Intuition is the voice of our angels whispering gems of wisdom that guide us on our path. That’s how I perceived intuition as a young child. I’ve always had a keen sense of intuition, and I always trusted it. As a child, trusting intuition was an essential ingredient to feeling safe in a chaotic and frequently violent environment. I relied on it and clung to it with a death grip. But I didn’t, as a child, perceive intuition as part of me or even emanating from me. I “heard” things through my guardians – “imaginary friends” to the adults. They kept me safe; ergo, they were an integral part of my youth. Unfortunately, I stopped engaging with intuition in my teens, but that’s a different long story.
Long COVID forced me to listen, heed, nurture, nourish and cultivate intuition. It has given me many remedies for unrelenting, untenable physical pain. I prayed for relief; it didn’t come. I prayed for death; it didn’t come. I screamed for relief; the pain worsened. Nothing I did eased the pain.
Out of sheer desperation, I started asking my body repeatedly, “What do you want from me?” At first, I asked in an angry, demanding voice. My body betrayed me. I didn’t expect any answers, but they came when I asked without anger or self-pity – “gems of wisdom” that fell into meditation practices. Divine gifts. For two years, I got regular inputs on what to do to feel better. Sometimes these gems came as definitive answers. “It was the [insert specific food]” that caused the horrific bloating and gastrointestinal pain. “It’s your vagus nerve.” “It’s your spleen.” Other times, I’d observe myself absentmindedly doing something that eased the pain – applying pressure to specific spots, tapping the top of my sternum, tugging at my ear – that led me to see the connections to the many answers I “heard” previously. It’s like a dance between mind and body. The mind gives the background information – spleen, vagus nerve – and the body intuitively translates it to action. And all I have to do is notice. The spots I pressed that relieved pain are along the spleen meridian. I’d never heard of meridians but I accidentally located the one that needed work. Tugging my ear both stimulates the vagus nerve and helps relax the jaw. Tapping my sternum, though, that’s the big one: stimulating the thymus, which is basically the womb of our immune armies. When I started tapping my thymus is when my health finally started improving – after more than three years of utter and constant torture. It’s still a long and difficult process, but I found hope again.
I trust intuition. But what drives intuition? Where does it come from? I submit: It is what we glean from the One when we can relax enough to perceive Oneness. We’re always in it. We’re part of it. We just can’t hear it or sense it because we blocked it off in youth. It never went anywhere. We stopped perceiving. Shhh … you can hear it too, as long as you aren’t trying to hear anything. There’s that pesky paradox. This illness helped me remember how to connect to Oneness. It’s something I practiced regularly during my youth, though I usually took the route of dreams to get there as a child. Now I invoke dream states through meditation so I can dip my toe into that bliss to extricate myself from this new, unfriendly body, if only for a moment. It’s what kept me sane, those brief respites from pain and grief.
Intuition teaches me how to heal – physically, emotionally, spiritually. It also taught me that healing is a whole-person process. We can’t isolate the physical from the emotional and spiritual, just as we can’t separate our minds from our bodies or our spirits from our hearts or our circulatory and respiratory systems. Over the course of my illness, I have walked back through all life’s traumas, physical and emotional. I reconnected to my child. I remember my birth and half a dozen or so previous lives. We are most connected to our formless selves at birth and at death. COVID nearly killed me. And that set me free. It allowed me to dance with Death without fear. And that allowed me to walk back through my life, finding gems of wisdom – blessings, lessons, forgiveness, and grace – in every traumatic event.
Thank you all for Being. Here. Now.
