training my intuition & some early lessons
12 Aug 2017a little over a week ago, i started intuition training… errrr… maybe training is the wrong word. but maybe it’s the right word. idk. ANYWAYS. the point is that i was instructed by a new colleague/connection, the founder of the school for mindful play, to play a game for a week with my intuition.
it’s a very simple game: when i notice my intuition (which i think i feel in my stomach and in my chest), i should pay attention to it and go with it. if i’m at restaurant, i should choose by what i’m drawn to, not what i rationalize as being the best option.
and so i played.
i’m probably going to keep a personal notebook tracking when i do and don’t follow it and what happens as a result in each lane. i have two examples already that i can share, one from when i listened and another one from when i didn’t… and boy do i regret not listening.
the time that i listened (sort of) was pretty simple and low stakes. i was at lunch with my friend, sam, and i was (as instructed) looking over the menu, trying to find what i was drawn to. i picked out two things and said them in my head. i asked sam what he was thinking about. he picked the same two things.
:O
of course there are many potential ways to rationalize why this happened: we’re similar, like similar things, maybe we were drawn to things we thought the other would like, or things we thought would maximize our collective happiness, whatever. point is, i started to play.
ok so the time that i didn’t listen was pretty shitty. although, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that bad, i still wish i had listened.
last saturday i was teaching a workshop at the prx podcast garage. we were nearing the end of the workshop and a conversation about whiteness was about to open up. i felt in my gut that this wasn’t the right place for it (we were a multi-racial group of folks who didn’t know each other very well and hadn’t really set up the training space with the proper groundrules and stuff to make that possible). i verbally sidelined the conversation and we moved on to talk about other things.
then, right before i was about to close the training, i ignored my intuition and let someone have a word about whiteness. before i knew it, the term ‘sand n*****’ had been dropped and i was in shock. i shut the conversation down and had the group sit in 2 mins of silence while i meditated (and i got my act together). i opened up a little space for folks to share their feelings, reactions, and responses to what had happened and then closed the workshop as planned.
UGH. if i had just listened to my intuition, which i had already done, that never would have happened.
so yea, note to self: listen to your freaking intuition.
words / writing / post-processing
499w / 17min / 5min