Intuitive intelligence

“We have been trained through years of school to be plenty smart, but we have had little (or no) training in being aware of our mind, changing beliefs, dealing with our emotional reactions, or behaviours. To make these changes requires a different kind of learning and some skilful practice.’’

Intuition is the ability to understand or know something without needing to think about it or usereason, "Just trusting your intuition", that's what many of us would like to do but what does that mean, what do you trust into? That is what we explore in this course.

We as humans do a lot of things intuitively. A rough estimate is that 95% of the decisions we make we make every day, we only consciously think about 5% or less of those decisions. This saves us a lot of time. It would be too tiring, if not impossible, to do everything we do consciously. At the same time, this has dangers. Many habitual actions and thought patterns are supportive. Yet there are also habitual thinking patterns or intuitive reactions that do not support yourself or others. There might be unconscious biases you might hold or survival patterns at play that do not support your visions, reactions and plans.

We intuitively carry our personal structure, history and backgrounds with us. If you come into a different culture, you might think: "How strange they are acting here!" Then you suddenly become aware of what you intuitively perceive as normal. You act from what you take for granted, until you find yourself in a different environment or situation. Often we feed our own biases because there is in many people the tendency to look for social media and friends with the same ideas. Also our studies often represent a deep dive into a very specific perspective. With this we fill and feed our unconscious thinking. All of these stored experiences and reaction patterns are different for everyone. Therefore, ‘we do not see things as they are, but as we are’. (Anais Nin)

Depending on how much safety you experience within yourself, a different perspective can work strongly as a threat/trigger. Our body reacts automatically with, for example, tension in the shoulders, tension in the jaw, pressure in the head. And if we are not aware that all this is going on, we can unconsciously might end up in a fight, flight or freeze response - we don't have an overview, we can't think properly. What remains for us is to react from our habitual patterns. Those or often the moments you afterwards think.. I should have reacted so and so, yet you didn’t and you couldn’t. The moment you are triggered, you simply cannot repair yourself through your rational thoughts because that part of the brain is not accessible. The openness is gone, we can't do anything about it, because that's how our instincts work. Through mindfulness and body awareness training, you can become more aware of your triggered state and learn ways to recover. Your thinking affects your bodily reactions yet your posture also affects your thinking. In body-oriented exercises, we practise regaining balance through the body by that getting away from your triggered state and with that regaining access to your pre-frontal cortex This is the most advanced part of your brain. From that place you have overview, compassion, you dare to take risks and you are connected to the moment. Regaining your balance allows you to react in many ways from a healthy open mind. With mindfulness training you can become more aware of what something does to you in the present moment, learn to be kind to yourself and others and you create space to choose if and how you want to react.

We also practice mindfulness in action through a 'talking stick' dialogue. The way we speak to each other holds a lot of habits. These habits are not always constructive. The dialogue is used in the sessions to talk about intuition and at the same time to remove those habitual patterns when talking. You are not allowed to respond immediately. You speak from I form since your perspective is a unique composite of all that is stored within you and not a general truth. And you are challenged to really listen and suspend your opinion. And it is precisely by taking more rest and time that we start to notice ourselves more, our ways of thinking and and we start to see and hear other perspectives more deeply.

In the 3-point free choice course there is room for a personal challenge and presentation You are asked to pick up a project that you are intuitively attracted to in order to investigate whether following your intuition can bring you something good. The teacher does not give a lot of guidelines as to thrown you back on trusting your own gut feeling about what you would consider good or worthwhile. A very exciting question for many because following one's own wisdom and ideas is not central to our education system. This results in great, surprising, intriguing, open, sometimes vulnerable powerful end results.