the sound of your own voice

When I was a child, I knew a girl my age named Lynn. I recall her as a sturdy, kind-hearted child with a generous nature, a little dull but impossible to dislike. She was the only Linda I knew. Today, when I meet someone named Lynn, I immediately associate her with those qualities. I know that there is no real correlation between that name and those qualities outside of my own childhood experience, but there’s that intuitive nudge that tells me that Lynns are OK. 

This intuition is false. There are plenty of Lynns in the world who are nothing like the Lynn in my mind. If I relied only on this intuition, this gut feeling that someone named Lynn will be friendly but dull, I could easily be led astray. 

We all have these built-in associations, spun from a lifetime of experiences. It’s impossible to be aware of all of them; if you think you have no unconscious biases, you are incorrect. This is, at root, the problem with “trusting your gut.” You don’t even know what is down there, in your gut. There’s a whole world you carry with you that you can only see, if at all, with effort and work, and if you haven’t done that work, your intuition is worthless.

I know that’s not a popular thing to say, especially among people who practice magic. The gut feeling, the intuition, is held up as being infallible. It’s understandable. We do all this work that relies on receptivity and sensitivity to subtle energies and states that are beyond the rational world. We must be able to perceive with other senses, and often those senses rely on intuition. How can we have psychic awareness if we can’t trust our intuition?

Another example: on a regular basis, I see messages on social media that look something like: “I’ve had a feeling of anxiety and dread lately, nightmares, frightening visions. Has anyone else been experiencing this?” There are always at least a few people who validate this and confirm that they, too, have been feeling off (“the astral is feeling gunky!”) Usually, the little group then goes on to speculate about what dreadful events might be about to happen or are happening to create this situation. I’ve seen people get themselves all whipped up based on this sort of thing, especially if they can gather enough people around them to join in. It is invariably complete nonsense. Even if something terrible does happen (there’s always something going on somewhere in the world), it’s still nonsense. It’s not prophecy, it’s not psychic ability, it’s a group of people sharing an anxiety attack. They choose not to look within to find the source of the anxiety; rather, they project it out onto the world. In doing so, they harm themselves. Not only do they amplify the anxiety, but they also deny themselves the real message that the anxious feeling is trying to convey, which is much more personal and could do a lot of good if understood and heeded.   

Jason Miller talks about the perception/projection ratio. “Every interaction you have ever had with any person, place, or thing was a combination of accurate perception of actual events and your own mental projection. . . if your mundane interactions are a combination of your perception of actual events and your mental projection – than how much MORE susceptible to mental projection are interactions with spirits, gods, and other subtle beings?” (http://www.strategicsorcery.net/whole-magic-perception-vs-projection/?fbclid=IwAR1xp3i-QptSDo0Emuz44R_TKdMNs3ieG1MFQemxttIqn39xYxenkGRmReg). He’s talking about discernment in spirit communication, but I think it equally applies to intuition, which is communication with yourself. How do you know if you’re talking to a spirit or yourself? How do you know if your intuition is providing valuable information or leading you down a false path?

How do you know the sound of your own voice?

I don’t think you can, always, but you can keep moving closer to it. You won’t get there by always trusting your gut. You get there by knowing yourself. You get there by really looking at that feeling (“do I just think this because she’s a Lynn? Am I anxious because I have a situation in my life I’m not dealing with well, not the Apocalypse? Is this spirit telling me something useful, or just something I want to hear?”) and moving past that gut feeling and into self-awareness. I’m not suggesting that we discard intuitive awareness, but without self-awareness, you cannot rely on it. It’s one of the most important senses a witch can develop, and yet I rarely hear it spoken of directly. Self-awareness is the thread that can lead you through the subtle worlds without getting lost.

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