BLOG 161
May 25, 2026
YIN AND YANG
“You may recognize the feeling — the inner knowing that arrives without explanation. It may come as a tightening in your belly, a dream that lingers after waking, or the sudden sense that you should call someone, take a different road, say yes, say no, or pause before stepping forward. Some call it an empathic or psychic ability. Others refer to it as intuition. No matter the name, it is the same ancient language — the soul speaking from within.”
(Daily Om, May 22, 2026: “Connecting with Your Intuition”)
As I woke this morning I was awed by the massive gray bulk of the église across the street, silhouetted against a deep royal blue sky. Behind the feminine contours of its ancient domes, modern skyscrapers, their sharp angles of glass and steel stretched up like modern day Goliaths, lit from within by the energy of industry.
The contrast, as you can see by the photo, suggests the yin and yang of the human psyche. We are not either/or. We are both/and: reason and feelings, logic and intuition, masculine and feminine, and the challenge is not for one to prevail over the other, but to cultivate the strengths of each, to live in harmony within ourselves and with our surroundings.
From the angle at which I sit, the church blocks out most of the buildings, its copper roofs long-since verdigrised to a nostalgic sage green (spellcheck seems to think “veridigrised” is not a word) and I wonder if it might be metaphorical for how my focus has shifted from the more outgoing pursuits of my youth to the focus on self-growth and evolution of consciousness that now preoccupy my seventies. This inner focus might help explain why my interest in travel waned so greatly since COVID locked us all into our particular bubbles.
Rightly or wrongly, it was COVID’s “isolationism” that prompted our move to the condo, with its incumbent clearing out of years-old memorabilia, souvenirs of trips taken decades ago, a file cabinet unopened since I know not when, textbooks and course materials from my years of studies in yoga and transpersonal psychology. Things I meant to revisit and never did. Now shredded and forgotten once again. A type of material catharsis or rite of passage between my old life and the new. What prompts one to make certain moves that alter, however slightly, the course of their lives?
If not intuition, what prompted me to break out of my comfort zone, to do the thing I thought I couldn’t do, as Eleanor Roosevelt would say, and get on a plane to Europe after a multi-year hiatus?
While in France we rented a car to tour around Bergerac and Cognac, and most challengingly, to drop our daughter and grandson off in Bordeaux to catch the train to Paris for their flight home. We hadn’t counted on the GPS navigation being in French. It wasn’t the language barrier so much as her obscure obstructions that stumped us time and again. We eventually learned that “Tournez à gauche” meant stay in the left lane and the actual turn would come shortly. One wrong turn landed us in a construction maze at the train station, glad that we’d allowed plenty of time for just such enervating screw-ups.
While we’d long-since backed up our car’s GPS instructions by using the Waze app, when it came time to return the car, Jim announced that he’d figured out what the French navigator was saying, and, sure enough, we breezed into the rental return without deviation.
Cultivating one’s intuition is also a matter of learning how this inner navigator, or soul, speaks. As Hollis explains, we set up our own “language barrier” by needing proofs, guarantees, incontrovertible evidence regarding our next steps. Fear and lethargy being chief among these inner saboteurs. Needing to know how everything was going to work out — and imagining worst case scenarios — nearly foreclosed on my going away in the first place.
Now my intuition tells me that I’m about to embark — or already have — on another transition, perhaps less tangible or overt than traveling or moving to a condo, but a new chapter nonetheless. By simply resisting what resisted in me, I broke through the force field of habit and complacency and am now primed to let my intuition guide me.
To heck with certainty. It’s the road less traveled for me! 🦩