Hope you are surrounded by your favorite color today! This post is about the spiritual practice of Listening To Your Intuition.
During my junior year of college, I enrolled in a class that met in the basement of a classroom building. Students in this class were divided into groups to do a group project. At the end of the semester, each group presented the results of their project to the class. Although our class met on weekdays, the professor decided we would present our group projects on a Sunday night.
Once everyone had finished their presentations, I said goodbye to my group as they walked up the staircase near our classroom. I drove my wheelchair to the opposite end of the basement, where the only elevator in the building was located.
As I approached the elevator, a strange feeling came over me but I didn’t know why. I pressed the elevator button but the button didn’t light up like it usually did. Although my brain said, “Push the button again. You just need to push the button harder,” the strange feeling said, “Something is wrong. Go get help NOW!”
Instead of trying to press the button again, I immediately put my power wheelchair on its highest speed and drove as quickly as possible to the other end of the basement. The last student in my class had just reached the top of the staircase.
I screamed at the top of my lungs, “DAN! Can you get the professor? The elevator’s broken.”
“Oh shoot! Ok. I’ll be right back, Allison.”
A few seconds later, Dan and our professor came down the steps and walked with me to the elevator. My professor pushed the elevator button several times, but to no avail. The button wasn’t lighting up and there was no sound coming from the elevator shaft which meant two things: the elevator was, without a shadow of a doubt, out of order and the professor, Dan and I had just become besties for the evening.
I was both thankful for the strange feeling that led me to get help as quickly as I did and in a state of “How in the world am I going to get out of this? It’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting in a 200 pound wheelchair in front of a broken elevator.”
The professor, Dan and I went back to our classroom where there was a telephone that only called campus security. The professor called campus security to ask about the elevator. The school had turned off the power to the elevator since it was a Sunday evening. Restoring power to the elevator required an elevator technician to come to campus. However, the closest technician lived over a hour from campus. It was 8:30pm and the technician didn’t know when he’d arrive.
My professor had a family commitment he needed to get to. He was torn between leaving to be with his family and staying to make sure that I was able to get upstairs safely.
After trying to decide the best course of action for several minutes, the professor said, “Allison, I’m just not comfortable leaving you by yourself.”
I smiled and said, “That makes two of us.” The professor, Dan and I all laughed.
The professor then asked, “How much does your chair weigh?”
“About 200 pounds, I think,” I replied.
The professor turned to Dan and said, “I’m pretty strong and you are clearly very strong. I think we can get her chair upstairs. What do you think?”
Dan, who was 6’3 and pure muscle from head to toe, said, “Sure. That’s fine with me.”
They helped me get out of my chair and proceeded to bump my chair up each step. I prayed that everyone and everything made it to the top of the staircase in one piece and in perfect working order. Thankfully, after a few minutes, they had put my chair at the top of the steps. Dan came back downstairs and carried me up the stairs as though I weighed as much as a feather. Before I knew it, I was reunited with my chair. After thanking my professor and Dan, I headed back to my dorm.
As events unfolded that evening, I knew that the strange feeling I had was my intuition. However, I didn’t realize until months later that when I listened to that feeling, I had engaged in a spiritual practice. The purpose of spiritual practice is to embody our oneness with the Divine. Part of embodying that oneness is communicating with the Divine. Communication involves listening. One of the ways we listen to the Divine is by listening to our intuition because our intuition is the voice of the Divine. When we listen to our intuition and allow the voice of the Divine to guide our decisions, we act from our unity with the Universe causing love and blessings to pour upon us!
Love, blessings and purple,
Allison
Try to do this exercise everyday this week. If you need modifications to the practice, scroll down to the section titled Access Notes.
Journaling About Your Intuition
A key part of listening to your intuition is knowing what your intuition sounds like. This exercise is intended to help you understand how your intuition speaks to you.
Get a notebook or an app and write down/type any hunches or gut feelings you experience throughout your day. You can write down these hunches as they occur or at the end of the day. After a few days of journaling, read through your journal and see if there’s a certain way you experience your intuition (Do you get a feeling somewhere in your body? Do you hear something that tells you what you should do? Do you see something that answers a question?).
The following modifications are intended to create equal access to the spiritual practice above. These modifications are somewhat general to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible. Please feel free to further tweak the exercise as needed so that you can participate as fully as possible while honoring your body’s needs.
1. If you have difficulty typing or writing, type or write one word for each hunch you experience that describes the hunch.
2. If writing/typing in a journal on a daily basis is not possible, try these modifications.
a. Write/type in your intuition journal once or twice this week. Or,
b. Make a voice journal where you speak your hunches into a device that records your voice. After you have recorded a few hunches, listen to all of your journal entries to see if you notice a pattern of how your intuition speaks to you. Or,
c. Say, sign or make a mental list of the hunches you experience each day. If you decide to list your hunches by saying them, signing them or making a mental list, set an intention to notice how your intuition speaks to you.
