As a concept, it’s a fantastic script. Two star crossed lovers wounded by a past littered with one failed relationship after another. Life gives them one last battle to fight: the battle to find each other.

It’s a sweeping, soaring, tear-fest of two people hampered by fate and shackled to a future they can’t yet see but which they both know lies somewhere just beyond their immediate reach. It’s Gable and Leigh, Bogart and Bergman, Tracy and Hepburn. It’s Keira Knightley and Andrew Lincoln in that scene in Love Actually. Except in your version, Keira doesn’t let him walk away.

You have the script and, because this is your love story, you have a ready-made cast. It’s an epic romantic blockbuster destined to smash all box office records.

The only problem is that your subconscious has been tasked with job of directing it.

As the director of your personal movie, your subconscious is more Quentin Tarantino than, say, Steven Spielberg. It’s opinionated and often comes with its own agenda, drawing on your past experiences to inform your present and future. If you grew up in a house of drama, your subconscious is more likely to push you toward dramatic love and tempestuous hit-and-run run hook-ups. 

Without clarity in our lives we tend to drift around like rudderless ships. One of the keys to finding clarity in our life is listening to our intuition and if we don’t, we will be buffeted around by the winds of others wills and desires. At best we will end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied, at worst deeply resentful. In truth it is your right to look inside yourself for answers. We’re defining intuition here as a potent form of inner wisdom, not mediated by the intellect or logical conscious mind. Intuition is accessible to us all, and it’s a still, small voice inside. I think of intuition as an unflinching truth-teller committed to our well-being.

So if we all have it, why do some of us struggle so incessantly with trusting ourselves?

Well, simply because we are not taught to, we are often taught by our caregivers to trust others above ourselves and this reinforced by others around us as children, such as teachers or other figures of authority in regular proximity. If the subconscious mind, which simply doesn’t understand time, has learnt this at an early age then it continues playing out the unhelpful belief system that ‘others know best’. This combined with fear, external pressure or low self-esteem can seriously get in the way and prevent you from listening to, and most importantly acting upon, your gut feelings.

Continue reading…