SWNOVELS Chapter The Gifts of Imperfection: GUIDEPOST #5
Everything about this research process has pushed me in ways that I never imagined. This is especially true when it comes to topics like faith, intuition, and spirituality. When the importance of intuition and faith first emerged as key patterns in wholehearted living, I winced a little bit. Once again, I felt like my good friends—logic and reason—were under attack. I remember telling Steve, “Now it’s intuition and faith! Can you believe it?”
He replied, “I’m surprised that you’re surprised. You work off of faith and your gut all of the time.”
He took me off guard with his comment.
I sat down next to him and said, “Yeah, I know I’m a gut and faith kinda girl, but I guess I’m not very intuitive. Read this definition from the dictionary: ‘Intuition is direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning process.’ ”¹
Steve chuckled. “So, maybe the definition doesn’t match what you’re learning from the data. You’ll write a new one. It won’t be the first time.”
I spent a year focusing on intuition and faith. I interviewed and collected stories so that I could get my head and heart around what it means to cultivate intuition and trust faith. I was surprised by what I learned.
INTUITION
Intuition is not independent of any reasoning process. In fact, psychologists believe that intuition is a rapid-fire, unconscious associating process—like a mental puzzle.²
The brain makes an observation, scans its files, and matches the observation with existing memories, knowledge, and experiences. Once it puts together a series of matches, we get a “gut” on what we’ve observed.
Sometimes our intuition or our gut tells us what we need to know; other times it actually steers us toward fact-finding and reasoning. As it turns out, intuition may be the quiet voice within, but that voice is not limited to one message. Sometimes our intuition whispers, “Follow your instincts.” Other times it shouts, “You need to check this out; we don’t have enough information!”
In my research, I found that what silences our intuitive voice is our need for certainty. Most of us are not very good at not knowing. We like sure things and guarantees so much that we don’t pay attention to the outcomes of our brain’s matching process.
For example, rather than respecting a strong internal instinct, we become fearful and look for assurances from others.
“What do you think?”
“Should I do it?”
“Do you think it’s a good idea, or do you think I’ll regret it?”
“What would you do?”
A typical response to these survey questions is, “I’m not sure what you should do. What does your gut say?”
And there it is. What does your gut say?
We shake our head and say, “I’m not sure” when the real answer is, “I have no idea what my gut says; we haven’t spoken in years.”
When we start polling people, it’s often because we don’t trust our own knowing. It feels too shaky and too uncertain. We want assurances and folks with whom we can share the blame if things don’t pan out. I know all about this. I’m a professional pollster—it’s hard for me to go it alone sometimes. When I’m making a difficult decision and feel disconnected from my intuition, I have a tendency to survey everyone around me. Ironically, since doing this research, surveying has become a red flag for me—it tells me that I’m feeling vulnerable about making a decision.
As I mentioned earlier, if we learn to trust our intuition, it can even tell us that we don’t have a good instinct on something and that we need more data. Another example of how our need for certainty sabotages our intuition is when we ignore our gut’s warning to slow down, gather more information, or reality-check our expectations:
“I’m just going to do it. I don’t care anymore.”
“I’m tired of thinking about it. It’s too stressful.”
“I’d rather just do it than wait another second.”
“I can’t stand not knowing.”
When we charge headlong into big decisions, it may be because we don’t want to know the answers that will emerge from doing due diligence. We know that fact-finding might lead us away from what we think we want.
I always tell myself, “If I’m afraid to run the numbers or put pencil to paper, I shouldn’t do it.” When we just want to get the decision-making over with, it’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether we simply can’t stand the vulnerability of being still long enough to think it through and make a mindful decision.
So, as you can see, intuition isn’t always about accessing the answers from within. Sometimes when we’ve tapped into our inner wisdom, it tells us that we don’t know enough to make a decision without more investigation. Here’s the definition I crafted from the research:
Intuition is not a single way of knowing—it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason.
FAITH
I’ve come to realize that faith and reason are not natural enemies. It’s our human need for certainty and our need to “be right” that have pitted faith and reason against each other in an almost reckless way. We force ourselves to choose and defend one way of knowing the world at the expense of the other.
I understand that faith and reason can clash and create uncomfortable tensions—those tensions play out in my life, and I can feel them in my bones. But this work has forced me to see that it’s our fear of the unknown and our fear of being wrong that create most of our conflict and anxiety. We need both faith and reason to make meaning in an uncertain world.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the terms having faith and my faith in my interviews with people who are living the wholehearted journey. At first I thought that faith meant “there’s a reason for everything.” I personally struggled with that because I’m not comfortable with using God or faith or spirituality to explain tragedy. It actually feels like substituting certainty for faith when people say, “There’s a reason for everything.”
But I quickly learned from the interviews that faith meant something else to these people. Here’s how I define faith based on the research interviews:
Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.
I also learned that it’s not always the scientists who struggle with faith and the religious who fully embrace uncertainty. Many forms of fundamentalism and extremism are about choosing certainty over faith.
I love this from theologian Richard Rohr: “My scientist friends have come up with things like ‘principles of uncertainty’ and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.”³
Faith is essential when we decide to live and love with our whole hearts in a world where most of us want assurances before we risk being vulnerable and getting hurt. To say, “I’m going to engage wholeheartedly in my life” requires believing without seeing.
DIG DEEP
Get Deliberate: Letting go of certainty is one of my greatest challenges. I even have a physical response to “not knowing”—it’s anxiety and fear and vulnerability combined. That’s when I have to get very quiet and still. With my busy life, that can mean hiding in the garage or driving around the block. Whatever it takes, I have to find a way to be still so I can hear what I’m saying.
Get Inspired: The process of reclaiming my spiritual and faith life was not an easy one (hence the 2007 Breakdown Spiritual Awakening). There’s a quote that literally cracked open my heart. It’s from a book by Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”⁴
Her books about faith and grace inspire me.⁵
I’m inspired by and thankful for When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd⁶
and Pema Chödrön’s Comfortable with Uncertainty;⁷
they saved me. And last, I absolutely love this quote from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: “… intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.”⁸
Get Going: When I’m really scared or unsure, I need something right away to calm my cravings for certainty. For me, the Serenity Prayer does the trick. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen!