How does our intuition work?

The other day in the studio, I stopped and looked at the faces in my painting - they looked so worked over, so tensely drawn, that I felt I was losing the expressiveness that I wanted on the canvas.  The thought popped into my mind: “You could try another painting on the same size canvas, and paint it more quickly, more expressively.”

Almost immediately barriers to that idea popped into my mind, reasons not to, some voiced by my nasty inner critic: “It would be a waste of canvas. You tried at this scale and it didn’t work, so why bother doing more?  You just can’t do faces so why even continue trying?”

The next day when I searched more gently for what to do next and allowed space for intuitive ideas, the same thought was still lingering– another canvas of the same size but painted with less tension. I listened to the suggestion and accepted it; “Just go with it – it’s the next step.” 

What would happen was unknowable in advance. The chances were that the next canvas would turn out something quite different – but I didn’t need to know that at this point. I simply needed to attend to that intuitively suggested next step.

I lay the canvas on the floor and cut another large piece…

We are all hiding, acrylic on canvas, Lynne Cameron 2021.

Sometimes we only realise our intuition was whispering to us when it’s too late. Our intuition had been trying to tell us and we had not listened. We drag ourselves to an event that we didn’t feel altogether enthusiastic about and find it a waste of our precious time and energy. Afterward we chide ourselves: “I should have know it would be a waste of time.”

We see what has happened and say to ourselves, “I knew this would happen.” We knew and we didn’t know. We knew deep inside our bodies and minds but we didn’t catch the quiet whisper we were offered.

Befriending our intuition requires us to learn how it speaks to us, to tune into its soft whispers. To make the effort to ‘stand out of the way’, to put in place an allowing and attending.