Is that little voice intuition or neurosis?

Here's how a modern-day mystic helped me learn the difference

Towards the end of my marriage, I kept seeing a vision. It wasn’t unpleasant; it was lovely, in fact: a cabin on a hill surrounded by lush, green fields, which I knew—in that dreamlike way of silent knowing—were the fields of southwest England.

It was a lovely, sweet image, but it tormented me. Why? Because of what it meant. That cabin was not my life, it was not my home. I lived with my husband in the middle of Los Angeles. And thanks to finances and family ties, there was no real way we could move.

Worse: it wasn’t the first time I’d seen an image like this. Sure, this was the most vivid and detailed version I’d seen. But they had come to me towards the end of every romantic relationship I’d ever had, these visions of living alone in a house on a hill in the middle of nowhere.

Every therapist I ever consulted told me this was my avoidant attachment. These visions were fantasies of isolation, they told me—my maladaptive coping mechanism in the face of the most dangerous thing in the world: true intimacy. The answer wasn’t to follow my flight instinct. It was to learn to live with and receive the thing I both feared and wanted most: love.

And there’s great wisdom in that. I do need to learn to do that.

But here’s the thing.

I now live alone in a house on a hill in rural southwest England, with a cabin in the garden and lush green fields all around, and I’ve never been happier. For the first time ever, I feel no doubt.

I’m finally living the life that’s right for me. The life that was calling to me all along.

Those visions weren’t just neurosis or the terrified ravings of a battered attachment system. They were my truest life, whispering to me, coming to get me.

***

What is intuition? Where does it come from? And how can we ever tell the difference between bone-deep knowing and simple anxiety?

During the dying months of my marriage, when I was tormented by the image of a sweet cabin that wanted to tear my life apart, I posed these questions to a wise person (OK, it was Gwyneth Paltrow’s sex coach, don’t judge me). Her response is one of the most helpful things anyone has ever said to me. She said: Intuition doesn’t speak in words. If a thought is hectoring you in full sentences, or mounting persuasive arguments, that’s not intuition, it’s some acquired anxiety or other. But if it’s a vision or a feeling tone that is arising strongly in you, or lingering in ways you can’t explain—that is worth paying attention to.

Boom. When she said that, I knew in an instant that I had to pay attention to this image that had followed me around half my life.

But I still didn’t know where the cabin came from, or why. That part of the puzzle has only come into focus more recently, as I’ve deepened my reading of the mystics. And nobody has been more helpful to me in figuring this out than modern-day mystic Cynthia Bourgeault.

“We humans are curiously bilingual,” says Bourgeault in her book Eye of the Heart:

We speak the language of this world with all its charms and nuances, but we also strain toward that invisible other that seems to hover right beyond us in those dazzling glimpses and visions: that intuition of “another intensity,” in the words of T.S. Eliot, to which we know we also belong.

In Bourgeault’s heart-stoppingly beautiful cosmology, which draws heavily on the metaphysics of George Gurdjieff, consciousness and being follow a ray of creation, from the unity of the absolute, through several starry realms, to embodied life on our earth, and farther, into a sort of dense, unsentient underworld.

The main difference between these levels of experience isn’t one of moral purity or superiority. It is simply a difference of density. As the “ray of creation” proceeds from the absolute, through the stars, to our embodied life on earth, the qualities of the realms become denser, more solid, “coarser,” in Bourgeault’s terms—though that’s no insult. Quite the opposite: this “coarseness” is an essential eternal tradeoff. Embodiment and all its attendant pains and limitations are the only way consciousness can feel the joy of being alive.

And here’s the best news of all: even when we’re embodied, we don’t stop at our skin! In fact, the defining cosmological feature of our earthly realm is its porous membrane with the higher realms. Yes, we live in mineral homes of flesh and bone, but these bones are also attuned to the infinite, to that other intensity to which we know we also belong.

And this is how we can understand intuition. Those visions that come to find us and whisper stories of our true lives, or unfold a vision of our soul’s mission on earth—those imaginal cabins, or whatever it is for you . . . they are the higher realms shining through the membrane, bright enough to pierce our lives on this earthly plane.

Because make no mistake: the right life for you, the full expression of your soul’s mission on earth—it is already happening in the imaginal realm. Up there, where time is not sequential, each of us is already doing what we were born to do; already taking our rightful places in the human and cosmic stories.

And bringing that truth down to this embodied life is a matter of listening and watching for the clues, the images and breadcrumbs that guide us on the way.

It won’t ever sound like: “Leave him,” or, “You’re secretly terrible and you deserve to be alone,” or, “You’ve made a terrible mistake.” It won’t give you a detailed five-year plan or a budget or a list of all your faults and how to fix them.

But it might just feel like a picture that lives in your chest and shines at you with a curious intensity. It might just be a higher level of beauty and meaning, trying to world itself through you.

Love,

xx Ellie