The Virtuous Cycle of Aliveness

Or: Intuition Is What You Eat for Breakfast

As I walked down the sidewalk this morning, a woman passing me almost tripped. She looked up sheepishly, laughing to herself, as she continued. I smiled a wide grin and made eye contact with her, sharing in this lighthearted moment together. Walking on Sunshine began playing in my head as I passed her and continued.

An hour before, I had been in a Zoom call. The Q&A continued beyond the end of the call. If you have to drop off, you’re welcome to do so now. I didn’t. As the questions continued I could feel a shift in my abdomen, an opening to a closing. I’m waiting for this to be over. Usually I’d wait it out – I had stayed past the invitation to leave, clearly committing to riding it out with everyone. The voices coming in to rationalize my waiting: maybe the best part is yet to come, maybe I’ll miss something important if I leave now. I breathed, felt the certainty of my no, and left the call. 

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There is something that I am healing towards on my healing journey. My healing has a direction, a velocity. 

In the beginning, that towards was something like less anxiety or more comfort in my own skin or more self love. 

I look back, and forward from here, and I see aliveness. 

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From an essay I published last year: 

As I undo my sandals I hear from the kitchen: Ellie’s here! I skip down the hallway, a friend turning from the searing pan to hug me. We line dance, my shoulder in his right hand and a spatula in his left. 

There is a bustling in the kitchen, the generative kind, where from the chaos of our movements emerges a meal. Blueberries washed, pancakes cooked, eggs stirred. I set the table and confide in him “I don’t know if the fork goes on the left or the right.” He throws up his hands and says “what does it matter, this is home!”

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What is the mechanism that leads to more of this aliveness? Is it created? Uncovered? Manifested? Where does it come from?

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A few months ago, I began working on a project with a few friends. I was excited about the idea, wanted it to exist in the world. I poured time into writing a roadmap, planning out market research and the business plan.

From our first meeting there was a twisting in my gut. A forcefulness to my words, a desire to shape my friends into the coworkers I wanted. Rushing urgency and clenching around the project’s outcome. 

Six weeks in, I quit in a voice memo and a teary video call. On the surface there were inner critic concerns – they’ll never trust me again – and underneath, an unmistakeable current of aliveness filling the space that quitting the project had left.

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There is a voice in me, in my gut, my core – the voice of my truest desires for this life. It speaks in moments small and large. A walk outside would feel good. I want to move to a new city.

When I live through this voice, aliveness opens. When I override it, aliveness closes. 

The effects of living from my core are fractals, transformative at all scales. It’s led to new recipes – I want shrimp, rice noodles, avocado, olive oil, and salsa right now – and it’s also what possessed me to sit down and meditate and journal and scream until I opened the memories of abuse I had repressed my whole life. Aliveness at every scale.

As aliveness opens, it creates more room for the voice of core, of intuition, to speak. As it closes, so too does the space for the voice of intuition.

This interdependence between aliveness and living from intuition creates a virtuous cycle: hear intuition, live from it, open aliveness, hear deeper intuition, live from it, open deeper aliveness, and so on.

There is a parallel vicious cycle: hear intuition, override it, close aliveness, lose some touch with intuition, live less from intuition, close more aliveness, and so on.

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A few years ago, I was in a relationship that was not in line with my intuition, my core sense of self. I remember an exhaling, a relaxing, each time my partner left me alone. My frustration with him, the energy spent complaining and the dismay when he didn’t change. Resentment when he asked to do regular relationship checkins.

Each week, I’d call my friend Noah, and each week I’d wonder to him whether I should break up with my partner. I was hoping Noah would tell me to, so it could be his fault and not mine. 

When that relationship ended I felt an immense exhale, relaxing, breath free again. A weight had been lifted and the sun shone brighter. 

For years, I used that relationship as an excuse to beat myself up. I knew, the whole time, that dating him was against my intuition, that it was hurting me, and I did it anyway. So stupid of me. I know better. I still fall into this sometimes.

And yet, when I really look at it: when we started dating, I was lonely. I was disowning my own pit of need in order to get human connection, desperately trying to build friendships without coming across as too needy or too much. I was living in a bedroom without a window and I had just barely emerged from the second worst suicidal depression of my life. 

Of course I dated him! A man showed up at my doorstep when I was afraid of my own pit of need for connection, offering to hold me and spend time with me and send me voice memos while he was at work. Of course I dated him! It fulfilled the deepest need I had at the time. I can forgive myself for that – even celebrate the fact that I found a way to get my deep depression pit of teary neediness fulfilled.

As that deep need was being met, I began living from my intuition in other areas of my life. I started a new job, a better fit than my previous one. I visited my closest friends in another city, and let myself sink into the care and love I felt with them. I made cole slaw from scratch because I felt like it. I started going on walks to the pier, sitting in the sunshine most days. By the time the relationship ended, I was out of my depression pit.

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For the vast majority of us, it’s been well-adapted behavior at some point in our lives to live out of alignment with our intuition, to do the thing that twists our gut. We take the job with the shitty boss because it’s better than being behind on rent. We stay in the shitty relationship because it beats being lonely.

The idea here is not that it’s always correct to live from the deepest, grandest version of your intuition, but rather that it’s helpful to be aware of these virtuous and vicious cycles, because even in times when we’re deeply out of alignment with ourselves, there’s always foothold to be found. 

The skillful thing is not to immediately quit the job and be unable to pay rent, or to leave the partner you’ve been enduring for years and lose your apartment – it’s to live from whatever depth of intuition is clear and tolerable, and trust that in acting on that over and over again, enough aliveness will build to help you address the bigger out-of-alignment pieces.

At this point in my healing journey, I think that this is my work. Stoking that virtuous cycle. Listening, over and over again, to the voice of intuition, orienting not towards how loud or clear it is, but rather to how much louder and clearer it’s getting. 

So, reader: what is the single next thing you could do to live from your intuition?

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