Episode 9 - Intuition and Authenticity
Intro - The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns. This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony. Soul Sojourn is a podcast that is exploring this journey of the soul; considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences. Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul. It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives.
Welcome - Hi there! This is Jenn Pedersen and I’m so glad that you’ve joined me today for another episode of Soul Sojourn, another stop on our journey together. Today I am going to be talking about the issues of intuition and authenticity. I’ve touched on these topics a couple times in this first season. In the conservative, calvinist Christian sphere I was raised and spent the first chunk of my adult life within, trusting your gut, listening to your intuition, or paying attention to your inner voice was not encouraged. Largely it was actually discouraged because the thinking is that there is nothing good within us - we are all inherently evil, fallen, sinful people. So trusting your gut or listening to the small still voice within you was highly discouraged. I was told I was supposed to look outward - look to older, wiser people who had somehow overcome their inherent sinfulness for guidance in my life. I was told my own gut instincts were not trustworthy. And yet the reality was and is - I am a deeply intuitive person who goes with my gut in many areas of my life - it’s just how I’m built. And I think this is true of many other people as well. As we walk through our days there are spur of the moment decisions we have to make based on our intuition. We meet a new person and we trust our gut, our intuition about the nature of this person, we listen to the inner voice and we decide if we want to allow this person into our lives. We often have a gut instinct about others - some we meet we resonate with and think, hey I want them to be a part of my life and we follow that gut instinct and in time we find out if it was a good instinct or a bad one as the person shows us more parts of themselves. Sometimes I meet people and have a pretty instantaneous gut instinct that they are not a person I want involved in my life, not the type of energy I want around me. We listen to our intuition as we make other decisions as well, about our careers, our families, what route we take to a certain location, what foods and drinks we want to consume, what types of activities we want to engage in. Some of us do a bunch of research and seek to learn as much as we can before we make some of these decisions, but at the end of the day we have to trust our gut in so many situations. This is intuition.
Over the past year I’ve really been leaning into listening to my intuition. As I came out of a time of burnout and started reassessing what I wanted my life to look like in the second half, I started listening to my gut and trying to pay attention to what I really wanted my life to look like going forward. My life had been a long series of shoulds - I should get married young, I should have children, I should be a stay at home mom and wife, I should homeschool (rejected that should), I should serve faithfully in the church, I should seek to do good in my community - I should, I should, I should. But there’s something about looking at your 50th birthday after walking through a significant season of challenges and traumas, a major deconstruction of your faith and a season of burnout and depression that makes you want to attempt to design a different kind of life - a life that brings flourishing and joy. A life built more on activities that bring fulfillment and less on drudgery and obligation.
And as I started building my life back - I read a wonderful book by Parker Palmer called “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life”. Just the title spoke to my soul - I knew I had lived a divided life for too long and was looking for wholeness.
He begins the book with a quote from Leonard Cohen - “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul.”
And then Palmer writes “Today we live in a blizzard . .. It swirls around us as economic injustice, ecological ruin, physical and spiritual violence, and their inevitable outcome, war. It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference to the sufferings of others. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this madness and been separated from their own souls.
The lost ones come from every walk of life. Some of us fear that we, or those we love, will become lost in the storm. Some are lost at this moment and are trying to find the way home. Some are lost without knowing it, and some are using the blizzard as cover while cynically exploiting its chaos for private gain. It’s easy to believe the poet’s claim that “the blizzard of the world” has overturned “the order of the soul,” easy to believe that the soul – that life-giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness – has lost all power to guide our lives. But my own experience of the blizzard tells me that it is not so. The soul’s order can never be destroyed. It may be obscured by the whiteout. We may forget, or deny, that its guidance is close at hand. And yet we are still in the soul’s backyard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.
We can find our way back home again. When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world – in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, in the community – as we are called back to our “hidden wholeness” amid the violence of the storm.”
As I read these words from the prelude of this book, I realized that I had been wandering in a blizzard for far too long and I had felt that the order of my own soul had been overturned - that it had lost its power. During my season of burnout the blizzard nearly overtook me - I was truly lost - blinded by the sorrow and grief, the loss and the injustice swirling around me. And as I began to walk out of that blizzard of my own soul, I started to catch sight of my soul once again and regain my bearings. I had friends and family who walked with me through that season and helped me to find my footing once again. I had people who lovingly asked me questions about the hurt I’d experienced and helped me process that hurt. And slowly I began looking forward and feeling some hope about life once again.
