An Unlikely Pairing: Intention + Letting Go

I have always been drawn to contradiction: people who hold seemingly opposing perspectives; places where life and death, or filth and cleanliness meet; moments that render us loquacious folks silent. Sandpaper and release, fine particles of our perceived identities freed.

I think that deep down I gravitated towards contradiction like the seeking out of a personal koan. I could not intellectualize my way through them. My only choice was to sit with contradiction, hold its multiplicities, relax into formlessness.

Consider: the loosening of grip of ourselves, the forgetting of goal, the aimless wandering.  

“In order to find your way, you must become lost…it’s how we stumble upon exquisite new worlds, new ways of speaking, new ways of being. We become so found that we are incarcerated in our maps. The idea of purpose to me is the invitation to stray away from the algorithms, the formulas we are used to, in order to encounter beings that exceed us.”
– Bayo Akomolafe, To Find Your Purpose

The running script in the West is that development – from baby to child to adult – slowly perfects itself through the cultivation of a solid identity. Knowing myself. What makes me uniquely me. My beliefs. My skills. The development of qualities that render me a capably formed individual, evolving to a state of “I know myself” or “I am ‘x’ type of person.”

Alternatively, my experiences of intuition surface the more I relax my own hold on this type of solid identity. In the simplest of terms, I have to release clinging to a solid ‘self’ to experience moments of lucidity.

My journey articulating this path of intuition was very much buoyed by Judith Orloff’s book Second Sight. In this book, Orloff describes her journey marrying her intuitive powers with her psychiatric profession. In one of her writings, she tells a story of witnessing and trying out “spoon bending.” When participants in the session were failing at making spoons bend, the intuitive facilitating the session invited the participants to both set an intention and then let it go. And from the contradiction of setting intention and then release, intuitive skill was born. Spoons began to bend.

And so I try to set intention and let go, embracing spaces of contradiction, of lostness, of ambiguity, of clay.

So here’s an intention, one to lightly hold and release.

One of the things I am clear about is that I tend towards the traditional, intellectual ‘head’ space (totally reductive, I know) and that if I am not careful, I will wind up confusing the analytical mind with lucidity. I need to take steps towards leaning into the experience of this journey, removing it from the constraints of the intellectual pursuit alone.

My intention is that of always complementing my intellectual pursuit with practices that embrace the other aspects – experiential, sensing, spiritual, all the other many parts, not separate, not solid.  

As many of you know, I have been traveling with my family now for nearly a year. These travels just ended this past week, and likely my personal rituals will also change. For now, I have a pretty in-depth morning ritual, generally consisting of three steps. It exists not to explicitly cultivate intuition, but simply to simultaneously ground and expand me. I believe that this grounding/expansion is key to cultivating intuition.

At six o’clock, long before the pitter patter of the little ones, I make my coffee and sit in the quiet.

First: reading / release into inspiration.
I find that reading – currently fiction, memoirs, or spiritual literature – helps to expand my sensory, emotional, and cognitive spheres. I think of it like a spectrum of possibility. Releasing into someone else’s world relaxes my hold onto my own perceived reality. It takes my sometimes rigid or bounded mind and draws me, aimlessly, into unexpected territory.

Current reading: Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, One Woman’s Spiritual Journey, by Jan Willis.

Second: meditation / space.
Meditation is key to this work. I have ebbed and flowed with my meditation practice throughout my life, sometimes adhering to a routine, and sometimes deprioritizing it for what seemed in the moment more urgent. Meditation – its insights and its ripples – feels to me a vital source for everything I experience about intuition (even though my flashes of intuition have not been experienced solely within the bounds of meditation), and yet – outside of this trip – I have struggled with consistency.

Currently: trying out the Waking Up app, which I am enjoying. Normally I prefer silence, but currently, a voice accompanying me into the places beyond mind is nourishing my practice.

Third: writing / unexpected sketches, rewritten boundaries.
Writing has always been both cathartic and expansive for me. My mind works better in writing than in speaking. In the best moments, creativity washes over me, into what feels like play, with words and their echoes. That said, my writing tends to – without other practices to ‘get me out of my head’ – become soul-less. I find that writing after grounding in inspiration and space is more expansive, more fun, and more unpredictable.

Currently: sometimes my journal, sometimes our family blog (which is largely drawing to a close with the end of our travels), sometimes here in this newsletter.

My hope is that I add or switch up these practices to experiment with my own cultivation of intuition. Next on rotation: an exploration of dreams and how voyaging into that currently quiet territory might affect my experience of intuition.

Some additional inspiration to leave you with:

If you feel that too, if you sense there's something else, a god in the burning bush, a voice urging you to approach with feet unshod, then you must know that it will take courage to shapeshift. The 'new' needs courage. Courage is not the knight rushing headlong into the flames; courage is not a choice we make. Courage is a disability, the animist strike of a wild god that breaks the thigh and makes you limp. Courage is a lisp. A crack. An autistic child sensing the world at its edges where it is still being made. Courage is meeting 'the heart' - where 'the heart' is the pulsating vitality of things, of ecological things, that bends you into new shapes. One does not "have" courage; one is summoned by it. Anointed by it. Touched by it.  

-Bayo Akomolafe, Kyah’s Courage