Guided By Love
On intuition, freak accidents, and the brilliance of love
Guided By Love
The entire week before the heavy wooden tabletop mounted on a wall fell on my head, I knew not to go near it. I was working in a furniture showroom on Madison Avenue helping a friend of a friend and the tabletop hung over the manager’s desk.
“How do you sit under this?” I asked her on the first day. “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to fall on you?”
“No,” she said laughing at the foolishness of my thinking, “it’s secured to the wall.”
All week I avoided that tabletop. The owner and the manager and there may have also been other employees, it was a while ago now, poked fun at me. The tabletop dominated the office and it took some doing not to go near it.
On the very last moment of my final day, the owner handed me a letter which he asked me to mail. To do so, I needed to get a stamp from the manager’s desk. So, my week of work complete, I walked over to grab the stamp and the rope that was securing the tabletop to the wall broke and it fell on my head.
People often ask me how my head and brain injury came about. Most often, I simply say: The rope on a huge tabletop mounted on the wall in a furniture showroom broke and it fell on my head. But sometimes I share the full story, the story about how I knew what was going to happen and until that very last moment, I dodged the happening. In that one split second, I got slack. And: wham.
That was when I became aware of how potent and precise my intuition was, something Western society had trained me to dismiss. I don’t recall attempting to deepen my connection with it back then, my health and my life were forever altered and I was thrown into an extended survival mode that I’ve never fully exited, but some part of me now knew it was there.
I’d long been in awe of other people’s psychic abilities, curious to hear their insights, often about myself. But even after the table that I’d spent a week avoiding because I knew it was going to fall fell on my head it still didn’t cross my mind to rely on myself. Or if it did, I brushed it away. It seemed safer to turn to others.
And so for decades that’s what I did.
As many of you will know, my healing journey has been long and often arduous. The injury happened before the football players were all over the news shining a much-needed light on head and brain injury and back then, even many doctors didn’t have the proper treatment knowledge. The first fancy Upper East Side doctor who examined me didn’t order a MRI, CTscan, or X-ray. And I wasn’t even put into a neck brace. Therefore, many of the issues that plague me now, are rooted in improper early care. I believe if the same injury had happened to me today, it would play out differently.
Over the decades, I turned to countless doctors for help, and as tests and exams offered useful but limited insight for my complex symptoms, I found myself increasingly drawn to people known for their intuitive abilities be they doctors or bodywork practitioners or medical psychics. Many of them helped me along my path, some quite a bit, but each one shared with me some version of sensing what an off-the-charts healer or psychic or shaman, et cetera, that I was.
This was a lot to lay at the feet of someone who was barely getting through each day. And someone who, other than when they spent a week avoiding a tabletop mounted on a wall because they knew it was going to fall and then it did fall on their head, felt no conscious connection to their intuition.
My parents are both wildly intuitive. I can remember my (now ex) husband and I having a terrible and rare fight and I took off my wedding band and threw it at him, something I’d never done before, and my mom calling seconds later to make sure I was okay. And years before that, years before K and I were married, back when we were barely twenty and had dated and broken up and my dad had moved me into my tiny studio apartment in New York City, the last thing he said to me was, “Don’t let K move in here.” I remember thinking it was such a strange comment because we hadn’t spoken for several months. And then one week later, out of nowhere, K called from the airport where he was on a layover from London to Detroit and wondered if he could come see me. And then he never left. I could fill pages with these sorts of stories.
And yet, whilst I could recognize and accept this trait in my parents, aside from the falling tabletop, I could not recognize and accept it in me. This despite believing that we are all intuitive and, in the West, at least, we’ve lost our connection to it, alongside our connection to nature and animals and our primordial lineage. Sometimes when I’m out walking the dogs, I see all the roads around us and elsewhere around the world from a bird’s eye view as plastered-over wounds on the Great Mother and my heart feels torn open.
Perhaps a part of me was afraid of connecting with my ancestors, afraid of knowing this pure and true part of myself, afraid of being powerful, afraid of being well. I don’t know the answer. And hasn’t intuition, a natural part of being human, only taken on these supersonic and otherworldly qualities because in the West we deny its existence?
