The value of instinct

A post about trusting your gut feeling

I am around seven years old and on holiday in Cornwall, about to board a coach for a day trip with my family.

“Would you like a sweet?”

Says my grandma.

But something feels off.

Why has she taken out one single sweet and handed it to me?

Why can I not dip my hand into the bag as I usually would?

Why does the sweet she offers, look slightly different to the others? 

I mull this over with logic, figure she’s my grandma who loves me so it’s all good, and pop it in my mouth.

I start to eat it and she’s watching me.

Weirdly.

And then…….as I chew the creamy toffee, my teeth suddenly bash against a hard surface. My tongue picks up on unexpected bitter and I spit it quickly into the palm of my hand, glaring at my grandma in puzzlement.  I examine her lined face for clues, try and read expression, find explanation.

“It’s just a travel sickness pill. We know you always feel sick on the coach and we didn’t think you’d swallow it if we just gave it to you…..so we hid it in a sweet.”

And there it is.

An early lesson in instinct.

In trusting that gut feeling, that when something doesn’t seem right, it usually isn’t.

It’s one I haven’t forgotten.

‘10 reasons you should not eat bugs’

Said the post I stumbled upon this morning. I’ve seen them before - about the chitin insects contain, being toxic to humans. Blah de blah blah.

But here’s the thing.

I don’t know about you, but I already knew not to eat bugs without someone having to tell me!

Just as I knew about the sweet.

You with me?

An internal buzzer goes haywire. It doesn’t matter how many celebrities I see do it or how many times I’m told they’re ‘full of protein’, I KNOW it’s wrong.

Just as I knew not to wear a face mask. Didn’t need to be spelled out. Louder than Grandmaster Flash in ‘White Lines’ it screamed “Don’t do it!”

Covering my own air ways?

Obstructing my own breathing? HELLO!!!

A strong instinct is something I’ve always prized and the times I’ve ignored it, have been at my peril.

An example is when I became a mother.

I trusted my gut on some things but not others. There was no way, for example, my baby would be fed to a predetermined rota and made to ‘cry it out’, as was fashionable in some circles thanks to so called ‘experts’ such as Gina Ford.

My son would have my milk, as and when he needed it, as was his right. That is why it existed, for him.  I, the adult would just have to ‘deal with it’ if he needed it at times inconvenient to myself.

On other issues, however, I went against my natural inclination and wrestled with the consequences.

Co-sleeping fell into this category. My mother’s instinct was to oust his father from my bed - an adult who did not need me - and instead focus on our son, our ‘babymoon’.

But I didn’t do this. I listened to health visitors who harped on about cot death, of the scare stories of mothers falling asleep and crushing their infants. I considered my partner and how banishing him to another room would make him feel…..

My baby’s instinct clearly mirrored mine. He wanted to be with his mother, suckling as and when in his dreamy daze. As soon as he found himself alone in the Moses basket, he would scream his little lungs out. Why was this person he’d spent nine months living inside, suddenly not next to him, skin on skin?

Why did I override my gut feeling?

Perhaps it seemed too contentious to ‘rock the boat’ over things I didn’t know enough about.

Maybe I felt too overwhelmed and exhausted by motherhood to put up a fight with pushy professionals .

I wasn’t on social media at the time so didn’t know about the groups that spoke of gentle and attachment parenting that would have supported me and reminded me of cultures around the world where co-sleeping is the norm, as it was for many years with our own ancestors.

I look back and it was a big regret for me. The time I spent fighting nature. Battling our bond.

And who benefits from babies being parted as early as possible from their mothers?

Is it mothers? Is it babies?

No.

There is a huge industry dependent upon us feeling that we ‘need’ a Nursery, baby’s own crib and blankets. Not to mention an economy fattened on the separation of mothers and infants so they can enter the work place.

Around this time, I read a book called ‘A natural history of parenting’ by Susan Allport. This helped me immensely.

It told of how animals parent their young using pure instinct, reminding me that I was first and foremost, a mammal. Most of the instances of animal mothers harming their young occur in zoos and artificial situations.

I eventually joined Facebook and found groups and books about ideologies that not only chimed with my soul, but backed up my innate ‘knowing’ with scientific studies. An example was ‘Why Love Matters’ by Sue Gerhardt which explored the impact of rising levels of cortisol when babies are left to cry.

And it is often this way with instinct.

At first we don’t understand the logic.

It comes later.

It asks that we simply trust it, until we do.

It is an investment in something we cannot explain.

A leap of faith in ourself.

Whether it is about a person you don’t want around your kids, sensing someone is lying or famously, that you *just know* not to go to school because you ‘don’t like Mondays’.

For many of us, the ‘Covid’ debacle was a classic instance of instinct kicking in. 

To begin with, in the very early days, perhaps we didn’t have our reasoning solidified as to why it didn’t ‘sit right’.  Certainly my own objections focused upon my personal freedom being tinkered with and dislike of creeping authoritarianism, rather than any medical explanation.

Fast forward a few years and we are now spoilt for choice for sources of evidence to ‘back up’ that initial suspicion that something was off.

And the older I have got, the more faith I place in these feelings.

Sometimes they are physical pushes and pulls.

Other times an inner voice speaks to me.

Gut feeling was there before the internet, before books, before the BBC did those patronising ‘should I worry if…..’ features.

It sits in most of us as an underused muscle, wasting away, begging to be toned.

Animals have amazing instincts. They vacate areas before tsunamis and earthquakes.

What is it that they tap into that we have lost touch with?

There are many theories on this.

Some say it’s to do with the ‘third eye’ and/or pineal gland - that modern life calcifies or blocks it.

Others say it’s because we no longer walk barefoot and have lost a physical connection to the Earth.

Then, there is the way that learning has become compartmentalised into a series of individual subjects, fragmenting our thinking and leading us into avenues of fractured reason rather than the holistic approach we once had.

Events like the clocks changing also serve to disrupt circadian rhythms, further disconnecting us from the subtle natural cycles that informed our ancestors. The same could be said for modern inventions such as WiFi and light pollution.

For me, the most likely explanation is the huge levels of distraction we are now subjected to. How do we find the quiet space to gently tune in when we have so many other ‘voices’ competing for attention?

Of course, logic and research has its place.

But sometimes you will have to decide quickly.

You won’t have the time or resources to research.

You will have only instinct.

For this reason, it is worth honing.

So I ask you to consider;

What can you do to better connect with your inner voice?

Are there times recently when you’ve listened to it?

Ignored it?

What has been the result?

Remember playing ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ as a child?

Well, instinct just LOVES playing ‘hot and cold’!

Try it!

Ask yourself, when you think of a person or idea, do you feel ‘warm’, ‘cool’?

Are you attracted? Repelled?

Do you feel close to ‘discovering’ something?

We will never have all the answers but growth occurs when we ask questions.

And what better place to start, than by visiting our own untapped archives!