Do you remember the last time you ignored your intuition?
And do you remember how you felt and what happened as a result?
Author: HRUND GUNNSTEINSDOTTIR
The body serves as a conduit for intuition.
The brain receives a lot of kudos for analysis and translating the world to us, but our whole body is picking up information and data points that inform our perceptions, thoughts, actions, and sense of who we are. Our conscious mind can only grasp a tiny fraction of this processing; most sinks into our unconscious mind, ‘the sea within’. Our unconscious mind works incredibly fast and makes thousands or millions of connections between bits of information, sensations, and data points, which may come to the surface as a vague hunch or a clear thought. It can also loom deep within us and never reach the surface of our mind, unverbalised, but still shapes our behaviour.
There are many reasons why it is so important for us to harness our intuition. One has to do with the fact that intuition connects us to the ‘real world’. The animate, living, ever-changing world we live in, but we have become increasingly disconnected from.
Here are two stories of how intuition connects us to the real world and brings out our highest intelligence.
I. Part - the ancient Wayfinders
Hundreds of years ago, the ancient Polynesian navigators were able to map almost the entire Pacific Ocean, the largest ocean on Earth, without any of the modern technology now available to us. Compare that to the fact that today, we only know about 5-20% of the world's oceans.
Their achievement was no less extraordinary than all the human genius it took to put a man on the moon, writes Wade Davis in his magnificent book "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World."
They sailed on simple open canoes and read into the currents, the ocean colours, the waves, the behaviour of birds, and shadows that appeared on clouds and indicated there was an island in the distance. The ancient Polynesian navigators knew the names of around 300 stars in the night sky, and they built this knowledge through generations.
They had what we now need at scale: the courage to go into uncharted territories – their knowledge of the world was embodied, and they paid attention to sensory data over generations.
First-hand experience
Generation after generation, they learned to collect first-hand experience and stay aligned with their intuition as their inner compass and constantly adjust to the ever-changing external environment. This way they never got lost out on the open seas. Similarly, the world we live in is like an open sea; it is constantly flowing and changing, and the better we are able to tune into the rhythm, the better we immerse ourselves in it, are able to thrive and find our ways.
Connecting details to the big picture
The ancient Polynesian navigators were able to do this because they were deeply connected with their intuition and the real, natural world. Their genius was the ability to connect the big picture with details, how things interconnect. Their minds were incredibly agile, constantly connecting the micro to the macro, a process in which intuition is key.
Their mantra was something like this:
"If you can read the world you live in, if you can see the possible in your mind, you will never get lost."
II. Part - the modern Wayfinders
Enric Sala grew up by the sea in Spain and dreamt of becoming a marine biologist. He became a university professor but after spending time in the ivory towers of academia, Enric felt remote from the ocean. In his own words, he saw himself ‘writing the obituary of ocean life’. He saw the ocean’s health degrade, sometimes to the point of extinction, and he felt an urgent desire to restore its ecosystems and ability to thrive. And so he resigned from academia to spend most of his time immersed in the ocean in order to deepen his intuition about it, inspired by the ancient Polynesian navigators.
Changing the world
Earlier in his career, Enric believed it would be enough if people knew the scientific facts about the deteriorating ecosystems in the ocean, but he was wrong.
What he realised was that people needed to experience, see and feel it for themselves. It was not enough to know it rationally, they had to sense it intuitively.
Enric not only deepened his intuition about the ocean and what he needed to do about it by immersing himself in it, but also understood how to activate the intuition of national leaders so that they‘d take the right decision, from a place of understanding how everything is interconnected.
He and his team achieved this by giving national leaders firsthand experiences of both the destruction and flourishing of the ocean, and offering their support when these leaders decided to protect it.
Since then, Enric with his team at the National Geographic and Pristine Seas Project, have enabled and inspired global leaders to protect the last wild places in the ocean. To date, they’ve helped create 26 of the largest marine reserves on the planet, covering an area of more than 6.5 million square kilometres.
Under the same moon and stars
This morning, we woke up under the same moon and stars as the ancient Polynesian navigators. But the difference between us and them, is that we’d have great difficulties navigating without a GPS or our smartphones. And besides, today, about 1/3 of humanity can’t see the Milky Way because of light pollution.
That is both a fact and a metaphor for our growing disconnect with the natural and ‘real’ world, as is evident in how wildly we’ve extrapolated natural resources to the extent that planet Earth is losing her stability and ability to renew its energy.
This disconnect has also emerged in the time-changer book The Anxious Generation, written and researched by Jonathan Haidt, and shows the dire need to bring ourselves and our kids, out of the virtual (and abstract) world and into the real, animate world in order to feel a sense of belonging, purpose, self-worth and agency.
We are mostly unconsciously informed
We are mostly unaware of the things that inform how we experience and perceive the world. Our task is to become more aware of that because what we take in, informs how we experience, impact and show up in the world.
If we see the world as an interconnected web, then that is what it begins to feel like. If we see the world as fragmented and divided and polarized, then that is how it begins to feel like; our brains get wired that way and we maintain that narrative.
Collectively, we have the technology, scientific knowledge and resources to manifest sustainable ways of living, but what needs to change is our mindset and how we ground and balance ourselves in the world. How we use our intelligence and intuitions, shapes the world we live in.
Our task is to re-connect with the ‘sea within’, InnSæi, our intuition, in order to reconnect with the web of life to which we innately belong to.
While The Anxious Generation is a book that shows us why this is important, InnSæi: heal, revive and reset with the Icelandic art of intuition guides the reader how to do that.
Try this experiment
Do you remember the last time you ignored your intuition?
Do you remember how you felt and what happened as a result?
If you do remember, I recommend you write it down in your journal and then the next time you are aware of your intuition, even if it feels unclear or vague, that you also write down what that feels like and what happens next.
There’s magic in writing both in the same place because a stronger intuition starts to emerge when we see our attention on paper. It is like you are planting seeds of awareness you might not otherwise have, about how you attend to the world and your intuition. You water the seeds by documenting them, and they start to grow with your growing attention to them.
These are often very subtle moments we hardly notice, or short with a strong bodily sensation. When we tune into these moments we are learning to read, listen to, sense our intuition; what it is telling us, how it tries to direct us and it is entirely up to us to pay attention, no one does that for us.