Author: Ariole K Alei
What is instinct? What is intuition? Let's explore them
one at a time.
I encourage you to close your eyes for a moment, to turn
off any unnecessary sound in your immediate proximity,
perhaps even to dim the lights. Relax your body, allowing
it to sink with its true weight into the chair in which you
are seated. Take a deep, slow breath.
As you learn to meditate with openness to what you
discover, with inquisitiveness as to the true nature of
reality within, you will be able to tap into your felt
sense of what instinct - and intuition - and many other
inner states and capacities, are.
Let's begin with instinct. Instinct is an inner warning, a
signal. It arises from within in response to a stimulus or
a situation without. It is your higher mind's, or your
deeper wisdom's, way of telling you that there is danger,
real and true, imminently near to you. Your instinct
directs both your attention to the danger and your action.
When the instinct is awake - or rather when you are awake
to your instinct - you immediately hear this message and
receive it. You might 'hear' it as a strong surge of
energy in your body. Or as a sudden alertness to a
specific stimuli, focusing in from the abstract or 'large
view' to the very precise. Or you may 'hear' it as a
sudden sense of what to do, in this moment, now.
Instincts are about survival. They are the internal
mechanism of alerting us to the perils and dangers to our
survival. Cutting ourselves off from and disregarding the
signals of our instinct, we become numb to the real and
present dangers which threaten our very existence -
physical, emotional, mental, and psychic.
Intuition is different than instinct. It is not about
danger, about survival. It is about thrival. Where
instinct is a sudden, sharp, not-to-be-denied message of
danger and what to do about it, intuition is a fluid
message. In fact, intuition is precisely about flow.
The purpose of intuition is to lead us, to guide us, to
self-actualization - the process of becoming all that we
essentially are and nothing that we are not. It is, in a
sense, a guide to our becoming whole and real. I mean here
not real in terms of scientific real of see, hear, touch.
I mean real in terms of authentic, truthful, fully
embodying one's heart and soul.
I was once shown, in a meditative experience, how intuition
'works'. How it always seems to know the best way, the
richest way, the most growth-oriented way, the 'path of
least resistance and greatest gain'. It went like this …
Imagine that you are above the earth, in an airplane
perhaps, or a hot air balloon. You are flying over land,
with water flowing and meandering through it.
From this vantage you are able to see an object, or an idea
or a possibility. For ease of understanding you might
think of an idea or a possibility as an object.
You can see, from this vantage, where the object is
relative to the bigger picture - the world around it. You
can see the obstacles near and far from it. And you can
see the pathways of potential flow.
Energy, unhindered, always flows. Sometimes this is swift,
other times nearly imperceptible. Yet energy is always in
flow. To be alive is to be in flow.
Intuition is like our own birds' eye view, embodied. It is
the voice of that birds' eye viewer, speaking to us from
where we can hear it most intimately - within. Intuition
is the process, or voice, or mechanism, which guides and
directs us to where and how we can flow. It guides us
around the obstacles. It gives us a sense of options, of
choices. It shows us where we, as energy, can flow.
If you are a follower of your intuition you will know that
it always leads you to opportunities - never to dead ends.
It always leads you to personal growth - it never banks on
what you've already done, already learned, without
naturally stretching you to discover and to know more of
your Self.
Intuition leads us to expansion, yet in a very organic and
natural way. It is not the mind dreaming, or planning. It
is the inner wisdom leading us to our own next step.
- Excerpt from "Awakening Instinct - Running the Gauntlet -
Windows Through Time" by Ariole K. Alei
About the Author:
Ariole K. Alei is a Tele Class Leader, Keynote Speaker and
Author of 7 books. The Co-Founder with her husband Colin
Hillstrom of HeartSong Matchmaking - "the world's first
holistic meeting site for singles interested in
spirituality and ecology" and its 'sister' - HeartSong Life
and Relationship Training, she leads international Tele
Classes on a variety of topics.
http://www.HeartSongSolutions
http://www.HeartSongMatchmakin
