Part 2 of a 4-Part Series
If you’re like many people, there was a time in your life when you were getting intuitional messages but not heeding them. Oh, the misery that can ensue, right?!
You may have heard of Vaughn Allex, former American Airlines ticket agent, who checked in two of the five hijackers who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11/01. He spoke with Oprah Winfrey years later in an interview I watched on her NBC network show.
I recall him talking about how he’d received a strong, intuitive nudge that something about the two men wasn’t right. (Note: men have strong intuition, too.) He stated to Oprah that he regretted not having acted beyond the normal security procedures. He justified not going beyond them because logically he had no legal right to prevent them from getting on the plane.
In other 2011 and 2016 interviews, Vaughn explains how he did follow all procedures and checked their IDs, asked them a few standard security questions, and even flagged their bags for extra scrutiny. Vaughn did recover from the guilt better than some of the other male airline employees who talked themselves out of their intuitive guidance that day.
Vaughn shared that he’s gone on to accept responsibility and forgive himself. What a brave Soul he is to share his journey publicly so that others can learn!
Let Intuition Move You
In my own circle of colleagues and friends, one woman shared with me her recent experience of not listening to her intuition.
She’s a single woman who was planning a long-distance move for herself on a short deadline, while also working full-time. She felt excited and positive about the move, yet also pressured and stressed.
One task on her long list of things to do was hiring a moving company. After doing an internet search and choosing one, she got an intuitive “hit” to not use the one she had chosen. It felt like a friend giving her a piece of advice. She felt frustrated with this guidance and rejected it, telling herself that she just didn’t have the time to get more quotes from other companies.
Fast forward to when she’s in her new home . . . she ended up having to fight the moving company for her things to be delivered. After living out of a suitcase for weeks on end, calling the company daily to ask where her items were, and finally filing a complaint with the Federal Department of Transportation and the Police department, her things were finally delivered seven weeks after she left her old home.
Face the Fear, Listen to Intuition
People justify ignoring intuition in extremely creative and logical ways—this is normal! When intuition points you in a direction you don’t like, fear’s at the core of your avoidance. Fear doesn’t want to follow illogical urges because it goes against fear’s prime directive…survival.
Fear’s instinct protects you from threats and the unknown. It’s going to do all it can to drown out your intuition; however, there’s a solution when your instinct battles with your intuition.
The key to the solution is to discern what instinct feels like from what intuition feels like. How can you tell the difference?
Remember instinct wants you to stay the same, to survive. Intuition is guidance to change, expand, and be brave. Instinct may try to be the loudest of the two, but when you know how to hold both fear and knowing yourself simultaneously, and recognize each of their roles, fear falls into the background.
Center yourself and quiet your mind. Hold instinct and intuition together inside of you and sense their difference. Honor both of them, feeling the fear and having the knowingness.
A quiet mind can identify intuition over instinct. In the silence, instinct’s like a shrill whistle, while intuition’s the deep, rumbling of a blue whale. Once you decide which is instinct and which is intuition, ask yourself, “How can I merge the guidance of the two in a way that honors both of them, and still allows me to leap forward?”
Keep in mind, as shown in both of the stories above, following your intuition may be hard, but ignoring it can be disastrous.
Next Time: Okay, so you’ve screwed up by ignoring your intuition and are paying the price. What now? How can you get out of the funk? How do you reconnect with that precious, intuitive part of yourself?
Written by Laura Abernathy