As a highly sensitive person who pays attention to subtleties and nuances, I can also get overstimulated and overwhelmed quickly.
It was several years back, after moving from India to the States and feeling overwhelmed during this transition that I started getting interested in intuition and how it could help me as a highly sensitive person.
So, it was while I was drowning in this too-much-noticing and so-much-change that I started becoming interested in finding ways that would help me cut through to the heart of things. I had often felt like I was an intuitive person who hadn’t followed intuition’s nudges and promptings in the past and I had dearly paid for it. Now, here was another chance to go inwards, instead of always doubting what was right for me. I would learn about intuition and about my own blocks to following it were.
In the past few years, I have done just that. Not always perfectly, not always well. But I have consciously tried to follow the hints and nudges that come from inside me. In the process, I have picked up a few things that might help you as well.
This week, let’s talk about what intuition is and what it isn’t. If you are someone like me, with a strong “rational” streak, then there are times when you might be confusing intuition and the intellect.
Learning about the difference between Intellect and Intuition can help us cut through the clutter as HSPs.
In her book, The Art of Intuition, Sophy Burnham gives an everyday example that clearly delineates this difference. She talks about Joanne, a journalist, who talked to her about her experience of intuition while she had been waiting in her doctor’s office. While Joanne was there, there was only one other patient in the waiting room. As time passed, Joanne got more and more bored, as we all do with nothing to do. But this other woman looked unkempt and almost repugnant. Joanne couldn’t bring herself to talk to her at first.
But then as more time passed, Joanne, bored out of her mind, started talking to this after all. To her great surprise, she discovered that this woman was a nuclear physicist. Joanne was fascinated by her and by the conversation that they ended up having.
Didn’t this mean that you couldn’t really trust your intuition, Joanne asked Burnham?
In the book, Burnham tells us what she told Joanne. Joanne, in fact, hadn’t acted based on her intuition. She had based her judgement on her intellect – the things about the woman that were visible to her such as her appearance as well as what she thought that appearance meant.
Intuition, Burnham tells us, is, in fact, the opposite of this.
Intuition is based on information that is unavailable to the intellect.
So, that means we just know something, even if we might not be able to explain exactly how we know that. That’s usually why it’s so hard to follow our inner promptings, even when we learn that not paying attention to them leads us in the wrong direction. How can we justify this strong feeling, this clear sense of knowing something? There is no logical reason for it. For example: As an HSP with strong intuition, you might meet someone new and feel that there is something off about them. But they look fine. So, you discount that first inner knowing, only to find later on that, something inside you did know that this was not a right person for you.
If you have had many such experiences, where you didn’t listen to that hunch only to find that it had valuable information, then, you, like me, will start paying attention to what that feeling, that intuition feels in your own body.
For me, sometimes, intuition is a strong feeling that urges me to do something that makes no sense (caution: destructive thoughts in the throes of emotions are not intuition. Intuition is a protective sense, not a destructive one), such as go and talk to someone or physically turn left instead of right. Sometimes, it’s a very clear knowing, a very clear sense coming from inside me. For example, Years ago, meeting someone new for the first time who I later became friendly with, I had this very clear knowledge: “She is self-absorbed.” This was my feeling even before we had been introduced, even before either of us had spoken a word, either to each other or anybody around. Once we were introduced and became friendly, we seemingly had so much in common that I overrode that initial feeling. It didn’t make any rational, logical sense. It was only as a little time passed that it became clear that here again, I was getting entangled in a one-sided friendship. I was the one who was always listening.
As an HSP struggling with boundaries, the intuition I got in the beginning was exactly the kind of information I needed. But I had discounted it.
It was after many such wrong turns, overriding that first feeling and then paying for it, that I started paying attention and giving credence to my own intuition. It had important things to say.
Your intuition might have many valuable things to say to you as well. It can help you in your journey as an HSP or empath who might notice a lot and so also get overwhelmed and overstimulated easily.
The hard part of this process is in giving ourselves permission to follow our intuition. Just like me, you will be scared of making mistakes. You will be scared of being judgmental. But here’s a thought. Maybe, there’s a difference between being judgmental and having discernment. After all, as Burnham tells us, the root of the word “intuition” comes from the Latin “teuri,” which means to guard and protect.
As HSPs, we can sometimes give the wrong people a chance too many instead of tuning in to intuition’s protective signals. Our intuition is there to keep us safe, to protect us. That’s something we need to remember as HSPs learning to deal with the world.
What might listening to it do for you? Could it steer you away from people who are not good for you? Could it nudge you in the right direction?
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