intuition: int(y)o͞oˈiSH(ə)n/; noun. The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. “We shall allow our intuition to guide us.”
-Oxford University Press, 2021
Honoring Our Gift
We inhabit an era of profound loyalty to facts and knowledge. Too many of us let logic rule the enchanting kingdoms of our lives—a stark departure from millennia spent attuned to the subtle guidance sourced from nature, the wisdom of children and elders, and our own instincts. Even Albert Einstein, of all people noted “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
The Third Awareness concerns how we can tap into and harness our intuition as a superpower—despite worldly pressure to dismiss its profound wisdom.
Context: From Basic Truths to Internal Exploration
We’ve considered the first two awarenesses: My life is better clear and I choose what I consume, each foundational truths on a ClearLife journey. Now we get to dive a bit deeper, explore the sexy layers well beneath the surface, the unique parts within each of us that reveal and guide our path.
The third and fourth awareness, addressing intuition and healing respectively, shine light on our innermost dimensions. In listening to ourselves and healing what may have made us want to dim in the first place, we can live a more intentional, aligned life.
The Third Awareness: My intuition defines my priorities and I pursue a life that reflects them.
ClearLife (still) isn’t about not doing or consuming anything. It’s about crafting a fully present, “dimmer-free” life. The Third Awareness is a bridge on the journey: With clarity (Awareness #1) and the knowing that whether we’re clear is up to us (Awareness #2) we gain better access our intuition. Empowered by this guidance, we can discern our true priorities and live a more aligned and intentional life.
Tuning in at Decision Crossroads
Considering intuition usually arises during decision making, especially for difficult choices. Standard practices of assessing facts and analyzing metrics only gets us so far. Yet, this is what many of us learn. I was coached to “Make a list of pros and cons” when faced with difficult decisions as a kid. I recall different colored post-it notes on my desk and pairs of columns in diaries. Sometimes this worked, but I recall feeling like I’d cheated, taken a shortcut of some kind, and less “final” in moving forward with the choice.
My preferred memories of making decisions concern going for a walk alone, sitting under a tree in silence, or perched on a rock by the San Francisco Bay. I think I may have even said “I am going to go clear my mind” on my way out the door. No lists. No analysis. Just tuning in and listening until the path forward was clear. These decisions felt better, more final—more my own—than those that followed listing facts. They still do.
For many of us, as we mature, societal expectations and self-imposed “shoulds” distance us from our innermost guidance. It’s why so many of us reach midlife and wonder What happened?! How did we get here? Is this what I really want? I don’t even know how to navigate out of this mess.
Turning Life Inside Out?
Looking to our intuition for guidance might feel awkward and inconvenient, especially if we’re typically guided by tradition, knowledge, and reason. But I have yet to encounter anyone who has regretted it, despite the often ensuing tumult.
“I hope your book helps me figure out my life, Cecily. Will it guide me through how to reset my priorities and get back on track?”
I looked at my wildly successful and intelligent friend sitting across from me at a charming seaside restaurant in Malibu. He had it all: two beautiful kids, an executive job at a sexy media company, a lovely wife at his side, and several super cool toys. He’d followed all of the social “rules” in achieving and collecting as much as he had, yet he often shared that he felt lost, unfulfilled, and drained—and he was grappling with several chronic health issues.
I remembered that part from my own path. Law school, an impressive career, a “perfect” (looking) family, and heartwarming photos on the handmade holiday cards. It all looked idyllic, but I’d lost touch with my true self and was working hard to conceal my emotional and physical misery beneath an impressive exterior—not to mention daily drinking to keep these uncomfortable inklings at bay.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Are you ready to listen to yourself? It can be pretty inconvenient, but the returns are fucking awesome.” Neither my book nor I can take any credit, but after some awe-inspiring shifts, this dear friend is no longer in the career, the marriage, or the complicated house… and his health is a lot better too 🫶🏼
My Experiences With The Third Awareness
When I took a meaningful break from drinking in 2017, I had spent years actively ignoring my inner guidance. In retrospect, I believe my daily drinking was a coping mechanism to silence the persistent voice of my intuition, trying to steer me away from the multitude of unhealthy circumstances I’d surrounded myself with. I wasn’t prepared to “turn my life inside out.” I was afraid of stillness, silence, truth because I didn’t want to hear that inner voice or face the truth. My internal mantras were “Everything is fine” and “I’ve got it.”
