WISDOM IS NOT WHAT WE THINK

You've likely heard the phrase, “It was my best thinking that got me here”.

Our minds are conditioned by society, by what we learn in school, by our families, by so many things. We are taught what people believe is truth, and yet the deepest truth is not something that comes through our minds. First, our deepest truth rises up from within. Our deepest truth comes from the brain that is the heart.

We are so taught to disregard that wisdom, that truth.

I had a boyfriend who worked in finance, and I commented to him one day about how incredibly intuitive he was. He erupted saying that intuition was not something that had a place in planning financial futures, that it was research that guided his decisions. He even dismissed it with a phrase, "got a hunch, bet a bunch" that he said in a very sarcastic way.

Yet I would witness him repeatedly making decisions based on what he, in other scenarios called his spidey sense.

Intuition is part of our more feminine essence, and in the masculine dominant culture we've been living in for centuries, this, of course, has been disregarded and diminished and considered dangerous. So in a very masculine paradigm like finance, intuition would be something that would be dismissed.

And yet intuition, our heart knowing, is our deepest truth.

That truth becomes so challenging to hear, particularly when it says something that feels inconvenient or even potentially dangerous - dangerous to our existing structures that make us feel comfortable.

Yet, this wisdom, this truly intuitive guidance, our soul knowing - will never misdirect us.

But it takes courage, willingness to get still enough to listen, to get still enough, to let all of the twists and turns of the mind to fall away.

The heart knowing in its truest essence is not fearful. It's not a voice that sounds or feels like fear. It is steady. It is simple. It is clear and direct. It is knowing. That is also known as gnosis with a G.

I've often taken to writing this knowing G-N-O-W-I-N-G.

The other piece about this level of wisdom is that it has a feeling and a sound. There is resonance in that truth. In that wisdom, you can feel it in your bones. It's the thing that creates what people call chicken bumps or goose flesh or truth bumps, chills.

It's that resonance that our body recognizes and reacts to - responds to - independent of anything we are thinking.

The body knows the truth. It hears it, it feels it. It responds. And the mind can be instantaneous in trying to shut it down or redirect it.

I have found that there's often a pause that I can recognize between hearing the truth and that mental chatter that jumps in. If I can remember to recognize that instantaneous initial response before the mind jumps in - that’s where the truth resides.

I remember receiving a notification that a bank card had been hacked and thousands and thousands of dollars had been charged on my account by someone else.

But when I received that news, the first response of my body was calm. And then I went into the what ifs and the worry and the, "oh s**t, I don't have the resources to cover this," and on and on.

It's that initial landing that is sometimes so brief. But when we can give ourselves the spaciousness to go back and remember, we recognize that the wisdom in our body, the wisdom in our hearts, the wisdom that is not what we think.