“There’s an art to reading and trusting the heart and mind.
Our mind maps out the directions, while our heart is the needle that intuits true north.”
- Mark Nepo
We are now on week four of our eleven week journey through our autumn session. Each week we uncover another dimension of listening. Listening, as we have learned has infinite dimensions and there are infinite ways to listen, infinite ways to walk along the path…the path that has no end.
In the words of Mark Nepo…
LISTENING IS THE DOORWAY TO EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS
We awaken our hearts through the reverence of listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us (this is the work of being), with our life of experience (this is the work of being human) , and with each other (this is the work of love).
As we continue to explore the work of being we are now ready to reveal and develop the gift we are each endowed with - the ability to think and feel and sense our way into all that we don’t know…the art of intuition!
Intuition is an art of discovery. To intuit means to look upon, to instruct from within, to understand or learn by instinct. And instinct refers to a learning we are born with. So intuition is the very personal way we listen to the Universe in order to discover and rediscover the learnings we are born with.
As such, intuition is a deep form of listening that when trusted can return us to the common, irrepressible element at the center of all life and to the Oneness of things that surround us, both of which are at the heart of resilience.
- Mark Nepo
“Intuition is the voice of the nonphysical world.”
- Gary Zukav
Multi-sensory perception and intuition are the same thing, but multi-sensory perception is a more accurate name. Most people think that intuition is a hunch that occurs now and then, but it is more that. It is a very sophisticated system that allows you to know more than you can with your five senses. As we become more and more intuitive—and we all are—we encounter different kinds of experiences.
There is no single way to experience intuition. It is different for everyone.
Some people have hunches. Some get ideas. Some people hear music, and others see pictures. Some people get sensations, others hear words. None is the correct, or the only, way.
You can find your way by paying attention to what is happening inside of you. This is the biggest difference between five-sensory perception and multi-sensory perception: The five senses require you to pay attention to what is outside of you. Intuition requires that you pay attention to what is happening within.
- Gary Zukav, Soul Stories
Silencing the Tiger
Because the mind is a hungry tiger that can never be satisfied, that which is timeless swims in and out of our hands, bringing us forward into places we wouldn’t go. So listening to what we’re not yet aware of involves silencing the tiger and keeping our hands open so we can feel when something timeless moves through us.
This can be difficult, for sitting quietly with our hands open in the middle of the day is suspect in our age. We can be misperceived as lazy or incompetent or not quite tethered to reality.
But silencing the tiger in our mind and staying open is what keeps us connected to a deeper reality. By this, I mean a depth beneath all circumstances in which we experience a sense of meaning that doesn’t change, the way gravity doesn’t change though what it impacts changes constantly.
Like inhaling and exhaling, the ways we silence our noise and open our heart are forms of deep listening that must be engaged if we are to survive.
- Mark Nepo
So how do we lean in and listen to all that is not us, to all that is calling, to the particular angel waiting to guide us more thoroughly into who we are born to be? While we can share insights, only you can discover this for yourself.
At every turn in every day we are presented with angels in a thousand guises, each calling us to follow their song. There is no right or wrong way to go, and only your heart can find the appointments you are born to keep. It’s hard to take this risk, but meeting each uncertainty with an open heart will lead us to an authentic tomorrow.
- Mark Nepo
“It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.”
- Mark Nepo
