It Took Me A While to Learn to Listen to My Intuition

My first semester in college I felt very determined to try to make it home for my Mom’s birthday. I was going to school in Durango Colorado, which is surrounded by mountain passes on all sides. Not just that, you drive through mountains and high valleys pretty much to whole way back to Denver.

It was kind of irrational, to try to drive home then, because it was just before Thanksgiving holiday. I would be going home then anyway, but I had it locked in my brain that this was the good-daughter thing to do. 

I had this nagging feeling that I shouldn’t go, but I kept telling myself it was just anxiety. I’m not really a road-trip person and there was a storm rolling in, so of course I’d feel a little anxious. That’s the story I told myself.

This was long before cell phones and weather apps. We could watch the news, until the weather report. Then trust the weather report that wasn’t much better than gambling, and do our best with what reality throws our way.

This drive was usually a little under 7 hours, which was already a lot to handle for a quick weekend trip.

I decided to take a longer route to try and go around the storm by heading south into New Mexico. 

Continuing to ignore this nagging feeling, I set off.

I drove over Wolf Creek Pass, since the storm wasn’t that far West, and then dipped into New Mexico, coming back up just shy of La Veta Pass. La Veta is a much smaller pass, the kind you wouldn’t even normally think of as a pass. It’s not as dramatic or intimidating as something like Wolf Creek Pass.

It wasn’t white out conditions, but it was really snowing, and it was nighttime. In my youthful arrogance, I thought I knew how to handle the snowpack, and probably trusted the tread on my tires too much. There’s a saying I heard a lot back home, “four wheel drive doesn’t mean four wheel stop”. Being able to stop is pretty critical.

Coming up around a bend near the top of the pass, I lost control. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t steer, I couldn’t even speed up. The road curved, there was no guard rail, and the road wasn’t banked.

My car followed the curve and smashed into the back of a semi. I totalled the car, got a bruise on my knee, and made the truck driver think he’d hit a speedbump since my little car didn’t have much of an impact on that big truck.

But that curve…what happened. Why did my car follow that curve? 

I didn’t think much about that at the time, because I was preoccupied by the first thought that came into my mind when I hit the truck. The very first thing I thought was “Thank you, Grandpa”. 

The Grandpa that popped into my mind died before I was born. He was very excited for his first grandchild, me, but he didn’t live long enough to meet me. Why on earth was “Thank you, Grandpa” the thing that popped into my mind? Weird.

I got a ticket for the accident and this ticket made note of the mile marker where I hit the truck.

At the end of the school year, out of curiosity my parents decided to head through La Veta rather than the usual route up through the San Luis Valley. When we saw the curve during the daylight it was baffling that my car had followed the curve rather than driving off a cliff. I didn’t realize there was a cliff right there. That’s what would have happened if my car had gone straight. 

A couple of years later I had the same anxiety feeling. Again, I ignored it. Again I came up against a dangerous situation and thought of my Grandpa when disaster was averted.

The third time I had that feeling I listened. I changed my plans, I stayed away from the source of the anxiety and nothing bad happened.

I still argue that I wish that the Universe would just send us a memo rather than these subjective, difficult-to-decipher messages. I would have loved a memo that said “Good job finally paying attention to the feeling I keep sending you. You avoided being hit by a drunk driver because you listened.” I’m a big fan of clarity! The Universe don’t give a damn.

Since clarity isn’t how this works, it took me a long time and some scary experiences before I started listening to my intuition. I finally knew what “no” felt like.

It took me even longer to recognize what “yes” felt like. For me “yes” comes after excitement wanes. Yes shows up as a subtle tug, almost like I’m moving in a direction with something else doing the navigating. It’s a little tingly in my heart region, and it’s a very quiet feeling. 

I’m still working to learn to dial into that “yes” feeling more and to see where it takes me. I need to be in a calm and centered place to detect my “yes”.

Now I feel like I have a committee that follows me around and looks after me. Obviously Grandpa is on the committee. I have some other ancestors on there as well, as well as spiritual beings that I’ve come across along the way. Good thing I have them since I’m a slow learner.

When I’m feeling anxious, I ask them for help. 

I call them my Spirit Allies. I think it might be them whispering to me when it’s a “yes”, and I think my mind has been too noisy for much of my life for their whisper to get through. Maybe they yell a little louder when it’s a “no”, especially when it’s a dangerous “no”.

Maybe those ‘yeses” come from that divine source I’ve started to call LOVE. You can call God whatever you like, but LOVE works for me.

What does your intuition feel like? Do you have any techniques for tuning into that source of guidance? For me, getting into a place of Theta Brainwaves is the most effective way to dial in to that information. 

You’ll hear more from me in the future about Theta Brainwaves, or as I’ve taken to calling it “Mystical Theta”.

Also, I think you’ll be happy to know there’s a guardrail along that curve now. I’m sure most people didn’t escape with just a bruise on their knee. Thank you Grandpa.

*Thanks for reading. As always, typos and errors included for your enjoyment.