Questions for Jenny:
!6 year old K asks:
What’s the difference between our intuition and anxiety?
Here’s the background. She’d been out running one day and a car pulled up alongside her trying to get her attention. Something felt really off and yucky. And she did the smart thing – she ran away.
In hindsight she was wondering if this was really her intuition at work and by running away she avoided a very real danger or if this was old anxieties blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
Here’s my answer.
Anxiety is literally a bunch of old intuitions that we pushed down into our body when we didn’t know how to listen to them or weren’t able to. Each of those smaller fears, even something that was just “Not Quite Right” made the next one bigger until they got all tangled up into more intense fear and on-going anxiety. The on-going anxiety clouds your easy intuition. One of my students long ago called this “the vacuum cleaner is so loud you can’t hear the sound of the telephone ringing”.
Fear is just a message and when we understand the message “pfft!” that’s the speed of it disappearing. Each understanding helps us to release more and more anxieties from the past and we get more and more confident in the accuracy of our intuition. We can release even the big anxieties easily.
All the other ways that we experience our intuition is just a message too. The thing to remember is that understanding that message ALWAYS feels good. So if we don’t feel good yet, then we just haven’t understood the message of it yet either. If you have the tiniest feeling that something is Not Quite Right, then like Kayla did, get the heck out of there and figure it out later.
This is a biiiiggg subject with a simple solution, so if you’re in a hurry, check out the book. It catapults readers into a practical experience of inner peace and joy while we’re creating a wonderful life and a wonderful world around us.
I love questions. If you have another one for me, put it in the comments and I’ll pick one for a podcast, video or blog.
What about that shot of adrenaline that screams Danger…and makes you run into the situation to protect someone you love from a perceived/felt threat
Gosh that’s a big question with a lot of nuances in the answer Anne. Short answer – that shot of adrenaline you’re talking about is to an imminent danger, which is a different kind of fear to anxiety, although background anxiety generally makes that kind of fear bigger. When we take action on that imminent danger the fears gone, even if the adrenaline can take a bit to work out of our system. Anxiety is layer after layer of old fears built up into a kind of cloud hanging over us. Anxiety creates a kind of noise that clouds our intuition and makes it harder for us to notice our intuition. Have you had an experience of that kind of adrenaline and rushing in to protect someone you love?
Yes, and that cloud of layers of anxiety is a very good description of the feeling of old fears built up. Is it possible to find a silver lining?
“Is it possible to find a silver lining?” That’s a BIIIGGG yes. <3 For me, the release of an old fear can bring anything from a gentle sliding into a new way of being, to a glorious experience of sartori. A flood of understanding often accompanies it, but isn't always necessary.