A trip to the beach and what is intuition?

Mom and I went to Crescent Beach yesterday (Sunday) afternoon. My weekend was very chill but I did have trip preparation tasks to complete for our road trip, starting this Saturday.

Sunday morning, lying in bed, I thought “I want to go to the beach today”. I felt confident that I could get the day’s scheduled work - car cleaning - done, plus have time for a slow morning, plus go to the beach. I want it all.

Weekend energy has shifted significantly since early summer when these days of the week were overflowing with gardening and property maintenance.

I need to remember this for next year. I’m still adjusting to the rhythms of living here and the routines of my current life goals. June is intense, August not so much. That is, until I start upping food production from the garden. A shift for future me to figure out.

Anyway, Sunday morning I had the thought to go to the beach and when I checked my texts Mom had sent a message the night before, “wanna go walk a beach tomorrow?”

We went for a long walk at Crescent Beach as the tide was going out. It was wonderful.

Yesterday morning I shared on Instagram how I had been getting ready for our upcoming trip - getting my audio materials downloaded and queued up, solidifying the itinerary, etc.

This Saturday we’re headed out for a 16 day cross-country road trip to pick up a trailer. I’ll be sharing that story more thoroughly in a video but the short story is that we ordered a custom built, fibreglass, lightweight camping trailer (Boler style) three years ago from a manufacturer in British Columbia. And we’re finally getting it now.

Back in June, after returning home from a two week trip to Montreal to visit our kids and celebrate three family university convocations, I was really on the fence about doing this road trip. Damien was still gung-ho thank goodness, didn’t pressure me and started to ask around if anyone was interested in joining to help share in the driving.

At the time my body was telling me I needed to be home. I had just come back from Montreal and there was so much I wanted to accomplish around here and I just wanted to be here, home. It was hard to imagine, to project into the future, that I’d be ok leaving.

This is what I wrote on my Instagram story about this experience, “back in June I just couldn’t wrap my brain around wanting to leave and do all that driving…but now I feel very ready to head out on the road, excited…I just think it’s funny how I can change my mind and how an idea will feel so wrong to me (as in I don’t want to do it) and then it doesn’t.”

I went on to say,

This is one of my problems with the advice to “trust your gut” or intuition. (Mine seems to change.) I’ve expressed to people I know personally that trusting my intuition is such a hard concept for me to understand. What does that mean? What does that feel like? Explain it to me? They explain to me what it feels like, and I’m like “um… I can’t relate.”

In June my intuition (or what I perceived as my intuition, certainly my gut) was against this trip. And now I can’t wait to go. I am probably misunderstanding intuition, confusing it with feelings or something.

Intuition. What exactly is that?

I asked for people to share their experiences/thoughts with me and the responses were interesting.

I never mentioned anxiety in my Instagram text but one of the responses clarified for me that I don’t know how to differentiate intuition from my anxiety, especially because my anxiety is experienced in my gut. So much for trusting your gut!

A different commenter, one of my long time online friends talked about how she has advised her kids to trust their gut and I couldn’t relate at all. I don’t know that I’ve ever said this to my children because I don’t know what that means myself.

Another online friend, who’s a registered psychological counsellor said that she has learned to identify intuition as quieter and more peaceful in the body than anxiety. This has been her personal experience as well as what’s she’s observed in her clients.

Here’s the thing: I love knowing. I use thinking, observing, words to know. I don’t feel out of touch with my body but bodily knowing is not a strong suit of mine and it feels like my body, specifically in anxiety, betrays me. In this regard my mind also can’t always be trusted as it catastrophizes and veers to over-analysis and over-thinking.

(For the record, and if you’re into the Enneagram, I’m a classic Type 6, my wing changes.)

I love having tools that help me know things. And I’d love having an in-house tool for deeper self-knowledge. And if I could understand and tap into intuition, that would be really cool. I could probably find a coach for that.

Do you have experiences and thoughts on intuition, anxiety and self-knowledge/knowledge? I’d love to hear your experiences with this.

And if you’re just here for the pretty beach pictures, that’s cool too.