Embrace Our Inner Knowing
March is Women's Herstory Month. It's taken centuries for women to be recognized for their imagination, creativity, intelligence, intuition, and persistence. It’s taken centuries for women to recognize their own imagination, creativity, intelligence, intuition, and persistence.
In Things My Mama Never Told Me, I explore the power of intuition. That gut feeling or intuition comes from everything we have learned and experienced from the time we were born. It comes from our family values and our memories. It comes from every woman that has gone before us. Every one of us can use this innate sense of knowing to keep us safe and reach our personal goals.
These terms – intuition, gut feeling, knowing – are often used interchangeably in many of the sources I read before and after writing the mama book.
Intuition: I learned about two operating systems in the brain that help us negotiate decisions. System 1 is Intuition (feeling/thinking fast. It’s quick, instinctual, and effortless. It draws on patterns each of us collects over time, and is a subconscious process used when we need to make a quick decision about whether something is real/fake, good/bad, right/wrong. System 2 is Logic (reasoning/thinking slowly). It’s more analytical and deliberate, a conscious thought process (like a list of pros and cons. System 1 knows the right answers long before System 2.
Gut Feeling: Have you ever had a nagging sensation that a stranger was following you or approaching you, so you crossed the street or changed directions? Later you found out there was an assault in that neighborhood? When asked later how you knew to go/stop/turn/run, you said, “I don’t know. I just knew.” Or maybe you had the feeling and you didn’t listen to it. Maybe something happened you regret, and later you said, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that.”
Knowing: I’ve been reading a lot of Glennon Doyle lately. In her most recent book, Untamed, she teaches us Keys to “resurrect the very parts of ourselves we were trained to mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable.” Things like emotion, intuition, imagination, and courage. Glennon says to “StopMovingStopTalkingStopSearchingStopPanickingStop Flailing. If you just stop doing, you’ll start knowing.” When she stopped and listened, her knowing nudged her toward the next precise thing.
More and more women are listening to their knowing today. I can tell from listening to teens use their voice and their courage to take stands on everything from climate change to gun control to gender and sexual identity to . . . well, they are deciding what’s important to them and how they will effect change. They know how to take the next indicated action step and they are not afraid to do it.