Intuitive Knowing

Intuitive Listening

“Cease trying to work things out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be Revelation.”

Eileen Caddy

I was having coffee with my friend, Harry, the other day. We are on the building committee for our church and had just met with a glass artist about etching angels on our doors. Harry is one of the few men I know who follows his intuition without letting left-brain questions muck up the signal. Intuition is not communication from outer space or from supernatural powers. It is simply a function of the right hemisphere of the brain which is non-verbal. It comes to us in images, urges or understanding and not by way of our 'talking brain'. Intuition could be described as knowing without going through the usual thought channels. The yogis say it is information from our third eye, the one that is energetic, at the level of the sixth chakra between the eyebrows.

I have learned over the course of a lifetime to trust the information that comes from strong intuition. William Wordsworth compared it to faith, saying, “Faith is a passionate intuition.” In faith we accept what we cannot see. The same is true of intuition. A case in point in my own life is the work I'm doing on the labyrinth at church. At our old church, we had a labyrinth on the grounds for people to use for meditation and prayer. Labyrinths are laid out flat on the ground in a circuitous route to the center. To leave, you turn and take the same route back to the beginning. There are no blind alleys or blocked passages. Labyrinths were built originally to simulate a journey, or pilgrimage, to a holy shrine. Many people can't afford to take a journey to the holy land, for instance, so labyrinths provide an 'as if' experience of going to a place of spiritual importance.

I confess that I have never been a great fan of walking the labyrinth, though I helped to create the one at the old church. But I was seized with an undeniable urge to lay this one out. I didn't know why, but I knew I had to do it. Harry told me, 'sometimes we have to act without knowing; maybe it isn't ours to know.' So I started working with it, and as I worked, I began to have images of how it could be used—not only as a traditional path for meditation, but also as a medicine wheel. I have laid it out on a north-south axis and placed identifying stones in the four directions. I've incorporated pottery shards and colorful tiles and stones into the path and small pottery 'bowls' along the way so that people can take mementos and leave prayer requests. As I am working, new ideas are coming. That's what it's like to follow intuition for me. I may not know why, but I know I must do it.

There's a new television show on Thursday nights—Touch. It's about a child who doesn't speak but creates mathematical patterns that connect people and events. His father tries to follow the child's lead by intuitively listening and trusting that his son is showing him what must be done. It's not your usual TV drama. I find it gratifying that someone has had the courage to plunge into the intrigues of the human mind that we can't explain, only experience.

In the spirit,

Jane