Intuition is not feelings

Just because to those who pride themselves on their mental prowess, intuition and feelings are seemingly alien, that does not mean they are the same.

The difference is that emotions connect our minds to our bodies, while intuition connects our minds to our souls. That is, they operate on two rather different levels, but equating them is more a reflection on the lack of understanding and capacity of those making such conflations. Trying to avoid the experiences of either will not bring any insight into what differences there may be between them.

Mind helps us to direct our emotions, as we need them to have the power to drive ourselves to achieve what we set out to do. However mind does not innately know truth, only how to reason with what information we have, true or otherwise. We need intuition to be able to hook into what really should be guiding what we do in life, otherwise we are stumbling around in our surfeit of information, relying on those around us to tell us what to do, and mostly suffering from our inability to know whether we should really be doing that.

After all, 40% of people think they are doing bullshit jobs, but do that because they don't know what else they should be doing. In a world full of trivial pursuits, intuition is needed to have some way of quickly prioritising effort. An intuitional flash of inspiration can short-circuit a whole lot of the angst and procrastination in thinking through options and their possible consequences. However, we have to be open to our intuition and what it tells us, otherwise we may deny ourselves the benefits of the path it opens for us.

Emotions can be irrational and driven by sensory gratification, whereas intuition operates to help us to make strategic decisions about our lives. The information we receive can feel like the missing piece in our mental jigsaw, or challenge us to make changes to our lives that will give us meaning and purpose. It may make us be wary of a path that seems to hold so much promise, but only because we had let our glamours about it rule our minds and emotions.

Emotions seem so powerful while we are young, but when we come to develop our mental capacities, we see so many more possibilities for our lives. But that plethora of possibilities is a two-edged sword, as it gives us more options, but makes it harder to know what is the best of them. While experience may eventually help us gain some wisdom about what is likely to be within our capabilities, it does not tell us what is best for us to actually be doing. That is exactly what intuition is for.

However, unless we learn to trust our intuition, we will be blind to its wisdom or just plain block it. So the first step is to be open to more than just the options we can see, but also open to how they are presented to us. We often have preconceptions about what is valid for us and how it appears, and intuition can come in other ways, especially if the path it presents is to break those patterns of thought, or relies on different aspects of our abilities that necessarily involve changing our thinking patterns, or at least our thoughts about what we're capable of.

When we lack self-awareness, we can confuse emotions and intuition, just because intuitional insights can trigger emotional responses within us. However, the difference is that what the intuition brings can change our lives, not just how we will feel for the next few minutes. This is the test for the difference, in that if we think through what the consequences of taking what is indicated will lead to having to make changes to our lives and radical changes to our thinking to make those changes happen, then it is likely more intuition operating.

That is not the same as wanting to win a lottery, which will radically change our lifestyle, but not really our thinking, except to become super-indulgent. That is an emotionally driven fulfilling of our unspoken desires, and not inspired at all. Intuition operates to point to what will be worth us doing, and thus eventually to a greater sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Of course, if we are truly fulfilling what we should be doing, and not in some complacent stupor, we do not need our intuition to be pointing out alternatives!