Reclaim Your Intuitive Voice
The first article in this series explored how vitally important the act of reaching for things we desire (food and otherwise) is for a meaningful human experience but also the dissatisfaction that arises when we reach compulsively. If you missed it, you can read the article here.
In this second article, we'll explore how to recognize our intuitive voice to inform what and how we reach for food so we feel less reactive and more awake to our needs and the messages we receive from our body.
How Following Intuition Influences Our Relationship to Food
The behavioral food therapy process helps my clients understand that their compulsive food habits are the nervous system's attempt to calm unsettled energy and resolve tension when they're uncertain about their needs. As they move along the arc of healing they build capacity for discomfort which allows them to turn toward the unsettled energy and murky mental landscape and become curious about the non-food needs driving their impulse to reach. In time, this allows them to reorient themselves and begin listening to and trusting intuition. They become less reactive to and beholden by food and more connected to what's going on inside of them.
Redirecting our attention from the outside-in requires tuning into that quiet voice we all have that knows deep down what we truly need. Our intuitive voice must have a seat at the table if we want to live freely and have a more easeful relationship with food. Listening, trusting, and following intuition is a different way of knowing ourselves and orienting in life. Intuition points us in directions that don't necessarily sync up with the mind's rational knowing nor the linear path we're told to follow in life. But listening to our intuition keeps us close to our aliveness and soul's desires. When we ignore or dismiss intuition, our spirit weakens, making it harder to hear and trust what it wants us to know --- the life force it has to offer us. And we miss out on seeing ourselves fully, expressing fully, and living fully.
When we lack this fullness and alignment with ourselves, we don't belong to ourselves. We feel like a stranger in our own home, leaving us to experience an emptiness, a loneliness, and a longing that we'll otherwise fill with food and anything else that promises momentary relief.
How to Identify Our Intuitive Voice
Our intuitive voice is a truth, a wisdom that lives deep down in our body rather than in the logical, thinking mind. It is a knowing, a "felt sense" that something feels right or off. I like the way a few different people write about intuition.
Audrey Lorde refers to is as our deepest and nonrational knowing
“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge…..When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
Glennon Doyle refers to it as becoming untamed.
“We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
Estes refers to it as coming home to ourselves, to our wild instinctual nature.
“The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion but a practice. It is a psychology in its truest sense….a knowing of the soul. Without her, women are without ears to hear her soultalk or to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms. Without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semiparralyzing ennui or else wishful thinking…..
The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can.
So what is the Wild Woman?....She is ideas, feelings, urges, and memory. She is the one we leave home to look for. She is the one we come home to……When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized, and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego — one’s own or those belonging to others.”
How do we become more familiar with our untaming, our deepest and nonrational knowing, our wild, instinctual nature?
Intuition can show up in many forms; in our body, consciousness, and actions. It could be:
The feeling of aliveness
The relief and freedom felt after you say, do, or decide the hard thing
Jaw tension, knots in the stomach, itchy skin/rash, or any number of body aches and pains that coincide with holding in or letting out truth or grasping too tightly to a desired outcome
Deep, painful sobbing
The quiet whisper inside nudging you down a path that doesn't necessarily align with what appears to be most rational, secure, or certain in your life
Remembering --- reminding yourself of who you know you are, making contact with your inherent nature
Getting in touch with the most natural, unrestricted, uninhibited expression of yourself
Following the breadcrumbs of intuition, trusting that you're taking the next best step in this moment and subsequent steps will become clear as you stay open to those breadcrumbs and move toward them
The full body yes; that cellular knowing when something is right, when everything clicks into place (finding just the right gift, making that move, turning toward the lover who's a great teacher on your path, backing out of plans for your own wellbeing, pursuing the passion that allows that fuller expression of self, choosing yourself over a toxic relationship)
The act of opening, expanding, revolting, advocating, or liberating
The part of you that chooses to validate and honor your needs even when another part of you fears disappointing others
The part of you that acknowledge when you don't know what you need and instead of forcing an answer, allows yourself the space and grace to not know and lets that be okay.
This is not an exhaustive list. The ways we experience intuition are at once universal and uniquely individual. How do you recognize your intuitive voice? Leave a comment below so we learn from each other different way to access the quiet voice inside of us that holds our deepest and nonrational knowing.
Steps Forward
In the next article we'll explore:
The life experiences that block access to our intuition
Strategies for removing those blocks so that we can access, trust, and act on our intuition and reach for food (or anything else) in a way that feels conscious, calm, and clear-headed.