Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don’t know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more.
― C. JoyBell C.
The general possible explanation: Our conditioning
Patanjali, an Indian physician turned sage, wrote the Yoga Sutras in approximately 200 B.C. Among other things, the book addressed the question: How do people know anything?
Patanjali described four ways you know something.
(a) Its physical appearance,
(b) The associations you have with it,
(c) The meaning it has for you,
(d) Its spirit or essence.
When your primary modes of knowing are based on (a) the physical or material world and (b) your associations with it, intuition is an occasional guest in your life.
Intuition does function at this level, but it is more like a tool that you pick up, or something that is suddenly there or not. If you are working with intuition on these levels, it will seem unpredictable.
When you are leading a fulfilling life, one with meaning for you (level c), intuition can be fully integrated into your life and an equal partner with your logic, if you commit to it. Remember: intuition thrives in meaning and travels on love.
When you love your life and its purpose, intuition becomes a way of life. You understand how it functions, and know that you can count on intuition’s wise and elegant input.
The fourth way-spiritual or essence level knowing allows you to be one with or resonant with that which you want to know. At this level, there is no separation between yourself and the other, so direct knowledge is available.
Why is that relevant at all and how correlated could those four levels be to our conditioning, one may ask?
To answer such a question, we first need to define what conditioning stipulates, I suppose!
Simply put, instead of keeping us connected to the ‘true self’ whose worth is intrinsic, who was granted some common precious gifts, in addition to our potential and specific skills we would use to give back to the world, everybody in our environment, mainly our caregivers, distorted us to some degree.
Those gifts we all used to share before creating the filter, aka the false persona, are the Universal Principles center, the power of choice, and the seeds of our four forms of intelligence — intellectual, emotional, physical, and most importantly spiritual.
Our parents criticized us from an early age. Instead of modeling principled living, teaching, and guiding us in developing our seeds, they loved us conditionally and/or inconsistently and asked us to prove our worth daily.
The problem is that the parents are looking for behaviors, emotions, and thinking patterns that their children have never seen modeled.
–Brené Brown
The false persona we created is nothing but:
- A set of limiting beliefs both about ourselves and the world,
- Shields we have been building against our profound shame of never feeling good enough,
- Twisted center (s),
- Unhealthy behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms.
All of the above are responsible for numbing the true self.
This false persona, along with all the psychological baggage: emotional scars, unprocessed feelings, flashbacks — in many cases Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder — would define our position in the different intuition levels.
I think that the further our persona is from our true self, and the heavier our baggage is, the more likely we would be in the ‘occasional guest’ arena.
Who are the folks who are more susceptible to betray themselves?
It seems to me that if we are an empath or a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and/or a Fearful-Avoidant attached individual, our intuition about others is almost always correct for a very good reason.
In an attempt to cope with our unfriendly household and dysfunctional family system, we needed to become very attuned to others, experts in picking up on the most subtle cues and in reading body language as a self-preservation strategy.
So, why did we fall for narcissists and other antagonistic personalities, you may ask?
This is from a personal experience and was confirmed by some honest friends I was privileged to know: the problem is our ‘self-doubt’.
Why do we doubt ourselves?
Sadly enough, according to many brilliant childhood trauma specialists and psychotherapists, we are attracted to what we are familiar with. In other words, if we have an antagonistic life partner, business partner, friend — you name it, the chances are high that we knew that toxic bond in our childhood (one or both of our caregivers) and confused it with ‘love’.
Interestingly, in the quality of a child who still sees the world with ‘innocent’ lenses and craves attention, love, and belonging, it is much easier to doubt ourselves than to accept the reality of having a caregiver anything less than perfect.
This specific subconscious pattern would interfere with our intuition until we start being aware of the trap.
Luckily, when it happens somehow — in many cases following some tragedy — and that we eventually break our denial, start becoming self-aware, educate ourselves, and commit very seriously to destroying the outcomes of our lifetime of conditioning so that our true self may break free, here is what the priceless paycheck would be:
We would get our power back. Not only would we feel something is off while wholly trusting the feeling but our educated mind and developed critical thinking skills would, slowly but surely, instantly see the red flags for what they truly are!
Such a very insightful post, Myriam. Thank you for sharing here.