Later, after I left NYC and moved to Michigan to be closer to my aging parents, as happens with these sorts of injuries, my symptoms grew much worse. In a new home with no community yet in place or trusted medical support, I agreed to take prescription drugs that I knew were not what my body needed and entered the most terrifying experience of my life, one where I had to fight minute-by-minute to stay alive. I remember clearly being in the bath, a nightly ritual for the mammoth pain, and a voice said to me, “Your mind is on drugs. Trust in me and I will get you through this.” The source of this voice was unclear, but I did trust her and so I listened. Of course, I see now, it was the voice that told me to avoid the tabletop. It was the voice, even as a young child, that told me to only adopt the runt of the litter, to help every stray, and to choose the most bedraggled Christmas Tree. It was the voice that had been speaking to me all my life. It was the voice that I sometimes allowed myself to hear or perhaps it was that the voice screamed extra loud in those moments. It was the voice of me.
These days, my intuition and I are in easier communication, by which I mean I’ve grown to trust myself more readily. I’ll pop back inside to shut off the dehumidifier because I had a knowing that not doing so was dangerous. Or I’ll take this road and not that one because I sensed it’s safer for animals (I’m obsessed with roadkill and never want to harm an animal). Was I right? Or was I mixing up fear with intuition? Most of the time, there’s no way of knowing if you dodged the thing your intuition was nudging you to dodge because you took the appropriate steps to avoid it and did.
With the tabletop, of course, I want to say had I not gone for the stamp, the tabletop would have still fallen and in that case I would have known I’d been correct. But recently a new friend suggested that the tabletop also knew what was going to happen, that it too had consciousness, and that it was a convergence of knowledge: that all things knew they were headed for that moment. Which is a kind of wild take, one I haven’t fully processed yet, but when she said it, I lit up inside which is always an indicator for me that I am hearing a truth.
I realize now I’ve long used intuition to guide me towards friends. I was going to write that luckily most of the time it’s been bang on. I have friends in my life who I’ve known since I was five! And many more from junior high and high school. But even the times it’s been “wrong,” even when it’s led me to some “bad” choices, those situations (and some from back in the day were pretty bad) always forced me to grow toward myself in deeply meaningful ways. So perhaps my intuition was still guiding me toward what I needed in a roundabout manner. Or perhaps I was ignoring my intuition and paying the cost. Because as a society we’ve collectively ridiculed our own inner knowing for so long in favor of rational thought, which is also useful but not the end all it’s promised to be, and because I largely bought into this, there’s a lot about earlier versions of myself that are unknown to me.
Intuition also guides how I care for the animals who live with me, what I eat, what supplements I take, who I reach out to for interviews and what we talk about, where I go on holidays, what I share about myself and what I hold back in essays or conversations, how to best help wildlife, what to plant where in my garden, whom to trust, what to watch or read or listen to, and so on. The more I honor these knowings, the greater ease I have in my life.
One place I can still spin out is my health. Here my mind thunders in and has so much to declare! No doubt meaning to be helpful, but my stress skyrockets. After back-and-forthing everything endlessly and often turning to trusted friends and family members for their opinions, it’s once more my intuition that guides me. And whilst my path has been slow and often scary and hard, I have healed tremendously, well beyond what doctors said was possible. And the same intuition that told me to avoid the tabletop in the first place is what has led me to this moment – often bucking treatments and protocols that doctors pressed upon me in favor of what I knew were meant for me.
As I write this, I realize it’s connected to last month’s essay about no longer wanting to share my stories. When we are guided by knowings there’s less need to talk about everything. Which I think is also connected to why talk therapy (which can be powerful and necessary!) lost its potency for me. Something is shifting and deepening. And I’m excited for these changes.
Maybe intuition is not as woo-woo as I was raised to believe. “Gut feeling” is often used interchangeably for intuition and modern science reveals we have more neurotransmitters in our gut than in our brain. Therefore, perhaps intuition is simply a supersonically fast thought! Also: in Tibetan Buddhism, the mind is not located in the brain, rather within the heart at the vibrant, pulsing core of our bodies, at the base of our gentleness and fierceness.
I am always best guided when guided by love.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like this one about my dad believing me about complications with my health when so many didn’t:
love love love.
Intuition is our birthright and our sixth sense. My dear mom taught me how to listen to mine as a wee one. She said we each had an inner voice that guided us, and to listen. I have always felt that our intuitive senses are on a spectrum, and with pausing to listen, the messages come with increased clarity. Your writing feels like an extension of home for me. Beautiful, life giving and SO necessary in this world. Mahalo Nui Loa. 💜🪶