Intuit (and Out of It)

Part of the featured topic series,
Using Intuition

I’ve done a lot of slogging lately. In fact, I spent much of 2010 in a fitful slog through horrendous, knee-deep, boot-sucking sludge… with enough bright spots, much needed support, and a relentless inner sense of something to enable me to continue the journey. Finally, when the calendar page turned and a whole brand-new year lay before me, I thought, “Hurray for 2011, Year of Manifestation!” Then I plunged back into the muck where I tend to do a lot of thrashing and disremembering of who I am before I come to my senses, before I can sense my own wisdom again. Surely there are more pleasant routes to releasing my being from the bondage of the past… or maybe not… for me. After all, this path is working for me–if you were to question any cell in my body, each would tell you that this is so. They have more room to dance than they once did.

Dancing, however, felt like a vague impossibility for much of February. In an email exchange with friend and energy work practitioner, Michele Mayama, she suggested that we work together again, if it felt like it was time. The moment I read her email, I felt an immediate movement within, tugging the rest of me forward. If I could convey the message in words, it would be something like, “Yes, it is so.”

Within a week I was able to get in to see her, and during my appointment I felt like I was emerging from 10,000 leagues under the sea, as legions of accumulated imprisoning beliefs slid off and I relaxed into my own space. Much of what was released had to do with my highly diligent, though misguided efforts over lifetimes to figure out how to do it right, how to fit in in the world of people, and be safe, not get hurt–but in spite of it all, I could never quite achieve the unshakable sense of connection, belonging, safety that I so desired. It felt like part of me kept trying to join me here, but after each tentative testing of the waters, it would retract, with a feeling of “I don’t see myself here, I don’t see my place here.”

We began making a place for that part of me here by clearing my channels of connection with the natural world, where I feel most myself, most at home. Since I began this work of soul healing a couple of years ago, I have felt many times like a kid in a candy shop—this is all too good to be true, that love and life and souls could be so boundless! And yet it IS true. Over and over again I am amazed as I uncover beliefs I didn’t know I had that are limiting me from what truly is. I had rediscovered the Earth Mother (a candy shop experience) through my healing process, but now a whole new realm was opening before me. I could have a REAL, living loving relationship with all of the Earth Mother’s nature beings, in any dimension. I could BE and be embraced here in the Earth Mother’s arms—my whole being could play and dance and sing in a more expansive and joyful way than I had known.

Yet I HAD known, on some limited level. Because somehow I found my way from college into a job as a naturalist, playing with kids outside. And somehow when we bought our house 12 years ago, we ended up two blocks from a creek, less than a mile from the river, and a couple of blocks from a dingy gas station that would later be transformed into a pond, complete with a beautiful springtime toad chorus that I can hear loud and clear from my house. In a few short months I will be blessed with their song again, and perhaps I will hear more within that song. I have suffered significant hearing loss over the ages where my soul’s voice, my intuition, is concerned, but I’ve still managed to catch some of its whisperings—even when I didn’t quite know what it was. I am preparing myself to hear more.

I received a delightful gift at my appointment. At some point Michele mentioned fairies, about which I have never given much thought, beyond fairy accessories for my daughters, but that word spoke to a place within me. In the days that followed I have had such bouncy, sparkly feelings of love. “Fairies…fairies…fairies” has been calling out within me, like a calling to loved ones I had thought were gone forever. I have a sense of an unfolding here that I can’t quite verbalize, but I’m listening, and I feel sure it will take me somewhere too good to be true, or as I prefer to think of it now, so good it must be true.

Copyright © 2011 Sharon Hylton. All Rights Reserved.