Famous Last Words

I think my recovery is complete. And I do mean recovery, I'm always growing, changing and hopefully improving. But a part of me was lost, that I had - like the 'child mind' zen texts talk about. Something I did naturally all along got disloged. Now I've recovered it. It's a good feeling.

Specifically what I've recovered is trust, trust in myself - my instincts are good. For a good period I had a crippling paranoia that they couldn't be trusted. I was getting tripped up on my instincts. It was a mess and more than anything else, that's why I was in psychotherapy. I'd begun to doubt my ability to intuitively read situations.

I trust my cognitive mind, it's good. I trust my instinctive/intuitive mind, it's good too. They just got messed up in a situation that didn't add up, and it took a lot of talk and a lot of introspection to sort one from the other.

It was the kind of handicap that forced me to grow though. Like an AFL player learning to kick with both feet, or a training exercise where they are told only to handball - the restrictions force you to adjust your game and you become more versatile. So while I learned a lot in the time where I could no longer hear my intuition for the noise in my head, I can hear it again now, act on it (or take it's direction not to act) and I trust it.

I left therapy almost 6 months ago, and my last session was really just a check out-debrief, I was on the right path from Christmas - but specific with issues to your intuition - your intuition pays off long run, not in the moment so you can start taking the right actions with it, but you have to wait around for cognitive evidence that that was correct.

And that's because intuition is not a spooky 6th sense, it's a rapid fire quick and dirty heuristic calculator, telling you in broad strokes when things add up and when they don't. In the short run it can be right or wrong, because it's rule of thumb - broadly right but not infallible. Think of it if you will as a roulette table. Your intuition says that in the long run the house always wins, or with just a coin toss that in the long run the odds will be 50/50. So a gambler might come in and win big off the first couple of spins on a roulette table, or your friend may toss 3 heads in a row on a 'fair' coin. You look stupid, your intuition looks stupid. But the more tosses of the coin your friend makes, or the longer the gambler stays at the table - the more the results conform to intuitions rule of thumb.

I have seen something else under the sun:

The race is not to the swift
    or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
    or wealth to the brilliant
    or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

So under my sun, I've had 6 months to observe that when my gut has told me something was a bad idea, and I've been given pause to say 'well maybe that wasn't a bad idea' when time was applied it does indeed wash out that way. And that's what has given my intuition the all clear. Something I can trust. I'm sorted now to listen to my intuition and then get my slower cogitating mind to catch the fuck up, rather than employ it's efforts to talk me out of my intuition, or paralyze me with doubts.

Rumi says: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition." and "If you are wholly perplexed and in straits, have patience, for patience is the key to joy"

Intuition got us thus far, and further than the writers of Ecclesiasties 9:11, and Rumi the poet. I'm glad to have recovered mine.

Things be looking up.