Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Intuitive Flash

On a recent hike, I had an experience that reminded me of the power of intuition.

It was the first time I ever hiked wearing headphones. I decided to listen to music as I did a particularly strenuous hike. I wanted to experiment with my 'attitude.' I often find that when my physical fitness limits are tested, I doubt my abilities. I wondered if listening to uplifting, inspiring music would help me counter my natural tendency to doubt myself. Incidental, it worked like a charm! I zoomed right up the mountain while listening to my 'feel good' music!

The one challenge this introduced to my hiking was that I couldn't hear other hikers approaching from behind. I had to pay careful attention to make sure that if someone needed to pass, I moved out of the way.

When I was on my way down the mountain this became even more important. I have more trouble going down, at times, than I do going up. The knees, don't you know. One particular time on my way down, two young ladies were coming towards me, on their way up the mountain. We passed each other each on our different missions. About 10 seconds after they passed me, I suddenly felt the need to turn around. As I turned around to look up the trail towards them, I saw that one young lady had dropped her water bottle and it was rolling down the rather steep trail, rapidly, towards me. I am not very good at catching moving objects, but it was far enough away from me, and coming straight at me, so I was able to reach down and pick it up. The young woman was very grateful. If I hadn't been there, I think the bottle would have gone off a cliff edge somewhere - to be lost forever. I was so glad I was there. The young woman would be in need of that water and, as I mentioned yesterday, I abhor litter on the trail!

How did I know when to turn around? I hadn't felt that need on the entire hike up to that point, about 3 hours by then. With my music volume shall we say, a little loud, I couldn't hear anything. Something in me just said, "turn around... NOW."

I believe we all have this intuition somewhere within us. Call it guidance, the voice of Spirit, intuition... call it what you will. In my perspective, we all have access to this guidance or wisdom. We simply need to cultivate our attention and awareness of it. Like anything else, if we exercise it and practice it - it will strengthen and improve. It can become dependable, in fact.

Intuition is a powerful tool. Got intuition??

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