When you are born, you come into a tribe.
Whether you like your tribe, agree with your tribe, whether the tribe is made up of mentally healthy adults or not, this is the place you begin.
I sometimes liken the place you begin to where you start on a game board.
The point is, quite simply, you start somewhere.
Now imagine that the game board of your life is a clock.
You are born a little past 12 o’clock.
You move along, and as you begin to move along your tribe tells you how things are supposed to be.
The main people giving you messages about how your life is supposed to look include:
- Your parents.
- Your peers.
- Your professors.
- Your priests.
- Your politicians.
Whether these people hold actual wisdom or not is beside the point.
They tell you how life is supposed to be done and on the right hand side of your spiritual clock, whether you agree or even think about what they are saying, you live as though their word is the truth.
Then something happens.
At 5 o’clock the proverbial excrement hits the fan.
This is your first major spiritual crisis.
Now your first major spiritual crisis could look different from what my first major spiritual crisis or your brother’s or your mother’s or your sister’s or anybody else’s first major spiritual crisis looks like.
It could be a death of a loved one, divorce, illness, accident, so-called failure.
A blow, and one that knocks you off your game totally – that is what it feels like.
The entire applecart breaks down, the wheels fall off the cart and everything you have already been taught to do no longer seems to make any sense, apply to this situation or provide any hope of rescuing you from your current predicament.
As a result, you are forced to dig your roots much deeper. You have to grow down into yourself in order to grow up.
Or, in some cases where people refuse to grow, NOT.
Hopefully you are amongst those who recognize that this first major spiritual crisis is a time when you have to go deeper into yourself to do something different.
You learn a whole new set of skills.
Now your new tool kit at this point could be different from mine.
Maybe you learn to meditate.
Maybe you get religion.
Maybe you discover something significant about yourself, such as the fact that although you may be changeable you are not breakable.
You slough off the old lessons of your parents, peers, professors, priests and politicians and these new tools propel you forward.
You discover your own truth about life.
Now here’s where things get really interesting.
Instead of following the collective dogma of the tribe – the parents, peers, professors, priests and politicians – you go into yourself.
You start listening to you soul.
You discover your own inner guidance.
Here is the entire point of intuition: it’s not so much about any technique.
I can teach you maybe countless techniques about how to access your intuitive guidance, but the entire point of using all these techniques, of trying them on, discarding what doesn’t work for you and grabbing hold of the methods that do work is to find a way of accessing your own inner truth.
Now armed with your new skill set – the one separate and apart from the one your tribe blessed you with – you move onto the left hand side of the spiritual clock.
On the left hand side of the spiritual clock of your life, you take responsibility.
You recognize that it’s all about you listening to your soul to find the path to your own joy.
This is the entire point of intuition: to discover what works uniquely for yourself, even if 100 other people have told you something different.
You can bless your parents, have fun with your peers, appreciate your professors, honor your priests and take your politicians with a grain of salt, recognizing that they have all played an important role in your development.
Now it’s you listening to your soul guidance, finding your own way and developing the courage to do what you alone are here to do.
That’s intuition, simply put, no window dressing.
