Learn to Tame Intuition -

I've almost always been a strongly intuitive person.  On personality tests I was by far intuitive--off the charts.  And as such, it was easy to do some post-hoc justifications about events in my life that turned out unnecessarily bad.  Intuition doesn't always yield badness, though, so it is tricky to find a way to thread the needle of trusting it just enough, while also retaining the capacity of self-doubt.  I mean, I get that it could be a beneficial strategy to always follow intuition for some people, even objectively, without their subsequent justification.  So, anyway, I guess I'm at a point in my life where I'm starting to let my intuition back in, so long as I have bright line rules.  Which is to say that I'm not tingling with my own sobriety so much that I'm hesitant to even try something or take a stand on something, at least a little bit. For a long time I was plunged so deep into the water of "taking a stand" or "trying" it was a bit hard to see the forest for the trees.  So I backed way, way, up, into the cerebral restrained land of 20,000 feet up, unengaged with a lot of my own emotion about the world.  And therein lies the strangeness.  That is, that I can at once have a bunch of emotion and also be estranged from it.  To be completely honest, I think the idea that I experienced the world on a different level than the world I did happen to experience and that it takes time for me to realize the other level of experience that was previously submerged is a bit of a hoax.  It makes much more sense to say that I've learned valuable things about myself and others and applied them retroactively.  Anyway.  The point is only that I am allowing myself more intense, or colorful, or engaged, interaction, and less cerebral restraint.  That's the point.  And it feels good in a way, because I do feel in control.  And I do revert to cerebral states later.

One of the basic premises of life that I'd failed to grasp at any level prior to my sobriety was of repetition and knowledge acquisition.  It goes like this: you try something once, let's say running around a large park with a lot of interlocked trails.  You learn a good chunk, but you tell yourself you know more than you actually do, so the second time you run, you go out and get promptly lost because of  your over-confidence.  Now, instead, I stick to the same route a few times, maybe a month, and then branch out once I've had a chance to feel like things are truly familiar, in my gut.  Trick is that gut feelings of familiar take all sorts of practice, which was the missing piece before in my life.  OK?  Enough for now.