Trust Your Gut

​Do you trust your gut feeling?
What is it anyway? This gut feeling?
It’s far more powerful than logic, isn’t it?
I've seen this over the years, when people have taken decisions that flew in the face of all the logic, all the advice thrown at them, and found that they'd taken the right decision.
For them.

Gut feeling is a peculiar thing. It's so strong that it often trumps considered reason. And we do well to listen to it. There are times, aren't there, when everything points to a particular decision, and yet, and yet, there's a voice in the back of the head that speaks to us with such conviction that we feel compelled to follow it.

This is a thought pattern that comes of  experience.
Experience can suggest a move that seems illogical.
Experience often sees what inexperience doesn't. 

Life skills and ‘know how’ account for a lot. Most life skills are born of experience. They're the result of personal decisions that have taught us something. But only when we're watching and listening.
It's not always the case, but it's frequent.

Experience, the 'doing' of something, gives insights that no amount of theory can begin to give. We can experience in a second what takes minutes, sometimes hours, to read and understand. Even then we've only got a theoretical take on it.

The doing of something gives a living sensation of acting, facing challenges, using our resources, that imprints itself on the mind, the body, the nervous system, that cannot be got otherwise. And there is the added power of the emotion felt in the encounter. This is what imprints it decidedly in our minds.

A lot of the learning in experience is so fast it hardly registers consciously. We don't sit and analyze move by move, thought by flashing thought, what happened. Or what we did.
It's as much a reaction as an action.
We're reacting to our own split second perceptions and responses.
This is what gives experience. It gives the confidence of having faced the unknown and responded to it. And found that we're still here.

Some people learn instinctively. They can see a situation, and in the beat of the heart, see what it's about and decide which way to go with it. This is what 'awareness' is about; a conscious thoughtfulness of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and searching for a way to deal with them.
This has been one of the discoveries of the past decade, where people have found the time and discipline to meditate, calm the mind, to just 'be', and quietened the mind of the bustling noise that assails us. When we let it.

Mindfulness, Meditation, Quietening, have brought a level of observant thought to very many people. As activities, they overlap and bring a balance into our lives. They give us time to reflect, stand back and observe ourselves in the act of living. 
At a recent workshop, there was very strong evidence of individuals who had gained benefit from this practice. The benefit was real, not some woolly wishful thinking conjured up to coincide with their intentions. 

It's a skill. It can be learned. And then needs to be practiced. 

Take the time.