The whole drive I was feeling a little off, like something bad yet unexplainable was about to happen. I leaned back my chair and intentionally breathed to the base of my spine, like I know well to do.
My spidey senses were telling me to pay attention.
To what, exactly? I didn’t know. So the story my mind made up was a familiar fear: what if we get in a car accident?
The feeling persisted for about 20 minutes, when all of a sudden I heard my husband ask my son “Do you have your seatbelt on?” I looked back —unstrapped. On the highway. My heart skipped a beat. My terror and rage welled up the tears at the back of my throat.
I intuitively knew, the whole time, something was up, but I didn’t know what it was.
So I unintentionally made up a story that felt kind of right, but also not threatening. I did not actually think we’d get in a car accident. But neither did I know why I was feeling that uneasy yet persistent feeling. So I made up a story to make sense of my un-ease. The signal was accurate. The story I made up to feel safe was not.
Your body has a ‘gut feeling’ before your mind has time to catch up.
But we are taught to dismiss it.
Most women, and certainly men, are trained to dismiss those feelings as “irrational”. We are taught to not pay attention, because there is no evidence. Too often in history women who knew more than they were allowed to know were called witches and burned or diagnosed hysterical and lobotomized. Either way, the message is clear: women’s intuition is not to be trusted.
But before you were an adult with an understanding of this, you were a child whose perspective was dismissed. The adults around you knew better and you, the child, were to follow their directives. They taught you what to think, what to trust, what’s important, what to value, what to believe, what’s real, what’s truth, what’s love. They taught you who to be so you align with their expectations, stated or implied. Even parents with best intentions teach their children how to be externally referenced, to their detriment.
Externally referenced simply means that you take your instructions from outside of you. You look to authority to tell you what to do. You wait for permission. You defer to an external source, like Google or a doctor, to help you make a decision.
Deferring to external sources to make decisions teaches us to slow our thinking down so that we can collect and evaluate all the evidence before we make a decision.
There are two problems I foresee with that:
- The cultural conditioning we inherited as women teaches us to mistrust our inner cues in favor of seeking permission, validation and decision-making authority. Every decision you weren’t allowed to make — from how to do your hair to what to wear in class — became another way to defer your decision making outside of yourself. This is how you learned to be adaptable to your environment and dismiss, or at at least second guess, your intuition.
- Your body responds to a truth far faster than our mind; by the time your mind catches up to what your body knows, you’ve already abandoned your inner cues and engaged the preferred version of the story. That’s the story you believe will keep you safe, whether it actually would, or not. That’s because, as research continues to show, your nervous system processes one billion bits of information per second, while our conscious mind processes around ten bits.
This shows you why your mind is unable to process the information that moves through the body.
The body’s job is to process information.
Your job is to learn how to listen.
Your intellect’s job is to intentionally choose.
When you embody this process, your life begins to reflect what is actually true for you. So the choices you make are aligned and you live free of second-guessing. It can be exhausting to keep living as a shadow of your former self.
Learning to listen to your body is a skill, not a personality trait. That's where the Decloaking Foundation begins.
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PS - Every one of us has a story about a time when we knew in our gut but we ignored it. You heard mine, now I want to hear yours. I'm curious: what's your version of the seatbelt story?
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