Holistic Awareness

By now you have a good idea of what inner and outer intuition is from the past few blog posts. Building on the foundation of this knowledge, let’s look at another layer of intuition this week. When inner and outer awareness unite to create a heightened sense of intuition, I call this?holistic awareness.

Having a heightened holistic awareness will alert you to the faintest intuitive signals in critical moments. Holistic awareness isn’t a God-given gift. You must take deliberate steps to make holistic intuition part of your overall intelligence toolkit by developing your inner and outer awareness separately. If you don’t, you’re denying yourself the right to universal information and you’re relying on hope and chance.

A superintendent at a local school put his intuitional intelligence to use to diffuse a potentially life-and-death situation. He was a student of my SEALFIT Kokoro program and had worked on these skills. One day at work a teacher called him saying a student in her class was wearing a military uniform and carrying a backpack and it made her uncomfortable. My superintendent friend immediately thought that this was a pattern disrupt that signaled danger and told her to sit tight. Then, he called the Sheriff, but didn’t just leave it to them. He and another teacher darted to the room, surprising the student and physically removing him and his backpack. They escorted him into an isolated area where, sure enough, found a weapon and ammo in his bag. There were more in the student’s car. The superintendent trusted his gut, and he likely saved lives.

When you watch the patterns going on in your environment, it allows you to pay uncommon attention to any outliers and get an intuitive hit when you notice something off. This doesn’t have to be life or death every time. A guy you work with may have suffered a recent loss. If your intuitional intelligence is on high alert, you will sense his pain and may be able to be a source of comfort, even if that means easing his workload. It doesn’t mean you have to make him talk about what happened. Don’t forget that when you follow your intuition’s direction, other people’s intuitive senses can pick up on that, too. And that is often enough.

Common people don’t take the time to master this skill. Instead of listening to their intuition, they have their head down in their smartphone, absorbed in their own activities, bouncing their way through the day. Training your intuitive body-mind?system will allow you to be much more open to what’s going on with yourself, with those you love, and with others in any environment, whether familiar or foreign. You’ll sense danger or opportunity and respond accordingly, while everyone else is still trying to figure out what’s going on.?

And here’s another big reason to develop holistic awareness: to align with your ethos, you must trust your intuitive intelligence. You can’t just rely on the biases of your rational mind or the stories people tell you. It’s a huge source of inspiration and wisdom that most of us don’t tap into. We are trained to think it would be irresponsible or strange to take orders from sensations over our rational mind.?

That is one of many of the areas our society has gotten dead wrong. Next week I will continue to explore intuition and share the nature of the archetypal drive.