There are certain themes that just seem to be part of our lives. And even if they move into the background for a while and we think we're done with them, they'll show up again and again. They're like red threads, guiding threads: asking, and sometimes even compelling, us to pay attention.

Meditation, love, and healing are three such themes for me. And they came up to announce as themes for the meditation evenings that I'll be offering every other week in Montreal starting in September. I always trust what comes intuitively like that, and often I'll find out as I go along exactly what that means and how it will play out. 

So how do these three fit together?

After having written the last blog post, Intuition Revisited, I knew I wasn't quite done yet with the topic. There was this phrase that kept coming to mind: intuition is the voice of the heart. I hadn't been able to integrate it with the flow of the text, so I decided to write another post about the connection between the heart and intuition. Here it goes.

In the earlier blog, I focused on the contrast between the survival mode, which is ultimately driven by fear, and trusting the flow of Life, with intuition being an integral part of the ‘trust mode’. But how and where do we find trust in our psyche? When we rest in trust, where do we in fact rest? Trust cannot reside in the mind, as the mind will always find reasons to doubt whatever we think we know and can trust.

Intuition is usually understood to be a mental ability: it is defined as ‘comprehension without effort of reasoning’ (Webster’s), or as ‘immediate insight’ (Oxford English Dictionary). As such, it is associated with the receptive and symbolic mode of the right brain, as opposed to the logical, reasoning, thinking mode of the left brain. I have taught intuition in this neutral, mind-based way for over a decade. Looking at it like this is definitely useful, as it helps us understand how intuition functions by comparison with the ‘thinking’ mode that is most people’s way of using their minds. Once we get what the intuitive mode is like – essentially, knowing things without having thought about them – we’re able to identify it more easily and develop our use of it.