14- Intuitive Heads-Up

14- Intuitive Heads-Up

Intuition comes to all of us in greater or lesser degrees.  Those messages from our higher wisdom can facilitate many advantages. Warnings, guidance, and even the ability to heal through transmuting negative or stuck energy in ourselves or another are just some of the benefits.  Ignoring or dismissing intuitive awareness is literally choosing to navigate life without the innate compass we come to this life with.  I was given huge lessons in the value of listening to this higher wisdom and following its lead.

As I stood beside my girlfriends bed, just before they wheeled her away for her exam, a quiet knowing came to me.  A knowing that her diagnosis would be the same as the one my husband received the week before; colon cancer.  This ‘knowing’ was much like a premonition I had experienced prior to Phil’s diagnosis. 

Predicting my soon-to-be reality, as we drove past a hospital one day, I simply felt an unusually strong sense of compassion for those living in the hospital for weeks on end with an ill or dying relative.  The weight of that feeling stayed with me for a while and I remember commenting on it to Phil.  Weeks later, when I found myself in that very situation, I realized then that my higher wisdom had been giving me an intuitive heads-up.  As common as these intuitive messages are, for the most part we miss them or interpret them incorrectly.  If instead we were conditioned to move more deeply into these experiences when they arise, and inquire further of them, life would unfold with much less difficulty.

Because my girlfriend was a wellness expert and health-nut to say the least, there was seemingly no logical reason for my intuition that her diagnosis would also be cancer.  However, knowing her intimately and having been privy to her way of coping with life, something inside of me knew.  Intuition is all around us, especially as we are about to enter what could be a traumatic or difficult time.  As it turns out, weeks before her diagnosis, Deb was also given an intuitive heads-up, not once but twice!  I read it as a cautionary nudge and told her so, but she simply applied it to her ongoing angst about western medical practices, which also seemed logical.  It was logical!  It just wasn’t the whole story.

Deb worked in a hospital and on two separate occasions prior to her diagnosis, she reported walking down the hall and suddenly having an experience of being in an altered state of awareness.  She said the experience itself was surreal, as if she were in a scene from a sci-fi movie.  In this experience she found herself walking down the hospital hallway past large rooms containing suspended bodies of unconscious people being kept alive by chemicals infusions.  As she reported these experiences, she told me the one thing she knew for sure, was how absolutely unnatural and uncalled for this was.   This experience even made her question if she wanted to continue to work in such close association with hospitals and western medicine.  

Having worked as a wellness expert, licensed exercise physiologist and in hospital administration, Deb was always at odds with western medicine.  Her passion for alternative therapies was as strong and vocal as her rants against the abusive aspects of pharmacology.  Therefore, after her cancer diagnosis she completely surprised me by clinging to western medicine and opting for chemotherapy. 

As her closest friend, I was with her in those infusion rooms and hospital rooms as she reflected on the intuitive experiences she had shared with me. Realizing exactly what had been foreshadowed, she finally understood her visions.  Fear however, blocked her ability to do anything but ignore the message she now knew her intuition had sent; to ‘avoid the unnatural chemical infusions that would keep her suspended in a kind of odd limbo between life and death’.  Like interpreting a dream, she clearly understood the message, even as she sat in the infusion chair permitting dose after dose.  She also realized these weren’t the only intuitive messages she had received prior to her illness.  

For more than a year before her diagnosis Deb had complained of not feeling quite right in her gut.  She was one of those highly somatic individuals who had acute physical sensitivity.  Even her sensory abilities of hearing, tasting and smelling were off the chart.  But because she was so certain her wellness prevention lifestyle couldn’t possibly allow for any serious illness, she had simply written off her intuition that something “wasn’t quite right”.  I have a clear memory of her standing in my kitchen more than a year before her diagnosis, with one hand at the top of her stomach and the other at the bottom as she said “Something is going on from here to here!”  Once again I encouraged her to have it checked out.  Once again she discounted the warning.  Because we were together almost every day I knew how often she had suffered for years with ongoing nausea that she could never find the source of.  Since I tend to look at everything through a spiritual and also a metaphysical lens, I remarked on the possible link to this and her mantra with regard to “gutting life out”.  This was a phrase she had used for the more than the twenty years I had known her.  Deb was able to drive herself hard and deliberately through any circumstance.  She was a self-admitted worker bee and she had a personal will that amazed me…..and a stubbornness to match.  It would be these strengths she would call upon to engage any battle she faced.  

