"You must trust the small voice inside you
which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide."
-- Ingrid Bergman
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| Headless Barbie 5-29-14 |
"Don't try to comprehend with your mind.
Your minds are very limited.
Use your intuition."
-- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle In Time
"Call it intuition, a hunch, or a gut feeling --
if we followed it, we just might be happier."
-- Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D.
I had to make a difficult decision recently.
For me, it was an extremely difficult decision because it involved letting go of something good, something I really wanted to do, a good thing that I truly love.
I knew my gut was telling me, plainly and simply, what I needed to do, but I wasn't ready to listen.
My heart was also giving me multiple mixed up feelings about my options, while my head was shouting out its own tangle of conflicting advice and rationale. People were getting in through my ears and their voices were trying to out-shout those already clamoring inside me and the whole "conversation" was making me sick, literally.
The more I struggled to supervise the arguments and counter-arguments, to reconcile and sort out all the "what ifs" and "yeah, buts," the worse and worse I felt in my gut.
My gut was in such turmoil, in fact, that I became seriously, physically ill. I didn't fully understand why at the time, because there were other factors at play as well, but this decision over what I should do about this thing -- it was wrecking me.
And even though my gut was telling me exactly what to do, with all the other bickering going on, I couldn't hear it. More accurately, I didn't want to. Because my gut was telling me one single thing and it was the one thing everybody else was arguing so vehemently against.
The most difficult thing.
Long story short, my gut finally got my attention loud and clear by going on an extremely unpleasant and prolonged strike. It refused to budge until I finally broke under the pain, pressure, stress and exhaustion of it all.
My gut won the argument.
Miraculously, everybody else shut right the fuck up.
Turns out my heart and my head didn't really care as much as they were pretending to. They just like the sound of their own voices.
When the difficult decision was done, over, I was so relieved, because the difficult thing turned out to be the exactly perfectly right thing. I haven't questioned its rightness for even a minute since.
I'm pretty sure my heart and my head knew they were wrong all along. In fact, I'm sure they knew they were wrong when they said yes to this "thing" months ago, this thing they ultimately had to give back because my gut said so.
I'm also certain that my gut was already speaking months ago, but back then it was in a whisper and I wasn't willing to trust it until it shouted louder than all the rest and knocked me over like a wrecking ball.
My head tries to convince me with its intelligent, articulate, thought-out arguments.
My heart tries to break me with its passionate, emotional pleas.
But my gut? My gut simply knows what's good for me and what isn't.
Plain and simple.
If only I'd learn to listen.
