So happy to welcome back Dreamers & Schemers from maternity leave and summer work schedules! This evening we started work on our #intuition journals: mapping our intuitive skills, when we (don’t) use them, what our yes/no feels like or looks like, and how to begin building upon them. #thirdeye #chakrahealing #meditation #visualization #dreamersschemers #trust
Agreements and getting to know you
It was such a thrill to welcome back a couple Dreamers & Schemers who had been away for various reasons (maternity leave, summer schedules). I took my time this month going over the three agreements holding up our sacred space. I also tossed out the following questions for our “getting to know you”: In what area of your life do you trust your intuition? In what area of your life do you feel cut off from your intuition? Not surprisingly, it seems like a lot of us can trust our first impressions when it comes to reading people, but have a tougher time using our intuition to make career decisions—in spite of the fact that many of us also know what it feels like to get stuck in a job precisely because we ignored those bad feelings.
The premise of the intuition workshop is that all of us—broadly as human beings, and more specifically as youth-serving professionals—are intuitively gifted. I am further convinced that our intuition works for us in all areas of our life. When we feel a lack of guidance in any one area of our life, it isn’t because we don’t get intuitive hits around those issues, but that we don’t recognize or trust them. Intuition-building, therefore, is less about cultivating something in us that doesn’t exist, than recognizing and reinforcing what is already working really well for us.
Third eye meditation
This summer I felt a lot of energy in my third eye center, and noticed that it wasn’t restricted to those regions commonly related to the third eye (primarily the brow, but also the center of the head, where the pineal gland sits). Recently I’ve become aware of how the back of my head also gets really tingly when I bring my third eye into focus. But it makes sense when you consider that the occipital lobe is our brain’s visual processing center. In our meditation, we centered in the pineal gland, then moved to the brow, and then back to the occiput. And then we felt the energy connect and flow between these three points. Just for kicks I also had everyone review what it was like to center at other parts of the body (the heart and the gut), and then to try and center in all three places at the same time. Everyone was able to experience the difference in energy at each point (and each in her own unique way!) and also the flow between the three points in the head, so I was super pleased!
Third eye chakra overview
Anodea Judith continues to guide our upward journey through the chakras. Since we had a couple folks miss out on some of our summer sessions, we also took the opportunity to review some of the lower chakras.
Head vs. heart vs. gut + intuition mapping
Before we delved into the topic of intuition, we made sure to define it precisely. For our purposes, we defined intuition as an non-rational form of knowing that comes to us instantaneously. Comparatively, the intellect is rational, logical, and linear, and therefore relatively slow. We talked about when it was appropriate to use our rational faculty (e.g., when trying to choose a health plan), and when it gets us into trouble (e.g., when it tries to direct our career). We also felt into the energy of our intellect vs. our critical mind or ego. The biggest giveaway of the critical mind for everyone, it seemed, was the looping, nagging quality of the critical voice.
Intuition can be a pretty big bucket, but it gets really interesting once we start to find the nuances and figure out how exactly how it works for each of us. The first step is distinguishing gut and heart knowing from all the other forms of intuitive knowing. How does it feel to know something in your gut vs. your heart? When do you usually get and rely on gut knowing, and when do you usually get and rely on heart knowing?
The next step is to go back to your intuition journal (if you started one last year) and start noticing trends, and grouping your intuitive hits according to theme or skill. A lot of people immediately dissociate themselves from the word intuition because it conjures up abilities that only professional psychics seem to have: mediumship, aura reading, psychometry, scrying, telepathy, remote viewing, etc. But if you actually keep tabs on your intuition, you will be very surprised at how much knowing comes to you that you cannot possibly account for. And when those hits bear out, you will develop trust in those abilities, develop them consciously as skills, and be able to calm your chattering mind when it tries to talk you out of listening to your intuition.
Admin
Since this was a big task, we only got started with our intuition maps, and I assigned the rest for homework for next month. The next gathering will be on Thursday, October 12, when we will continue our work on the third eye. That session will focus on problem-solving: figuring out what stands in the way of us having clear vision in all parts of our lives, and methods for clearing those blocks.
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