I emerged from the dark night of my soul and began engaging with the world in new ways and building new connections, connections not all intertwined with the conservative churches I had been involved in my entire life. Connections with people who have had so many varied, amazing life experiences which are so different from mine. Connections that are bringing life and joy and hope and spaciousness to my life. About a year after this time of burnout I invited a group of these new friends to join me in a journey of exploring the deeper things of life. I invited some of these new friends to come together once a month for dinner and dialogue. And at our first gathering with 10 amazing new friends surrounding me, friends who came into my life as I walked out of the darkness, we read this passage from Palmer’s book and talked about the blizzards of our own lives. As I sat among this amazing group of new friends who have brought so much life and joy into my existence I got pretty choked up thinking about where I had been just 1 year prior to that, walking through that dark night of the soul - feeling hopeless and lost in a blizzard of my own soul. And I was reminded of how quickly life can change - so often it seems for the worse, but also sometimes for the better. My life is better, so much better than it has ever been. Don’t get me wrong, there were joys and good times all along the way but I’m coming into a spacious place of living and faith and existence where I am unwilling to be anything but my absolutely authentic self.
In Hidden Wholeness Palmer goes on to talk about the life of integrity and authenticity. He quotes Douglas Wood of jack pines who says
“Jack pines . . . are not lumber trees and they won’t win many beauty contests either.
But to me this valiant old tree, solitary on its own rocky point, is as beautiful as a living thing can be . . .In the calligraphy of its shape against the sky is written, strength of character and perseverance, survival of wind, drought, cold, heat, disease . . . In its silence it speaks of . . . wholeness . . . an integrity that comes from being what you are.” - Douglas Wood
Then Palmer writes “A jack pine “solitary on its rocky point” is one of the loveliest sights I know. But lovelier still is the sight of a man or woman standing with integrity intact . . . beauty arises when people refuse to live divided lives. Wholeness comes more easily to jack pines than to human beings. As humans, we are cursed with the blessing of consciousness and choice, a two-edged sword that both divides us and can help us become whole. Choosing wholeness, which sounds like a good thing, turns out to be risky business, making us vulnerable in ways we would prefer to avoid.
Thomas Merton said that “there is in all things . . . a hidden wholeness.” Merton’s words can at times sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the “integrity that comes from being what you are.”
I don’t know about you, but I do love a person who is living with integrity and being fully who they are at their core, and I think that means different things to me now than it did when I was fully immersed in fundamentalism. Now it is more about being true to oneself and not conforming to outside standards set for how you are supposed to live your life. I have a number of friends who model this life of integrity for me and I am better for it. They embrace who they are and what is important to them and they seek to live from that space rather than living as they “should” by someone else’s standards. My son Seth models this regularly for me. A beautiful aspect of his journey with autism is that he really has no concern for what others think he should do or what others think is cool. He does things he loves doing - like watching YouTube videos of people building lego sets and dashcam vidoes of roads all over the US and world because he loves roads. I appreciate his pure love for what he loves without a concern about whether it’s cool or popular. That’s integrity and authenticity. And yet he does take joy in seeing others have fun. Just the other day I was putting groceries away - I’m not a fan of grocery shopping or putting it all away when I get home, but on that day I had a cyndi Lauper playlist on and had basically danced my way through my grocery run at the store, with a few weird looks, and then danced my way through putting the groceries away. Seth was sitting in the living room as I was putting it all away and was smiling a huge smile and laughing at me as he saw the joy I was expressing. And he even joined in dancing a bit too. As we live in our own integrity and wholeness we can acknowledge that integrity and wholeness and joy in others and find our own happiness in that like Seth did with my grocery dance party.
For so many years, my wholeness was hidden. My full and free personality and intellect was squashed. I was told I was too much - that I should be less, be quieter, be a smaller version of myself. Part of the reason I was told to be less was because I was female - in the contexts I largely lived in for the first 40 years of my life, women were not to be bold, loud, intelligent or take up leadership roles. But here’s the thing - I’m bold, loud, intelligent and a natural leader. But I wanted to be loved and accepted so I tried to put myself in the mold I was supposed to fit in - but I was always spilling out of that mold - inadvertently or on purpose perhaps I broke the rules that were laid out for me and often was punished for that in a variety of ways. It was soul crushing and it happened over and over and over again. I’m so thankful to be in spaces now that affirm who I am as a person - as a leader and thinker and a person who is gifted in forming connections and community.
All those years of spilling out of the mold I was told I was supposed to fit in was like walking through a wilderness, with my soul thirsty and starving. In this new season of my life I feel I am walking into a lush valley that is full of beauty and wonder and amazing new adventures and I’m bringing the fullness of who I am into this new spacious, beautiful space. I’m no longer willing to squash and compress and make myself smaller. That life did damage to my soul for many years and I can’t live there anymore, I won’t. As I make this transformation into being who I truly am - truly unveiling the person who has always been within me, but unable and afraid to fully express the complete truth of who I am; as I move into this truer version of myself, some people in my life are a bit shocked and they are feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to deal with this new truer version of me. In many ways they liked the lesser version - I was certainly more manageable. I’m navigating this with some of the people in my life, allowing them time to adjust and evaluate and I’m recognizing that some relationships will not survive the shift that is taking place within me. And I’m coming to a place of acceptance with that. I’ll be sad to lose some of those connections, but I will no longer mask who I truly am to maintain relationships that are not life-giving and nourishing in my life. And the reality is that as I’m coming into this new place, there are many new connections that are embracing the fullness of who I am and love me just as I am - the big loud, opinionated, passionate authentic version of me.
