Is it intuition, or is it your past?
I give intuition a lot of authority. When I feel something strongly, I tend to assume it must be telling me something. I wish it were that simple.
Sometimes what feels like intuition is my brain recognizing a similarity to something from my past and deciding what it means before I even realize the connection. We may not consciously remember every experience we have had, but our brain keeps what it learned from them. A face, a tone of voice, a certain type of personality, even the way someone interacts with us can resemble someone or something we have experienced before. And our brain decides what that look or gesture means before we have had time to understand why.
Understanding ourselves can move emotional healing forward, but that doesn't always mean the body has caught up. We can understand what happened. We can make peace with it. We can forgive ourselves. And still, we can react to a familiar face, tone, personality, or situation as if some part of the past is hurting us again.
So I take a minute and ask myself:
What am I feeling right now?
Where is this reaction coming from?
Does something about this person remind me of someone/sometime/something?
Is this about what is happening now, or has my mind already connected it to something that happened before?
That distinction matters. Your brain will start looking for the answer if you ask for it.
Meditation has played a huge role in this for me. There have been moments in meditation when understanding didn't come through analysis or slowly putting pieces together. It arrived all at once. That aha moment allowed me to love myself again. I suddenly understood where it all came from — the hurt, the behavior, the choices I had made from reacting, and of course the emotions tied to being an adult and acting out like a child.
Sometimes it is intuition. Sometimes it is recognition. Sometimes it is history showing up in the present.
Let's stay curious long enough to find out what information this situation or emotion is bringing us.
