Falling In and Out of Love from an Intuitive Perspective
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Believe it or not, everyone has intuition. It's what you do with it that really matters. If you want more love in your life, it starts with you! A well-lived life is not without challenges or pain, but when you commit to using every experience to create a new you, you are using intuition in its most powerful and courageous form. Laura Day explains how to navigate the ins and outs of love, what your intuition does when you're committed to love and five healthy ways to create a good goodbye when it's time to leave.
Intuition, the ability to gather accurate data seemingly out of the blue, is a brain function everyone has for survival. When you need the facts fast to act when there is no time to reason or think, intuition gives you the right answer in the right time.I tell my students, "If you have to believe in something for it to work, it doesn't work; your belief is what's working." Intuition works even for nonbelievers. I train people to see the proof of intuition's existence and usefulness. However, mature, committed love is a counterintuitive act when framed from the perspective of your brain's imperative of your own survival, or that of your company or other resources. It is the override of your system of survival and the conscious decision to employ belief instead of reason, data or experience.
While love for your children is a function of biology, some people choose to call love the rational trading of one set of desires for a set of comforts. True, mature love—whether it is for a partner, an employee or anyone in your life you've committed to past the passion or fascination stage of biology—is a choice to believe in that person even when faced with intuitive evidence and information to the contrary...and to set your sights on being part of the partnership's best outcome.
The gift of intuition not only helps you understand that best outcome from the other person's point of view, but it gives you the information to help him or her achieve it. As a parent, a lover, a mentor, your target is not fact-finding to aid your own survival, but a commitment to finding the best in the other.
Four things your intuition does when you are committed to love
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Four things your intuition does when you are committed to love:
1. Your targets and resources become directed on others.
2. Your subconscious learns to override data that would interfere with your commitment to your belief.
3. Your state of well-being becomes a shared state, where the other person's well-being is interpreted as an integral factor to your survival.
4. You share intuition's greatest resource, which is attention, and allow it to be directed to goals that are not always in you or your company's best interest, but in the development of others, with the belief that this is of ultimate value.
When you use intuition as a mentor, a partner and a member of a community or company, you use intuition in its most generous and spiritual form. However, if your focus becomes futile or dangerous, your subconscious and your intuition will provide you with the evidence and information that disengagement is necessary. You may initially ignore this evidence out of a programmed habit of having belief in the other person, but over time, intuition does not leave you alone, piling proof after proof, until even belief is extinguished.
Intuition is a tool that allows you to create family and community for a common good in innovative and effective ways. It is also an Achilles' heel when the time to disengage is upon you. Even in the face of evidence, consciously choosing to give up your belief is one of the most devastating things you will ever face. Your intuition only increases this devastation, because you can experience the best possible outcome, yet in the face of failure, you must release it.
Three common mistakes people make at this very important point of courage:
1. The Band-Aid response: Instead of mourning a loss and gaining the insight to make a better choice, you make it feel better by falling into another relationship or distraction that essentially replicates what you needed to let go of.
2. The martyr response: Choosing to believe you made a mistake or were a victim, instead of acknowledging your choice to engage. I always tell my son that if it is your fault, you can fix it. Not the relationship, but you!
3. Engaging in the relationship in a destructive form by remaining in its patterns, even though the belief no longer exists—whether through revenge, lack of forgiveness or rumination.
Five healthy ways to create a good goodbye
1. Your targets and resources become directed on others.
2. Your subconscious learns to override data that would interfere with your commitment to your belief.
3. Your state of well-being becomes a shared state, where the other person's well-being is interpreted as an integral factor to your survival.
4. You share intuition's greatest resource, which is attention, and allow it to be directed to goals that are not always in you or your company's best interest, but in the development of others, with the belief that this is of ultimate value.
When you use intuition as a mentor, a partner and a member of a community or company, you use intuition in its most generous and spiritual form. However, if your focus becomes futile or dangerous, your subconscious and your intuition will provide you with the evidence and information that disengagement is necessary. You may initially ignore this evidence out of a programmed habit of having belief in the other person, but over time, intuition does not leave you alone, piling proof after proof, until even belief is extinguished.