Deb’s response to let logic override her intuition was not uncommon.  We all do this to some degree.  In her last few months of life, her body wracked from multiple chemo and radiation treatments that did nothing to heal her cancer, she spoke again of the strange premonition that had come to her, not once but twice prior to her diagnosis. She reflected on other intuitive nudges around her illness that she had received over the years but pushed aside.  Hearing her embrace the intuitive information that her higher wisdom was trying to send, was acknowledgement to not only recognize, but to listen and heed the messages we get.  For Deb it was an a-ha moment of awareness.  She realized she could indeed trust her higher knowing, and that in truth, that is who she is, but she could never hold onto this perspective long enough to let it guide her decisions.

From the first time I met Deb she voiced a desire to connect her head to her heart.  She knew that she let her mind run the show and teasingly referred to herself as ‘the big-headed woman’.  But she did not live in a world that supported living from one’s heart-space.  Surrendering to tenderness, sensitivity and compassion for ourselves and others are not openly rewarded, and often misunderstood as weakness.  Deb would do anything not to be seen as weak.  In many ways she was the strongest person I have ever known.  Near the end of her life, while continuing to work all through her illness and refusing to let go, her doctor even said “I don’t know what kind of glue holds you together!”.  She told me this with pride and I knew then that Deb also viewed surrender as a weakness.  I believe this societal conditioning is what really took her life, it just came in the form of cancer.

I’m from the ‘let go and let God’ side of the street. I have found surrender to be a very courageous choice having nothing to do with giving up and everything to do with giving in to powers I can’t consciously access with the limited aspect of my personality.  Surrender is for me the result of an understanding that I have a higher, non-physical aspect with a better vantage point, and I trust it!  Giving in to those things that spread themselves across our lives in the form of illness and loss are powerful lessons.  I know Deb knew this because at one point she shared that she thought her illness might be something she unconsciously developed to let her self “off the hook”.  Her love/hate relationship with life was largely due to the emotional pain that she intuitively picked up on without realizing it wasn’t hers to carry.  It is typical for intuitive empaths or clair-sentients (clear-sensing individuals) like Deb to go their entire life without realizing their heightened sensitivity is an intuitive gift to develop, rather than a burden to carry.

As an academic Deb was never taught how to direct her highly intuitive empathic nature.  And because it was so vast she didn’t know how to personally trust it.   Deb intuitively picked up on the emotional pain of others to such a degree that it was often overwhelming for her.  She had a difficult time even sitting through an emotionally charged movie.  More often than not, in an effort to cope, she turned to people pleasing and trying to keep everyone she loved happy.  What we sometimes overlook or write of as co-dependency is often a response to an empathic ability as strong as Deb’s. Her overtly reclusive lifestyle was also an attempt to avoid such strong feelings.  The less intimate relationships she had in her life, the easier it was to cope with life.  Apart from work Deb had no social life to speak of, no intimate partner and even with her two closest friends of more than twenty years she played her cards very close to her chest.  In those times when life became too much to bear, she let her guard down and fell into a heap in our arms.  We responded with the same advice again and again but we could never get her to simply align with her truth, pick herself first, and trust that others would be okay in their own choices. 

Reading this you may be wondering what purpose having such high sensitivities serves.  Emotional empaths/clair-sentients have the gift of transmutation whereby they can sense emotional distress in others and, if taught how, can assist in processing it energetically. This facilitates powerful healing opportunities for those suffering emotionally.  When feelings are stuffed, emotional energy is not processed and it has no choice but to manifest as illness.  Because our modern society is so cut off from giving intuition, in all it’s forms, the credit it is due, we all lose.  Deb quite literally took on the pain of the world, held it within her, and it destroyed her body.  

More and more people are coming into their intuitive abilities.  If we do not create an arena for them to be validated, understood and expanded upon we will lose these people and the incredible gifts they bring.  As I write this it has been a week since Deb’s transition.  Her loving and kind nature touched all those who knew her.  She shared with me the heartfelt sentiments she had for those she loved, her children above all.  I rest in the awareness that she is moving toward peace and understanding.  I include this story in her honor and in honor of all those that feel deeply and carry the pain of a world that is more concerned with competition than compassion.  It is my hope that anyone reading this who relates to such immense emotional pangs in themselves or another, learn about clair-sentient/empathic intuitive abilities and the process for healing transmutation.  This world needs these individuals and their gifts….and they need not suffer on our behalf.