In this excerpt from my novel A Voice Beyond Reason, the protagonist, a young Spaniard named Pablo, has begun awakening to his intuition.
In the process, he finds that paying attention to his inner voice is not always as straightforward as he might have hoped. His mentor, an old man named Victor, offers some insight.
“Instead of allowing yourself to slowly become more attuned to your inner voice, you’ve turned it into some sort of intellectual challenge, something to get a hold on by working hard enough at it, a puzzle to figure out. But that’s not how it works. It’s experiencing the mystery, opening yourself to how it feels. It’s immersing yourself in the subtleties and nuances as it rattles your bones or whispers in your ear. It’s not thinking, but feeling.”
“But that’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Pablo protested, disheartened by Victor’s assessment he’d been going about it all wrong. “It’s just that sometimes I don’t get what I hear.”
“Ah, yes,” said Victor, as though they’d stumbled upon a familiar problem. “By trying so hard to hear the voice of your intuition, you discovered other voices competing for your attention as well.”
“Other voices?” wondered Pablo. “What other voices?” If the idea of one inner voice seemed odd enough, the revelation there might somehow be many—ones that were in competition, no less—almost seemed cause for concern.
“Of your desires, your hopes, your fears . . . any number of them, I would guess, although those are certainly the most obvious ones.”
“Then how am I supposed to figure out which one to listen to? I don’t understand—it’s so confusing. It’s like there are all these people talking to me, but I can’t see their faces and I don’t recognize their voices. So, I don’t know who to trust.”
“All those voices can indeed make you crazy. It’s like listening to a noisy radio playing several stations at once. Especially when you’re overwhelmed, the other voices can cloud out your intuition. Fortunately, there are ways to distinguish its voice from the others—to tune into just that one station, so to speak.”
“How?”
“First of all, you take a deep breath. You have to calm yourself, so you can calm them as well. When you do, just like when those insects in the flowers pause from their work and, instead of whirling blurs on the air, we’re able to see their true forms and colors, you’ll be better able to recognize each of the voices for what they really are.”
“OK, but once all those voices are calm or whatever, I still don’t get how I’m supposed to figure out which one’s my intuition.”
“You can start by asking whether your own doubts or desires are at the root of what you’re hearing. In other words, are you somehow invested in what those voices have to say?”
“How can I tell?”
“You consider each of them as honestly and objectively as you can.”
“And which one is my intuition?” Pablo asked, still not sure he followed.
“The one that is not a manifestation of your own desires, doubts, or fears. The one that, rather than speaking on behalf of yourself, almost seems to come from someplace independent of or beyond your self.”
“I kind of get it,” said Pablo after a moment, sensing something familiar in what Victor was describing. “But I don’t think I understand completely.”
“Of course not, and that’s OK,” Victor reassured him. “You have to experience what I’m talking about in order to genuinely internalize it. … (But) it’s a choice. No one is going to force you to open your eyes, listen to what you hear, or, most of all, be attuned to what you feel, including your intuition. You have to make the effort.”
What challenges have you faced trying to tune into your intuition? How have you been successful? Share below! 👇