Trusting in Your Gut

Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster.  - Anne Wilson Schaef

Trust your gut.  You hear it all the time.  I've heard it time and time again on Oprah.  Trust the feeling.  You'll know it.  Just listen.

I know my gut.  It talks to me all the time.  Maybe that's why I have "stomach issues" of which I won't go into.  It is really sensitive.  Maybe having huge gut instincts adds to the sensitivity.

I thought a lot about this the other day when my gut was screaming at me. I was near the end of the night at the store and was alone when a man came in.  My gut screamed at me.  Then the next man came in and I could swear they could hear my gut screaming at me.  I immediately grabbed the key fob that has the alarm buttons on it and I pushed.  They hadn't even spoken to me yet and I was pushing every button I had.  I knew this was trouble about to happen.  This was the second time I have ever pressed the alarm. 

The first time I wasn't listening close enough to my gut and got caught, literally in a corner with no way out.  I made my way to the alarm eventually.  I'm going to cut myself some slack, though, on that "event".  The police told me his behavior was abnormal for a "normal" robbery (tell me exactly what a NORMAL robbery is please.)

I feel there are two people inside of me-me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.
- Kim Basinger

Over the past few years and surviving a few "incidents", my gut is well-honed.  And I was right this time.  While fortunately I was able to get them out of the store without incident, they were picked up and arrested.  My buddy Nick, the officer on duty that night thankfully, helped me to make the right decision.  He said he wished more people would work through their fears and make arrests so we could get these bad folks off the street.

Nick said I had strong instincts that came from a strong personality and did all the right things to avoid danger.  Lord knows I have had enough experience (unfortunately) throughout my years to hone those instincts.  And is that how your gut is trained?  Or is gut instinct in you from the very beginning of your life?

“Learn to let your intuition—gut instinct—tell you when the food, the relationship, the job isn’t good for you (and conversely, when what you’re doing is just right).”
- Oprah Winfrey

According to Psychology Today, intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can't immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed.

The brain takes in a situation, does a very quick search of its files, and then finds its best analogue among the stored sprawl of memories and knowledge.

So, it appears that the gut is something that is fine-tuned by experience and emotion. The gut itself literally feeds gut feelings; think of butterflies in the stomach when a decision is pending. The gut has millions of nerve cells and, through them, a "mind of its own," says Michael Gershon, author of The Second Brain and a professor at Columbia University. Still, gut feelings do not originate there, but in signals from the brain.

The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.  - Stanley Kubrick

Your brain stores up all of your experiences and when a similar experience comes up for you, your brain responds, kind of like sifting through a file cabinet to find the file that fits the project!  Okay, THAT shows my age!  Think of it as searching through your computer database.  Darn!  I thought I was special!  That I had special skills that other people don't.  But it's just my old age and living through so many different things that has been stored up in my brain.  No wonder I can't remember anything anymore.  There's no more room!

The more experience you have in a particular domain, the more reliable your intuitions, because they arise out of the richest array of collected patterns of experience.  So I am making the asumption that the more experiences you "experience" in life, the better your gut instinct will be.  I belive they call that "street smart".  At least that's what they called it in my youth.  And it wasn't a compliment.  If you were street smart as a woman back in my earlier days, it meant you had spent a bit of time outside of the safe confines of your home and family and you had probably picked up some bad habits and hung with the wrong people. 

Women were supposed to be sweet and kind and quiet.  Yeah, and also get yourself killed or raped or kidnapped or one of those nasty things.  Now you can't get along without some street smarts.  You'll get eaten up by business, and just plain people around you.  Or just plain simple get taken advantage of big time.

One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.- Henry Miller

So, I am sorry to say that gut instinct is not hocus pocus or something the gods have blessed you with solely.  It takes work, good listening skills and a large storage capacity from what I learned!  The good thing is that I know as I get older, my instincts are getting more honed, more accurate and more trustworthy.  We DO age like fine wine and get better and better.  At least I know I will not waste time trying to figure out what the right thing to do is.  I will just intrinsically search my very large database and it will make the decision for me in a flash!  So all you young people out there.  Listen up!  Pay attention to what the old folks are telling you.  They have lived to tell their tales and can probably help you avoid serious trouble.   Then again, if you don't make the mistakes yourself, how will you ever learn??  Never mind.  See you youngsters on the other end of life after you have many many Aha moments under your belt.

"You just go with your gut instinct, because your gut is smarter than your heart."  — Gerard Way