It wasn’t and I didn’t.
When I paused and started my alcohol-free experiment, my once-muted intuition became harder to ignore. Each day my inner guidance grew clearer, more insistent, and less deniable. It was like navigating life with a newly discovered superpower. I stopped doing things I knew weren’t nourishing for my family and me—including distancing myself from people and circumstances that depleted me—and gravitated towards others I found energizing and inspiring. At times it did feel like my life was being turned inside out!
This transition certainly had its messy moments, but the changes ended up being surprisingly manageable. And I stopped second guessing myself. The energy saved from just that—not second guessing myself—meant extra time and space to focus on other things.
“Oh shit, the kids.”
When we allow our innate innermost wisdom and guidance to chart our course, our life inevitably becomes an authentic reflection of what matters most to us. A poignant example of this for me concerns my role as mom.
About six months down my ClearLife path I popped my head up from overindulgent self-reflection, the messiness of my divorce, and the still smoking embers of my social life. It was then that I saw I’d been parenting on auto-pilot for years. The kids were fine—healthy, attending school and sports, seeing friends—but I didn’t know much more than that.
I didn’t really know how they were doing, what they were feeling, and even worse, I wasn’t close enough to them to be able to recognize some of the subtle ways kids communicate—through their art, lack of eye contact, sleep pattern shifts, change in appetite.
I stood alone in the kitchen of my tiny rented cottage, coffee in hand, and said out-loud, “Oh shit, the kids.” I knew that something had to change. It was a deep and intuitive knowing, not a mental decision.
In the weeks that followed, our lives changed to reflect my newfound commitment to prioritize the boys. I worked from home more, we spent evenings together crafting or playing games, and we took our time doing simple things, like getting to school.
I adjusted my meetings schedule so I could always walk my youngest to school . . . taking our time to stop and explore the nooks and crannies of our street, the things only kids see, like ant hills and lizard tunnels, personalized license plates, and dropped coins—and answer the beautiful questions kids ask: “Does the earth ever spin the other way?” and “Did you like art when you were a kid, like Xander?” and “Do you like to work, Mom, or do you work because you have to, like Sarah’s mom?”
Within a few months our routines had transformed. We were all a lot more connected, and I could see that prioritizing them meant a ripple effect for so many other positive changes throughout our lives. The hardest part was overcoming the shame for taking so long to get this right (more on that another day).
Another Departure From AA
As noted last week, the third step reads: “Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” I won’t belabor the point, except to highlight the key difference here: The Third Awareness is about discovering and following the guidance and wisdom within ourselves. It resides in all of us. We don’t need to surrender our will or our lives over to anyone or anything else. Everything we need to guide us is right here, within us, right now. We just need to tune in and listen.
Practices to Attune to and Follow Intuition
Writing about something as universal, innate, powerful, and unexplainable as intuition is like writing about how to love. There is no single or correct way to do it. However, I am inspired to share a few practices collected from the ClearLife community and my own experience:
Allow space and time to listen. It is easy to fill our lives with anything other than stillness, yet it is in those quiet places—ideally alone—when we can hear our true selves. Walks, time alone in nature, a pause with lyrics-free music—even certain types of movement—can support our ability to tune in.
Meditate. I had lunch with a new friend this week and our respective routines came up. “Everything comes back to meditation!” she exclaimed. So true. Whatever a meditation practice looks like for you, finding a steady pattern of daily pause, even if just for a few minutes, helps us become more acquainted with our intuitive voice.
Look for a sign. When struggling with a big life decisions, we often find ourselves at odds between our rational minds and intuition. My dear Great Aunt Judy (hi Judy! ❤️) taught me a practice she learned from her own mother, my grandmother, for these crossroads: Look for a sign. Ask for guidance and notice, what shows up, typically within a day. Interestingly, our conscious selves will “notice” signs that our intuition wants us to see and interpret in a certain way. Please share your experiences if you have any with this!
