Chapter 13
Everyday Magic
Intuition, Impulses, and Messages from Your Inner Physician
Hunches, impulses, intuition, and urges provide access to a wealth of information outside your usual conscious awareness. These messages from your inner self can send you on the trail of solutions to problems that haven’t yielded to single-mindedly rational approaches. After fruitless struggles with persistence unpleasant symptoms, you may suddenly feel a desire to get outdoors more, an impulse to exercise, an urge to listen to music, start a hobby, take a trip, call a particular friend, or eat certain foods. Heeding this advice from your inner physician can be the first step toward restoring yourself to balance and health.
Such "cures" seem so natural, simple, and easy that the magical quality of their sudden, fitting appearance in our mental landscape often goes unnoticed. In our frantic quest for healing, we can ignore this everyday magic, assuming we require more dramatic interventions to return us to health. In addition to the belief that major problems require major solutions, we can harbor other beliefs about intuition and impulses that cause us to tune them out.
As products of a culture that values rationality, we may believe that only mentally ill people pay attention to voices in their heads, or that acting on impulses is childish and irresponsible, or that logic is the only way to solve problems and make decisions, or that intuition is something women have, but men lack. On a personal level, we may disregard our inner voice, expecting it to be more clear, distinct and directive; or assume that it’s coming from some more exalted part of us and so will withhold information to punish or test us; or we may think our intuition is a better form of information than rationality and take messages from the interior literally when they should be interpreted with a grain of intellectual salt.
The trick to making the best use of communications from your inner self is to develop the ability to blend intuition and intellect using the paradoxical concept of active surrender. Your inner voice is a broadcasting frequency your intellect can learn to rely on through such tools as the practice of playful rituals and the use of an impulse journal. Skill at tuning your mental dial to a clear station, also known as quieting the mind, can be enhanced by training yourself in relaxation techniques or meditation as ways to still the worried inner chatter of the overburdened intellect. Once you become attuned to the practical magic that springs from following the offerings of your inner self, it will seem irrational not to keep part of your attention pointed in that direction.