Often the first (and sometimes greatest) challenge to Accessing Our Intuition is that there are so many other voices competing for airtime.
Usually, they are loud and overconfident, demanding that we not only pay attention, but also follow their strong suggestions.
I cannot help but be reminded of the beginning of Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem, The Journey:
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
I’ve often found that such voices, while desperately demanding our assistance, are also usually more than happy to make unsolicited suggestions on the repairs we need to make on our own lives as well.
In near pre-historic times (meaning at the dawn of the Facebook era), a wonderful, kind-hearted New Age friend asked me if I’d be willing to have a free mini-reading from their Favorite Psychic.
The Favorite Psychic had a great pal––another intuitive type––a Psychic Sidekick, as it were.
Buoyed by some early enthusiasm from their mutual followers about their ESP abilities and their interpersonal chemistry, they wanted to explore doing online readings together.
I couldn’t make the live window for the reading but since it was going to be recorded, I said I was more than happy to have them discuss my fate as an anonymous subject.
(Since it was totally free, my attitude was more or less, “Well, I suppose it couldn’t hurt / you never know where you’ll get some good advice.)
The next day I listened to the recording of the reading with what I assure you was a totally open mind, completely ready to be guided by this cosmic, bantering duo.
Alas, of the many readings I’ve had from a wide range of astrologers, intuitives, and energy healers this one was sadly lacking.
Nothing they said felt accurate, relevant, or even remotely useful.
Later that day my friend phoned me eager for my reactions, and I was, of course, kind but honest.
I told them that the reading just didn’t speak to me.
Their response was, quite frankly, astonishing.
So confident was my friend in their Favorite Psychic, they asserted that my own opinions on my past, present, and future were the ones at fault.
Essentially, the conversation devolved into the climactic courtroom scene in A Few Good Men.
Indeed, at one point, when I pointed out something very subjective in the reading that I strongly disagreed with, they more or less said “That’s because you can’t handle the truth.”
Unnerved by how trippy the conversation was with my normally reasonable and wise friend, since the recorded reading was maybe 10 minutes long, later I actually designed a flow chart of its key statements.
I ranked each one on a self-created Scale of Psychic Accuracy.
It went something like “Totally Wrong for Me” to “Mostly Wrong” on one end, to “True for Most People” in the middle, with “Uniquely True for Me” at the other extreme.
I saw this as a rational attempt to analyze the crackpot data.
My friend saw it as further evidence of my denial, my foolhardy rejection of their Favorite Psychic (+ New Sidekick)’s Cosmic Truths, ones apparently I was NOT allowed to question.
Realizing this was spiritual quicksand, we ultimately gave up, somehow––perhaps even miraculously––ending the conversation with a tenuous return to our usual camaraderie and banter.
The path to Accessing our Intuition is rarely smooth.
Underscoring that truth, here’s the middle section of the Mary Oliver poem:
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
Not only are our Inner Voices hard to hear amidst the clamor, sometimes even our outer voices are difficult to interpret as well.
One of my new projects involves some original music.
Thus, I found myself exploring various sound editing apps last week.
Based on that research, the omniscient Internet Algorithm besieged me with endless possibilities from the entire music scoring universe.
One of them was for a voice training and analysis app that seemed interesting.
It had lots of fun options like quizzes, and while relatively expensive, offered a one-week free trial.
Perhaps its most fun feature was that it used AI to analyze your voice and determine your Celebrity Sound-Alike.
All you had to do was read a 10-second clip and, after lots of flashing screens, the result popped up.
The first time I did it, I was delighted that I got David Bowie as my Celebrity Sound-Alike.
The second time, the result was George Clooney.
Although pleased with these assessments, I whimsically decided to test the veracity of the AI’s reasoning.
Thus, for the same test, I played 10 seconds clips of the actual George Clooney and then David Bowie from Youtube interviews.
The result was hilarious.
I tried it multiple times just to make sure.
Dazzlingly inaccurate, AI did not identify either the actual Bowie or Clooney as their own Celebrity Sound-Alike.
Instead, it “determined” each man’s actual vocal clip was closest to none other than…(drumroll)…Justin Bieber.
Here’s the ending of Mary Oliver’s poem, with its fabulous last lines that have helped me so often and so well.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
It’s all too easy to get dissuaded from listening to your own intuition, your own guru within.
Indeed, we live in a world where well-meaning friends might insist their Favorite Psychic has much better access to the meaning of your own Inner Life and Personal Journey than you do.
Even Technology is now embroiled in a conspiracy-level plot to label and misguide us, incorrectly assessing our voices while simultaneously unable to identify its own source material.
That’s why this month’s new meditation Accessing Your Intuition HERE is structured differently than all the many others I’ve done.
Between Intro and Outro, I stopped talking.
Instead, I built in 3-minutes of just music for self-reflective listening.
I wanted to offer a bigger window, one where you can tune into your own inner voice rather than just listening to my David Bowie/George Clooney/Justin Bieberone.
It’s increasingly necessary for us to tune others out in order to hear, as Mary Oliver tells us, that “new voice that you slowly recognize as your own.”
In the end, that’s really the only one to which you should be listening.
Namaste for Now,
