I’ll never create a workbook, download, lesson or challenge I don’t commit to myself. I knew if I started with a goal like “Wake up an hour early and sit in meditation” I’d never do it, and this morning’s 9-breath mini-meditation took me 2 minutes and 3 seconds. I timed it. So I have no excuse, not even for one single day, not to complete this exercise. The next part, jotting down the day’s intentions, also took about two minutes.
I started my list of intentions with things like “Exercise, Consume art. Contribute at work.” Then realized those are things I try to do every day... they aren’t really intentions for this unique day.
So I wrote down this intention, and a question: I intend to build closer, better relationships and community. How do I do that?
I sat quietly for a minute, then I remembered that I had thought about going to a coffee shop this morning to work for a while, but blew it off. I felt like I should go after all. I became aware that a barista I used to see every single week but haven’t seen lately would be there if I went today. My nudge from my intuition today was to ask her her name. That’s it.
And with this came a partial answer to my question: Start with the people you see regularly but don’t really get to know. Start with small acts of outreach. That’s all you need to know for now.
So I did.
I dropped my kids off, and to even my own surprise, the barista I hadn’t seen in months was there. Her name is Erin.
I worked all I could on my most urgent project today, had a great conversation with friends I meet with weekly and walked my dog. I noticed (step 2: noticing) every time I had a friendly interaction with someone, reminding me that even though I’ve felt isolated lately, in truth, I’m less isolated than I feel – and here were a bunch of examples.
There are a few things to remember here: One is that when we practice intuition daily, it may lead us to small, meaningful things. We may get a nudge to ask the barista her name. We may not always get a grand epiphany, say quit your job and start a llama farm, or propose to your loved one, or discover the unified theory of the universe. These small, daily exercises are for uplifting, even a little, real life – the hamster wheel some of us are on, the routines, the day-to-day small tweaks that can, over time, accumulate into big life shifts.
I thought of a few tips you could add to your meditations if you’d like in this video:
Maybe your intuitive goal today was to figure out how to repair a lawnmower, and you intuited that you needed to try tightening a bolt, or talking to the guy at the hardware store, or call your dad, or shopping for a new lawnmower. Intuition may give you the answer, or it may give you the next step you need to take toward the answer. And it may just be about a lawnmower.
That’s good. That’s what we’re trying to do here, because when you practice getting in touch with your intuition, when you pay attention to your gut feelings throughout the day, you practice it for the small things and the big things.
After a while, you’re primed and open. You will be ready when you’re Einstein and you’re shaving and E=MC2 comes to you. Or when you’re George Washington Carver, who credits a gut feeling to his revolutionary ideas behind crop rotation, or you’re Rosa Parks, who says “intuition and determination” are what prompted her to sit in the front of that bus on that day.
Taking a break this afternoon from day-job work, I decided to look for a few poems to read. In looking, saw that a friend I haven’t talked to in probably ten years had been reading a poem a day on Instagram for national poetry month. I listened to her read “Mouth Still Open” by Mosab Abu Toha, a beautiful, heartbreaking poem about the war in Gaza. In reading it, I felt a literal feeling in my gut, both because the poem and the situation in Gaza are devastating, but because the art Toha created to shed light on it is so utterly perfect.
I also felt an ache in my gut because I was reminded that I miss creative writing and the friends I once had with it. One of the happiest, most community-filled times of my life was studying poetry during my master’s degree and writing my first book, a community I have grown apart from over the years. I realized that that community is right there waiting for my interest in engagement, another nudge toward my intention for today, a day of reconnection. So this afternoon I’ll send my old friend a note to tell her how much I love hearing her voice read again.
Tell me: What was your first day with the gut-feeling challenge like?