From Chaos and Confusion to The Knowing Place
Your Intuitive Voice really wants you to listen!
Crystal Marie, Deeper is a free newsletter/blog. If you’d like to support this publication and have access to excerpts from my new book as I write it, along with some other cool perks, please consider upgrading to a paid subscriber.
You can also share excerpts of today’s post on social media, forward it to someone who might benefit, like it, or text it to a friend to show your support. It all helps.
Thank you for reading.
I’ve been busy this week prepping and taking care of details for the classes already on the online schedule, but the action of getting the book proposal submitted has served to get my idea wheels rolling again. I just finished writing up course descriptions for my first two live on location, or irl-”in real life”, workshops since everything shut down at the beginning of the Pandemic.
Remember that time when we all thought we’d be sitting at home for a couple of weeks and then everything would go back to normal?
Ha! Here we are almost three years later wondering just what the hell normal is anymore.
In spite of workplaces, schools, and businesses reopening for some time now, the gathering together for art making and events has been tentative. Like a locomotive chug chug chugging along, building up steam. There is this sense that we are all longing to return and regain our face-to-face human connections but the lapse in time since that was the norm leaves us feeling a little confused and directionless.
It’s from that place; the uncertain what to do next, where to go, what to focus on mood hanging in the atmosphere, that I decided to approach my next years schedule — focusing my courses on the content of the book, Recovering Your Intuitive Voice. It’s from that lack of connection to our inner knowing that the uncertain exactly what to do next feeling comes, or at least the anxiety surrounding it.
And it’s from that decision that I stumbled on this post that I wrote on my old blog last year and decided to share it with you today:
Your Intuitive Voice is the purest, most authentic, version of your own dang voice before all of life’s conditioning and experiences covered it up, and it is living inside of you still.
It’s that gut feeling place, that knowing place, the niggling doubt that keeps eating at you place, deep inside that we so often pay no heed, because part of life’s conditioning teaches us to be logical and practical and smart.
Logical, practical, smart thinking seems like a much different species than intuition, but it was born of the same seed. Both are a form of knowing, but one asks you to prove yourself and the other asks you to listen to and trust yourself. To understand that the knowing is deep and it began before you were born, continuing to gather the knowing right up until this very day.
When you enter the studio, your intuition comes with you. You don’t have to perform a special ceremony or do a studio rain dance to get it to make an appearance, you simply need to get quiet and listen.
If you haven't listened to it for a very long time--your own dang purest voice, then the logical, practical, smart voice will have stepped up to the plate and will earnestly tell you to not trouble yourself with such impractical things as trusting yourself when you’ve had a lifetime of input from outside authorities. Those teachers and guides who have brought you the tools and the rules that govern their use to help you paint and draw in the studio.
And that’s great that you’ve been able to receive such outstanding instruction. Maybe you even received some of it from me. But the lie we believe is that the intuitive voice is at odds with the logical, practical, smart, and more rational thinking that comes with following the lead of others who have more experience and the credentials behind their name to prove it.
The truth is, that all of the instruction and information you’ve picked up over the course of your years gets folded into your intuition. Like a good batter, the individual ingredients are important, but indistinguishable from each other, you simply get to enjoy the cake.
To work intuitively is not to put aside the information you’ve gleaned over the years, it is to trust that information is right there inside of you as you work. All you need to do is pay attention to that knowing nudge inside. The knowing place acknowledges the fear that comes from trying something new or stepping outside of your comfort zone and then it goes ahead and creates the thing anyway.
Maybe those first attempts will suck. Maybe you'll find all kinds of flaws, but that isn't evidence that proves you were better off following the rules of others then you were trusting your own dang voice. It is actually the evidence that you are listening.
The intuitive voice never promises you perfection the very first time you try. The intuitive voice understands its strength comes from the trying. And in that place a canary learns to fly.
Final note - If you’re on my marketing email list, you’ll get all the details about the new schedule later this week, along with news of the annual holiday pop up shop with new works available. If you’re not and you’d like to be, just hit reply to this email or leave me a comment below and I’d be happy to add you. With gratitude, Crystal Marie