Recently my counselor gave me a wonderful complement - she said she loved how I’m building a beautiful life full of elements that are life-giving and meaningful to me. I don’t have a traditional kind of life with just one career focus - recently a new friend called me a creative entrepreneur and I’ve adopted that language as a beautiful description of my new life - I dabble in many creative elements in life including music, graphic design, photography, cooking, and community building. As I’ve began to build this life of my own choosing, I have incorporated many different life-giving elements into this new existence which are all a piece of a collective whole of a life that I love. These pieces are all a bit different and yet there are similar things I value in all of them; elements of creativity and connection, all with a key element of seeking to make the world a more beautiful place.
Parker writes of the this “true self” that I am finding in my life and says, “We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness - an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.” He goes on to write about the functions of the souls - “The soul wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our own being, resisting the tendency of other faculties, like the intellect and ego, to uproot us from who we are. The soul wants to keep us connected to the community in which we find life, for it understands that relationships are necessary if we are to thrive. The soul wants to tell us the truth about ourselves, our world, and the relation between the two, whether that truth is easy or hard to hear. The soul wants to give us life and wants us to pass that gift along, to become life-givers in a world that deals too much death. All of us arrive on earth with souls in perfect form. But from the moment of birth onward, the soul or true self is assailed by deforming forces from without and within: by racism, sexism, economic injustice, and other social cancers; by jealousy, resentment, self-doubt, fear, and other demons of the inner life. And yet the soul persistently calls us back to our birthright form, back to lives that are grounded, connected, and whole.”
What a beautiful thought, that our seed of selfhood is encoded in us, that we each have our own spiritual DNA, unique to us, given to us from birth. There is so much that tries to draw us away from our true selves in our world - so many distractions and sorrows and assaults, but our soul persistently calls us back to the truth of who we are at our core. This has been my journey over the past 2 years, with my soul calling me back to my authentic self. I have been tuning into and trusting my intuition, learning to trust the voice of my own soul and to be my authentic self without being shaped by all the shoulds that have been placed upon me for so long. I’m trying to take time to listen to that inner voice more often and to trust it more completely so I can find that unique spiritual DNA, that unique selfhood that I believe was placed within me by the creator of all that is.
Several people have asked me how that feels for me. Largely it feels great, but there is also fear and anxiety about how others will respond, about what kind of rejection I may experience from others who don’t like the authentic me. But I’m committed to not letting that derail the change that’s been happening within me. I’m just no longer will to be a smaller version of myself anymore. I’m trying to continue to lean into my Lenten practice, even though we have passed the season of Lent. During our Ash Wednesday service we were encouraged to write down an intention for something we wanted to give up or take up during Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter on the church calendar. At that service I wrote down “I want to give up caring about other’s opinions of me.” That was the nice way to say it - in my head I was thinking - and pardon the french - “I’m giving up giving a shit.” This practice has been so good for me. When we are trying to be people pleasers we have a very hard time listening to our intuition, and instead often listen to other’s demands and desires for our lives. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be unkind or uncaring toward others, I just want to stop basing my opinion of myself on what others say and think about me and I want to stop feeling I have to follow all the shoulds because that’s what others think I should do, when those shoulds are not in my best interest. . I want to follow my own inner voice and pursue a life of flourishing and joy that suits me, that speaks to my desires and wishes.
As I close today I want to share one more quote from Parker Palmer’s “A Hidden Wholeness” Palmer writes:
“The soul is generous: it takes in the needs of the world. The soul is wise: it suffers without shutting down. The soul is hopeful: it engages the world in ways that keep opening our hearts. The soul is creative: it finds a path between realities that might defeat us and fantasies that are mere escapes. All we need to do is bring down the wall that separates us from our own souls and deprives the world of the soul’s regenerative powers.”
What is your soul, your inner voice, your intuition speaking to you right now? Have you taken the time to sit and listen recently? What wisdom, generosity, hope, and creativity is your soul longing to bring forth in your life? Perhaps it’s time to allow for your inner voice to be heard, to allow for that inner voice to have a say in what kind of life you are living. When that wall is up and we don’t know own our soul, we can’t see the true beauty within our soul or share that beauty fully with the world around us.
Thank you for listening to me ramble on a bit today. This was a fun episode for me to reflect a bit on just the past year and half of life and how much things have changed for the better in my life. I hope that you were encouraged to think about some things in a different way and expand your own perspective just a bit. I hope you’ll come back again next week on Soul Sojourn as we continue to explore the journey of soul. I look forward to what is to come, what stops we’ll take along the journey together. I’ll see you at the next stop.