Create a Stronger Vision Using Your Intuition

This is Part 30 of of a series on vision. It’s like a serialized book! You can read previous chapters here:

Part 1. Part 2. Part3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17. Part 18. Part 19. Part 20. Part 21. Part 22. Part 23. Part 24. Part 25. Part 26. Part 27. Part 28. Part 29.

I started and ended 2019 in New York City, the place I’ve called home since childhood. In between, I moved 30 times. I stayed in 11 different areas across two countries — United States and Panama — and two different states within the US — New York and California. Other than my initial flight to Panama and the events that drew me to California, I had no predetermined itinerary.

Although I did not always have a tangible plan, and it sometimes looked like my actions where whimsical or capricious, they were in fact guided by a larger vision.

The Origins of My Vision

My adventure didn’t start on a flight to Panama. It didn’t start when I closed on the sale of my apartment in the fall of 2018, or even when I first listed my apartment for sale in the fall of 2017. It started years earlier, in January 2015, with a rainbow over the Mediterranean Sea in Tel Aviv, followed a week later by a brain injury sustained when I fainted in my apartment in the middle of the night.

They say that if you don’t heed the whisper, eventually you’ll get a 2×4 to the head. My head found the 2×4 when it crashed to the floor. In the months I spent in recovery — a period of uncomfortable, forced stillness and silence — I received the seeds of the vision.

Although I call it a “vision,” it wasn’t a picture that I created. The vision came to me, but not as a picture. There was no visual attached to it. It came through me in different ways: I heard instructions. I saw words pop out at me in different places. I had feelings in my physical body. Some of the key parts were just a knowing, nothing I could point to or explain.

The period of silence and stillness after my brain injury created space for my intuition to reemerge. At the time, I don’t even know that I called it intuition, because I was so disconnected from that part of myself.

How I Lost My Intuition

Nobody ever taught me how to listen to my intuition; its not something we learn in school. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We live in a culture where proof is paramount and seeing is believing. If you’re going to make assertions, you better back them up with research and evidence. We are taught to be rational and realistic, to do what makes sense.

If you tell people you know something but you don’t have proof of it, they think you’re crazy. People get institutionalized for this.

So I had learned not to trust my inner knowings. I learned that physical sensations that felt out of place were “pains” to numb with medication, rather than messages to be opened and investigated. I absorbed the belief that feeling certain emotions meant that something was wrong with me, instead of being introduced to the possibility that I was feeling things for others.

I learned to listen to the “rational” voice within — the loud, shouting voice of ego and fear — rather than the still, small voice of wisdom.

I learned to bury my intuitive senses and trust only what I could see with my eyes, or what I could prove with evidence, even though what we see isn’t real, and evidence only proves an intuitive knowing that someone else had.

Intuition Creates Resistance

Given this lifelong burial of my intuitive senses — also known as the “clairs” — it should come as no surprise that when the seeds of this vision first implanted in me, I resisted with the full force of my resistance powers.

I resisted partly because it’s my nature to fight my way through everything. I am a mismatcher to the extreme, always trying to prove everyone wrong, including my inner wisdom.

Also because of fear. Stepping into the unknown of your vision is always an initiation that evokes fear. You’re leaping into mystery. You don’t know what will happen. On top of that, my strongest claires are my clairesentinence (feeling), claireaudience (hearing), and clairecognizance (an unexplained knowing). My vision wasn’t a visual. And following a knowing, a calling, and a feeling without a clear picture is like going on a journey without a map.

Which feels very accurate for how my journey has played out thus far. I call it a Listening Tour, to differentiate it from a vision quest.

Reconnecting With Intuition

When it comes to intuitive powers, clairvoyance tends to get the most attention. This fits a culture that places supreme value on seeing over the other senses.

Intuition comes in many forms and from all the senses: listening, feeling (both emotions and kinesthetic sensations), smelling, tasting, and general knowing.

Our “vision” might emanate from any of our senses, or a combination of them.

If you’ve ever heard someone speak about following their calling, they are referring to their claireaudience — processing intuition through the auditory channel.

Intuitive powers are not the province only of mediums and psychics. Everyone has intuitive powers. Most of us are cut off from our intuition because we learned to suppress that part of ourselves and because we are too busy to connect with it. We are always running, doing, thinking, and figuring things out. We get caught up in expectations, hijacked by fear, agitated by the commotion of life, overwhelmed, and sucked into the swirl of social media and work and life.

Intuition can only be accessed in a place of stillness, silence, and spaciousness. In our busy lives we don’t create space to connect with it and strengthen these powers. As a result, the vision we create for our lives isn’t ours; it’s a product of what our visuals-obsessed culture tells us we should strive for.

Vision Beyond Sight

Most people who create vision boards do so using pages ripped from magazines.

It can be comforting to have a picture of something to remind us of what’s possible, or an example to model. After all, we are conditioned to seek proof and evidence before we move forward with a plan.

I invite you to consider another option: there may be no image that can represent your vision because there is no proof or evidence to support it. You will supply the evidence. You will be the example.

Victor Frankl famously wrote about Man’s Search for Meaning; in a similar way, we seek enlightenment. But we need not search for meaning; it is not something we find, but something we create. Enlightenment exists in every moment, there is nothing to seek.

There is a breadth and depth of wisdom and guidance available to us through our all of our senses, if we learn how to access them and hear the messages they send us.

When we create space for stillness to connect with our intuitive powers, we can access a vision far beyond what we can see.