Observe avoidance. Change is hard. Naturally, us humans often try to maintain a status quo, even if we know another way is best. If we notice that we are spending an unusual amount of energy avoiding a topic, that’s usually a signal that we should take a closer look. Why? Perhaps because our intuition is guiding us towards confronting what we've been avoiding, as it likely holds a key to our growth.
Notice physical signals. Some of us are so adept at abiding by the mantra of “I should” that we’ve completely lost touch with our own internal compass. If we ignore ourselves for long enough, our bodies will intervene to get us to pause, change, rest, or otherwise shift. Close to home examples include a back pain that keeps us home for two weeks to address something we’ve been downplaying. A serious medical condition that pulls us away from a demanding career for months or more. As skin rash that keeps us inside for a week. The practice is noticing what the consequences of the physical issue might be and considering them as intuitive signals we can choose to heed.
🙏🏼 Thanking My Intuition for my Life and my Love 🙏🏼
It can be scary to trust ourselves more than others, social norms, and convention. It’s not for everyone. It has been essential for me—both on my ClearLife journey and beyond. Truth be told, I would not be here writing this post if I hadn’t “trusted my gut.”
If you’ve followed my breast cancer story, you know that it was listening to my intuition that led me to take some real time off to “tend to some lurking health concerns.” Though people I trusted tried to talk me out of it, I had a strong “sense” that I needed to take care of myself. Though I could have listened sooner—and wish I had—stepping away from my strong career path when I did saved my life.
In a less morbid vein, it was overriding my adherence to social norms that made it possible for me to open my heart and my life to my beloved. In the early stages of our relationship, I was inclined to pause, slow down, try to control the pace a bit, primarily for optics’-sake. An important figure in my ClearLife journey, Dr. Bill, stopped me in my tracks and sternly warned me that if I didn’t listen to myself and follow my heart, I would be perpetuating “an architecture of appropriateness, behaving in a way [to please] others,” rather than following my truest calling.
I’m still wildly imperfect here. Certain decisions and follow-through still stump me: Am I meeting this obstacle because I should reconsider this path or because it is a test of my commitment? Breaking routine and finding time in solitude in nature usually reveals the right path.
In closing I leave you with a poetic gem on intuition from The Book of Qualities, a collection of personified human traits I’ve kept with me since discovering it at the local bookstore as a teen (you can tell by how worn my copy is!).
Intuition
I invited Intuition to stay in my house when my roommates went North. I warned her that I am territorial and I keep the herb jars in alphabetical order. Intuition confessed that she has a “spotty employment record.” She was fired from her last job for daydreaming.
When Intuition moved in, she washed all the windows, cleaned out the fireplace, planted fruit tress, and lit purple candles. She doesn’t cook much. She eats beautiful foods, artichokes, avocados, persimmons and pomegranates, wild rice with wild mushroom, chrysanthemum tea. She doesn’t have many possessions. Each thing is special.. I wish you could see the way she arranged her treasures on the fireplace mantle. She has a splendid collection of cups, bowls, and baskets.
Well, the herbs are still in alphabetical order, and I can’t complain about how the house looks. Since Intuition moved in, my life has been turned inside out.
Be well.
Love ❤️
Miscellaneous…
Beyond excited… Soren and I together signed a lease for a new office space. It’s a special spot filled with personal history and some magic. We’re affectionately calling it our “birthing center” as we have so many ideas we want to bring to life in this beautiful space, including our first co-hosted retreat which will offer many opportunities to attune to intuition. Details here.
Noticing… Moodiness and some fear as transitions continue to unfold for our family this summer. Between upping a medication dose to keep my cancer recurrence at bay and preparing my older kid for a service trip in Southeast Asia, all of my “controlled control tendencies” are being pressure tested :) Anyone else out there a fan of The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control?
Considering… Taking two weeks to prepare the next TGIF on The Fourth Awareness on understanding, but not overly identifying with trauma. I’ll be on a retreat next Friday and might share something short and sweet instead.
Love the personification of Intuition! Your writing is lyrical, Cecily. Thank you for sharing.
I’m loving your Substack and recommending it to people I love. Thank you for sharing what you’ve learned and what you are continuing to learn. 💕