By: Gabriela Yareliz
Sometimes, our gut feeling and intuition is blunt and clear. We receive the message and understand it immediately.
I stood there clutching some recycling as the elevator door rolled open. I was eager to get into the elevator as it’s the only way into the basement where the trash and recycling are located. It had been very slow on the way down. Now, I could see why.
There were about seven EMS personnel in the elevator (mind you, this is a small elevator). When the door opened, I stood there stunned mentally processing the fact that there was no room for me. As I stared at them, I saw smoke clouds puffing up behind two of the EMS people. My eyes followed the smoke clouds down and saw there was a woman, pinned by EMS to the elevator wall, casually smoking as if nothing was wrong.
It was a bizarre scene. They stared at me waiting for the door to close again. I literally said out loud, “Oh, there is certainly no room for me. I will bring it back up.” They were quiet as smoke continued to puff as the doors closed.
Earlier that day, I had heard banging on all of the apartment doors in our hall (odd for our building). This must have been the person doing it. She must have had some sort of breakdown or disturbance. Who knows.
All I know is that when the door rolled open, I felt a pit in my stomach and something about the scene was immediately off. It was the same feeling that had told me to not open the door when I heard the noise in the hall.
Sometimes, it’s not so undeniable.
This is your PSA to listen to your gut. It can be in the most minor things– which route to take, what shoes to wear, even what exercise to do.
Recently, I noticed how I felt after doing a certain type of exercise. I wanted to do that exercise; be a part of that community so to speak, but one thing was true– when I did it, I didn’t feel great. In some ways, it made me anxious. I kept trying to push this– I am very disciplined after all. Until one day, I was like, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” I kept wondering why I was ignoring my own body and the voice in my head that was screaming to me that this was not for me (and also screaming at me to cancel before renewal, ha). The cardio had me feeling like trash and flailing. Listen, I am slow, and I needed to come back to something I already knew– that I like low impact. I respond well to low impact and low-impact modifications, and I didn’t need to push myself into something that made me feel terrible just because it seemed cool in theory.
I’ve been writing a lot about discernment, and I think that a big key in us developing discernment is learning to not ignore that voice. It’s a serious thing. We can’t keep self-abandoning and overriding the instinctive feeling and voice inside. The more we ignore ourselves, the more we lose the ability to hear the voice when it really matters– when it’s not just shoes and cardio. Some things will be really obvious, like the smoking woman pinned to the elevator wall surrounded by EMS that was keeping her controlled. Can you imagine if I would have squeezed into the elevator, and just been like, “Here we go!” As absurd as that sounds, sometimes we override important signals, and we do not read the room. We stroll in as oblivious or stubborn as it gets. It’s the equivalent to getting into an elevator car where something very concerning is being resolved.
Some things are less obvious and more complicated. Sometimes, we wish the voice said something else. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to sit with it, recognize it, gain clarity from it and obey. As we continue to heed the voice, the voice becomes clearer, and we begin to align ourselves. It’s important to nurture the voice. Otherwise, we’ll end up in some bizarre scene feeling miserable, wondering how on earth we got there.
GABRIELA YARELIZ 