivity of a nervous system that is always looking out for us, learning what regulation looks like for our specific nervous system is key to maintaining a connection with ourselves and others. We are able to be present and more attuned to our life and the people in it. 

“Regardless of how we get there, either through meditation or more directly by paying attention to novelty and questioning assumptions, to be mindful is to be present, noticing all of the wonders that we didn’t realize were right in front of us,” Ellen Langer tells us.

Shifting into this way of being is a practice. The goal isn’t to necessarily be there all the time but to widen the windows of time that you do spend in present awareness and learn how to loop back into the present moment when you catch yourself having drifted out of it. 

What is Your Relationship with Rest? 

Holding tension or being overly stressed through rocky times doesn’t always make it easier to get through. That tension is contraction. Learning to navigate change and rough spots with ease and grace at least allows you to let go. (You know savasana, the pose at the end of yoga class when you get to lay flat out on your mat and you just let go? It’s called the Dead Man’s pose and has been referred to as one the most important pose. It’s a pose of effortlessness and dissolving the ego. I had a brilliant yoga instructor say once: “It’s the pose you practice for because the hardest asana in life is change.”) 

What tells you to hold on tight, or increase tension when the going gets rough? What stops you from resting? Allowing yourself to rest gives you a chance to see things differently. 

When we are relaxed and connected, we’re tapped into our flow. It leaves space for the creative instinct to be on overdrive and ready to let the next big idea, insight, or solution come through. This is the inherent wisdom of the long hot shower, sitting in a hot tub, staring at the sky, marveling at the birds, smelling a gorgeous flower, or a deep belly laugh. 

There are two things we can control as humans: our choices and our actions. Our way of being in the world gives us more range in those two areas, or it limits it. Learning more about how we’re wired will give us a greater range and capacity for navigating our lives and making all the hard decisions that come along with it. Learning to hear the clarity of your heart will help in all the moments of pause, uncertainty, and not knowing. Creating new pathways in your nervous system to allow for more magic (or more joy, or more of the ‘good stuff’) is in the realm of the possible. Staying open to wonder when you find yourself in new territory, or in the terra incognita, keeps you curious at your growth edges and open to the magic. 

The practicality of all this is that innovation begins in the heart. The heart is your intuition-frequency counter, connecting you to your source of creativity. This is your power. In the Yoga Sutras, there’s a section on the magic superpowers of the yogis. One of the precepts is that “knowledge comes from intuition.” In other words, there’s a knowing in you that comes before mind-centered analysis.