Trust Your Gut

“If I have learned anything in this lifetime,” a friend recently wrote to me, “it’s that I need to trust my gut.”

I couldn’t agree more – but oh, it can be terrifying. It can be so hard that it feels physically impossible. But the alternative – living life like you’re playing a role in someone else’s play – is so much worse. I’d rather the pain of the band-aid ripping than a constant, gnawing pain that won’t go away.

I stayed at a job I hated for 6 years. And it took me 10 years to move away from DC, even though I knew deep down that it wasn’t the right place for me. I look back on these instances with sadness – sadness that I wasn’t confident enough in my instincts to pair them with action. But I also realize there’s no point beating myself up; we live and learn. I wasn’t ready then, for whatever reason. I had to experience what it felt like to ignore my intuition, before I could learn to trust it over all else. And then, oh, how good it feels…

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” – Alan Alda

Now I know the joy that comes from doing the thing you need to do, no matter how confusing it might be to other people, or even to yourself. I left a job that by all external accounts was “perfect” for me in order to begin freelancing; four years later and I’m still at it, and loving it. It’s freed up my energy for things I love, like family, friends, yoga, travel, art. I can give more of myself to improv, blogging – things that come from that place deep inside of me that needs to be heard.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein

But it’s hard. It’s hard when we’re trained to make decisions by thinking, since it turns out, we make the best decisions by feeling. Erica Heinz does a great job of explaining this in an article called “5 Clear Flags of Hidden Intuition” over on HuffingtonPost.com. She breaks down five ways to learn to hear what your body is telling you – here’s #1:

“Gut ache. Not as romantic as heartache, for sure, but way more useful. Did you know that one half of all our nerve cells are located in the gut? You have as many neurotransmitters there as you do in your brain. Your gut produces 95% of the serotonin in your body, and can function even if it’s detached from the spinal cord. (Read The Second Brain, by Michael Gershon, for more details.) So listen up! If it’s churning, aching, or fluttering, it’s not just indigestion. It’s Morse code.”

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Are you listening to your gut? Do you know what you want, deep down? Are you taking steps towards it?

Today I realized I need to be doing a different kind of improv. The classes I’m taking at UCB are great at teaching a particular skill set (game), but that’s not the skill set that fires my passion for improv (character, relationships). (Interestingly, I prefer a style that operates more from feeling than from thinking…hmm.) So tonight, I’m going to a “mixer” (open mic/jam) at Magnet Theater, a place known for an emphasis on character, and then I’m watching a couple of shows there. I have my eye on one of their classes. We’ll see where this goes…

Image above is by Cliph on Flickr

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