Should I or Should I Not?

Just Do IT

Do WHAT? Take the PLUNGE. Exercise RESTRAINT. Try something NEW. Stick with what you know to be TRUE. PUSH yourself to the LIMIT. USE good JUDGMENT. Say YES to opportunity. Say NO to danger. Jump IN. Stay OUT.

EXPERIMENT with what you don’t know. GROUND yourself in what you do know. LEAD the adventure. FOLLOW your heart. Be CURIOUS about where you could go. Be CONFIDENT about where you are.

There is no ‘right’ direction.

All advice is subjective and loaded with projections, baggage and flexible facts.

Eat the donut! You only live once. Don’t eat it! You’ll regret it later. Take the job! A bird in the hand. Don’t take it! Shoot for the stars. Get married! No such thing as perfect. Don’t! Hold out for true love. There is no universal ‘right’ direction but there IS right ‘for me’. And ‘for you’.

I believe intuition acts as each person’s internal GPS.

That if we listen for it, we can hear it.

There is the data. And there is the energy behind it. There are the words. And there is the emotional content inside them. There is the communication. Sometimes it is dreamy. Feels like you walk away on clouds. With a symphony of support surrounding you.

And sometimes, the communication has a whole lot of bullshit surrounding it. Often nothing concrete. More of a leftover feeling of ‘ick’, or an energetic residue of ‘ew’. THIS is what I am now listening for.

I have spent most of my life analyzing the literal substance of what someone says and blaming myself for failing to understand why I feel so bad when ‘what’ they said seems innocuous. Or stewed in my anger that what they said felt condescending or cold but their ‘actual’ words weren’t exactly mean or thoughtless.

Through decades of counseling, I learned how to circumnavigate my own insecurities, allow room for alternative interpretations of others’ intentions and developed a robust emotional toolkit for reconstructing interpersonal exchanges outside the confines of my personal biases. Yet, still, I always concluded that it was MY failure to figure it out. And the right thing to do was turn the other cheek. Take the higher ground.

BUT, at this ripe old age of 49, I am now also comfortable saying F that S.

With a big double-thumbs-up to my too-long-overlooked, righteously spirit-affirming intuitive mojo. And the big difference in how I feel making this choice is that it is no longer generated from saying NO to the other person but rather YES to ME.

It comes from a place of empowerment that how I think and what I feel and who I am and my artistic integrity and worthiness as a friend, mother and creative person matters. It is a shift to love from fear.

But, let me be clear, I still get plenty stuck in the murky, manic mess of ‘what if’.

What if that little voice I am hearing is NOT my intuition? What if it is my fear? Doubt? Anger? Or full-fledged insanity creeping in? Writer, speaker Martha Beck offers a stunningly dependable way to differentiate between the voice of loving intuition and the sirens of self-sabotage.

Does it feel like freedom or prison? It can feel like freedom and still be scary or overwhelming. But when it feels like prison, it always comes with a darkness and sense of dread, a tightness in the chest or throat and the feeling of bad things to come.

I have recently been using this same approach for intuitively navigating people. And being okay with the reality that sometimes people are not meant to be in our life forever. And sometimes the people we excluded for whatever reason are meant to be closer.

If life is a dance, our choice of partners changes everything.

The vibration of our physical, emotional and spiritual bodies… the frequency of our love…the expression of our passion… the rhythm of our joy… and the trust that our fear can indeed be held and softened with the connection of kindness.