A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube interview where Madison Arnholt explains how to tell intuition apart from emotional reactions. Key signals of intuition are clear, calm, neutral, and grounded sensations, whereas emotions show as high activation (excited) or low activation (anxious, afraid). She advises locating the feeling in the body (chest, stomach, jaw), feeling and naming it, giving it shape/size, and breathing until the energy transduces. She describes an experiment from her early business: prioritizing alignment and joy (documented in a Google Doc), practicing "stop, drop and release" instead of habitual reactive behaviors, which led to better outcomes and more inner peace.
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So when it comes to making decisions intuitively, how do you separate a feeling in your body that's telling you yes or no that you should listen to versus an emotional wave that's going through that isn't necessarily your natural wisdom.
So if you're feeling like clear, calm, neutral, grounded, odds are you're probably very connected to your intuition. If you're feeling active, activated, if you're feeling like super high and excited or kind of like low and anxious and afraid and resistant, that's a good sign that you're kind of like in an emotional reaction or in the mind's stories. And so what can be really helpful if that is the case, and there's kind of like that emotional, like high or low coming up is asking yourself, like, where is that in the body? Is there like a heavy feeling in the chest? Is there like a sinking, like, pit in the stomach? Is there like a tightness in the jaw? And drawing your awareness to where that kind of like activated or triggered energy is in the body and feeling and directly experiencing it. So you can close your eyes and like, if it's heavy in the chest and you just feel the heaviness in the chest, you can give it a shape. Maybe it's like the size of a five pound wait, so you just like feel it and breathe until. And as you do that, that feeling can begin to transmute what was once kind of like stuck frozen energy, kind of like blocking you from having that clarity. Or like clouds in front of the sun, they begin to part and then that natural clarity can begin to shine through again. So as we stay present with it and feel it and basically like ride it out, it's like a vibration that just needs to be felt, maybe expressed. Maybe if it's like anxiousness, maybe like it needs shaking, maybe it needs a lot of exhaling. Maybe if it's anger, it needs screaming, right? It could be anything the body is guiding you to, but just feeling it, allowing it to move and express how it wants to, and then it, it can dissolve and you, you'll feel that feeling of like, okay, okay, everything, everything is okay. What used to like, really keep me like stuck in the beginning of my business is like my worth was so connected to success and achievement. And I felt like, oh my God, everybody else on Instagram is like, so successful and like, why am I not farther along? What's wrong with me? Like, what's not working? And then when I would be feeling those feelings of like, shame, discouragement, frustration, disappointment, worry, I would then like react to them by doing very unhelpful things, like either going into, like, helpless victim mode and being like, well, nothing works anyways, why bother? And kind of like doing nothing or like over taking action and getting like, frantic and like, desperate and doing like, weird shit that obviously repelled people. I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna, like, play a little game for myself of, like, what happens when I really put my alignment first? What happens when I put joy first? So I, I literally started a, A Google Doc and I was like, I'm gonna just go step by step, make an experiment for myself and, like, see where it takes me. So I was like, okay. Week one is simply asking myself, what feels good now? And that's it. I just would multiple times throughout the day see if I could take what feels like, take that step of what feels good now. Even when the mind was like, no, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. It's like, no, you need to be like. It's like, well, what feels good now is going on a walk, but the mind is saying, I should be posting 10 things on Instagram. Well, it's like, what feels good? And then what happens if I really dedicate, like, part of this, like, experiment to every time as best I can, that one of those triggered or stuck emotions is coming up. It's like, stop, stop, drop and release. It's like, if it's coming up and I'm aware of it, I'm gonna do my best to not react, not do that habitual thing I normally do and just park, park my ass on the couch or whatever it was and, and feel the feeling until it dissolves. What I found is the more I let go of control from the mind and put my alignment and inner peace first, the more things work out and unfold in ways far better than I could have ever predicted or controlled. And I feel so much more at peace and joyful in the process. It's like, why would we not choose what's in alignment? It's like, well, the only reason we would not choose what's fun or in alignment is because we think we have to choose otherwise. But who said that's the only way? Who said that's the right way? Who said life's gonna fall apart if you don't do that? Does it? Does it not? It's like, I don't know. For me, I was like, I want to find out for myself if I kind of go off the inner peace deep end and see what happens if I put what my intuition is telling me to do over what I'm supposed to do.