Intuition is a tool that allows you to create family and community for a common good in innovative and effective ways. It is also an Achilles' heel when the time to disengage is upon you. Even in the face of evidence, consciously choosing to give up your belief is one of the most devastating things you will ever face. Your intuition only increases this devastation, because you can experience the best possible outcome, yet in the face of failure, you must release it.
Three common mistakes people make at this very important point of courage:
1. The Band-Aid response: Instead of mourning a loss and gaining the insight to make a better choice, you make it feel better by falling into another relationship or distraction that essentially replicates what you needed to let go of.
2. The martyr response: Choosing to believe you made a mistake or were a victim, instead of acknowledging your choice to engage. I always tell my son that if it is your fault, you can fix it. Not the relationship, but you!
3. Engaging in the relationship in a destructive form by remaining in its patterns, even though the belief no longer exists—whether through revenge, lack of forgiveness or rumination.
Five healthy ways to create a good goodbye
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Five healthy, intuitive and emotional ways to create a good good-bye:
1. Mourn your loss. Mourning is an acknowledgment that your belief was an act of courage, and taking time for grief is a "washing clean" to make space for the capacity to believe again.
2. Keep your intuition and attention on constructive goals in the present.
3. Do not polarize in your memory. Every situation contains both good and bad. Be grateful and nurture in your current life that which was good, while allowing what was harmful to be a gracious teacher.
4. Stay in integrity and take "right action" in all that you do. People are reactive beings, and it's not always easy, but when you are outside of your own integrity, you harm the structure that supports you, your goals and those around you in whom you are still committed to believe.
5. Do the exercises in How to Rule the World from Your Couch to help you disengage your attention from people, issues and goals that no longer serve you.
Intuition is a double-edged sword. It allows us to experience another's goals and needs as our own, but it also takes discipline to disengage from this habit when the situation demands it.
A life well-lived is not one without challenges or pain. It is a life in which every challenge creates something better in your life and in your being. When you commit to using every experience to create a new you, you are using intuition in its most powerful and courageous form!
Laura Day is the New York Times best-selling author of Practical Intuition and How to Rule the World from Your Couch. The Independent called her "The Psychic of Wall Street." Laura has been featured on The Oprah Show, Good Morning America and ABC News, as well as in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and other national and international media. She is currently working on her new book, No Biting, to be released in 2012.
Keep Reading from Laura Day:
The power of your intuition
What it means to feel wanted
When faith and function collide
1. Mourn your loss. Mourning is an acknowledgment that your belief was an act of courage, and taking time for grief is a "washing clean" to make space for the capacity to believe again.
2. Keep your intuition and attention on constructive goals in the present.
3. Do not polarize in your memory. Every situation contains both good and bad. Be grateful and nurture in your current life that which was good, while allowing what was harmful to be a gracious teacher.
4. Stay in integrity and take "right action" in all that you do. People are reactive beings, and it's not always easy, but when you are outside of your own integrity, you harm the structure that supports you, your goals and those around you in whom you are still committed to believe.
5. Do the exercises in How to Rule the World from Your Couch to help you disengage your attention from people, issues and goals that no longer serve you.
Intuition is a double-edged sword. It allows us to experience another's goals and needs as our own, but it also takes discipline to disengage from this habit when the situation demands it.
A life well-lived is not one without challenges or pain. It is a life in which every challenge creates something better in your life and in your being. When you commit to using every experience to create a new you, you are using intuition in its most powerful and courageous form!
Laura Day is the New York Times best-selling author of Practical Intuition and How to Rule the World from Your Couch. The Independent called her "The Psychic of Wall Street." Laura has been featured on The Oprah Show, Good Morning America and ABC News, as well as in Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and other national and international media. She is currently working on her new book, No Biting, to be released in 2012.
Keep Reading from Laura Day:
The power of your intuition
What it means to feel wanted
When faith and function collide
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