Waiting to Be Sensed
2013
Our whole selves are instruments.
Fully engaged–with our minds, bodies and emotions open and functioning–we are instruments perfectly calibrated to sensing the world around us. When we’re in alignment, we effortlessly feel into our world, interact with it, live as a fully integrated part of it.
Because in actuality there’s no way to disconnect our own wholeness from the wholeness of everything. It’s all connected, an infinite and vast web, wholly incomprehensible in scope and yet also somehow astonishingly accessible to us.
What we can do, however, is disconnect from our own wholeness.
When all is functioning well, our interconnection with the world is palpable on a visceral level, and accessible directly through our senses. Our bodies are constantly taking readings on our surroundings, physically noticing what might be dangerous, or what might be enjoyable. Situations are called to our attention through sensations or emotions–fear, anger, interest, attraction.
When our attention isn’t focused on the body’s messages, it can be easy to just let these things pass unnoticed, to miss essential cues that might otherwise save us inconvenience or even injury, or might lead us to a fulfilling experience.
When we ignore this information, as we often do, we shut ourselves off from the wholeness of our lived experience. From an early age we’re taught to let the mind take precedence, to allow it to cut us off from other ways of knowing and interacting. Without us even consciously noticing, the mind directs us to sit still, to wait, to persist, to keep quiet, to do as we’re expected to do.
These are all necessary skills, of course, and important to be able to rely on in certain situations. But they’re not always necessary or called for. We learn to police ourselves diligently and thereby cut off parts of our own experience and knowing that could help us live our lives more fully.
The body and emotions, when listened to, open up whole new vistas that we may have forgotten existed. The experience expands, widens, deepens, and the world becomes not the place we thought we already knew, but something vibrant, mysterious, fascinating. And as we let ourselves notice and engage in this way, we find ourselves guided by an inner knowing that has nothing whatsoever to do with rational thought.
This can lead to simple coincidences–the finding of a thing we’ve been searching for–or it can lead to circumstances much less explicable, much more engaging. It can lead us to new thoughts or ideas, to adventures we’d never otherwise have had, to travels we’d not have dared undertake.
The most beautiful aspect of intuition, perhaps, is the fact that it’s available to all of us, all the time. At any moment your whole self is waiting for you to listen and respond to it. And every time you do, with every action you take in response, the voice of your intuition becomes stronger, bolder, better able to support you.
What’s there right now, waiting to be sensed?