Instinct Guiding Intellect

wholeness Mar 01, 2021

Do you use your whole brain or just part of it? 

Weird question, I know, but it’s a serious one.

We put so much emphasis on our left-brain functions, and with good reason.  Our left brain is the logical, protective side.  It wants to keep us alive and safe, to move us in linear fashion and achieve things, to be on time, and to keep things the way they are.  Yep, our left-brain does not like change.  Not.  One.  Bit. 

Our right brain, on the other hand, is the dreamer, the creative and intuitive side that we all have.  We are all creative beings.  Yes, even you, reading this post and thinking “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.  I can’t even draw a stick figure.”  In fact, you are my favorite person to work with.  It is so cool when you see just how creative you really are🙂.

Before you post a comment about our brains not literally having different sides, I get it.  In fact, maybe I should rephrase everything above with right- and left-mind instead of brain.  The bottom line is while there are two hemispheres in our brain, the human body is an AMAZING creation of divinely genius proportions, and it does a lot of accommodating to help us live in this physical world.  All of that is not the point of this post, but I’ve gotten feedback before on the literal inaccuracies, so I just thought I’d point all that out up front.  Don’t let that keep you from understanding the point of the post.  Let’s just say the logical side and the intuitive side, so we don’t misunderstand each other.

Back to the actual point.  What is this phrase “Instinct Guiding Intellect?”  What does it mean, why do I care, and how do I do it?

You see, your right brain is charged with creating, seeing the bigger picture, and identifying your true dreams and desires.  It has no sense of time, and it completely understands that change is the only constant. The right brain embraces change and sees it for what it is:  the creative process kicking into gear.  Do you get what that means?  Whether or not you think you are artistic, whether you rely solely on logic and rational reasoning to make decisions, you ARE a creative being. You have the power to create your dreams, your desires, and the life you want to live.  Now, this is another topic I could write about for hours, so for the sake of your time, let’s move on to what you and I can do with that knowledge.

For one thing, we can start listening to our gut instincts, our intuition, or just that feeling we get about something that is happening or could happen.  The right brain is aware of things before we consciously understand them.  The most obvious example is when you’re in an unfamiliar place and you get an immediate good or bad vibe about it.  That is your right brain helping you understand whether or not that place is somewhere you want to stay or leave.  This isn’t about safety, necessarily.  It’s about the feeling, the energy of the place.  And, because the right brain has that awareness, we need to listen to it.  If it says “get outta here,” we need to listen and be on our way.  If it says “this is home,” we should probably investigate just how and why that sense of belonging is speaking to us. 

Now, as much as I love listening to my intuitive side, acting on my creative impulses, and sharing my practices with others, the right brain is still only half of the mind.  It is not really meant to live on its own.  If we lived only by our right brain, we would never be on time for anything, because we would have no sense of time.  We’d also have no sense of danger, so we likely would not survive for long.  But, without the right brain, we’re pretty much machines–   incredible miraculous machines, but machines, just the same.  The real purpose of the right brain is to come up with a vision of what we want to create and then tell the left-brain to go back it happen.  While the right brain is the dreamer, the left brain is the executer.  You see, once the left brain understands what the right brain wants, it creates a logical, rational plan to make it happen.  THAT is what it means to say instinct guiding intellect, and it leads to using our whole brains.  While the myth that we only use 10% of our brain is completely false, the whole brain would have to better than just one part, right?

I started down my current life path more than 15 years ago, when a friend and former boss suggested that I tap into my creative intuitive side.   I did what any corporate overachiever who receives that feedback would do.  I Googled right-brain exercises and gave some of them a try.  Neither one of us had any idea just how far that suggestion on his part or the action on mine would go, of course, but it was the beginning of my move to the intuitive side, and I will be forever grateful.

Wouldn’t life be more fun and more fulfilling if we used our whole brains?  How do YOU allow your instinct to guide your intellect?

All my life, no matter what change I’ve experienced, I’ve been able to use journaling to remember who I am, begin to understand what I can learn from this change, and how my experience can help other people going through something similar.  Get my free prompts, “Journaling for Answers,” and start finding your own answers within.

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