Trust Your Intuition

 Have you ever had a flash of intuition that seems to come like a bolt of lightning: quick and illuminating- providing insight and guidance for some area of your life? It could be the answer to a problem you've been struggling with, a sudden understanding of an idea (an "aha!" moment), or an illumination of your path forward, where previously things had seemed dark. It could just be that elusive "feeling" about someone or something that helps our decision making process.

Personally, these flashes of insight often come just before or just after waking, especially when I have been up praying about a situation or person in the wee hours of the night and then gone back to sleep (a frequent pattern of mine). There is a term known as "lucid dreaming", in which you are dreaming but aware that you are dreaming and so can observe any intuitive messages that come through and record them on waking.  

Of course, intuition can come to us in many other ways. Usually, it's when we are engaged in something that temporarily disengages our conscious, rational mind, like exercising in "the zone", listening to music or becoming totally immersed in a creative pursuit.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell  describes two different approaches to cognition and decision making: blinking, when intuition is used, and thinking, when an analysis is performed. He concludes that: "There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis". In other words: trust your intuition.

Clearly, many people do. Phrases like "I'm going with my gut", or "I just had a feeling about that" are pretty common in our vernacular.  But we also know that sometimes people make impulsive, bad decisions based on what their "gut" told them to do. So how do we know if we can trust our instinct in every situation?

I believe that if we are living our lives prayerfully and asking for guidance daily, we can trust our inner wisdom and our flashes of intuition. For most people, God doesn't have an audible voice, but speaks to our hearts and reveals insights through the Spirit.

So for today, let's ask to be better attuned to our inner wisdom, so that we can walk forward in confidence, fully trusting in our God -given sense of intuition.