The Sign

We had been at the beach that morning. One of those mornings that feels like a gift you didn’t ask for. The ocean was doing what it does and I was doing what I do, which is nothing in particular, just being there. By the time we were heading home I was loose in a way I rarely get to be. Easy. Not thinking about anything worth thinking about.

Then we hit a light.

There was a couple standing on the corner. Older. Nicely dressed like they were going to church. They were also holding signs. One read Jesus is Has Come. The other read something about Repenting and Rejoicing. They were smiling and waving, trying to engage with people stopped at the light. It was downright creepy.

Something hit me before I understood what I was looking at.

I pushed back against my seat. Not a small adjustment. A full body recoil, like I’d touched something hot. My fingers came up in a cross like I’d seen characters do when facing vampires. My husband found this funny. I found it funny too, right up until they saw me and started walking toward my window. The light changed. I rolled down the window and yelled something I won’t repeat here but that felt completely accurate.

We drove away and I sat with what had just happened.

I should tell you something about myself before I go further. I feel things at a volume most people don’t. Not because I’m wired differently, though maybe I am, but because of the work I’ve done. Decades of it. The kind that doesn’t make you calmer exactly, but cleaner. Fewer places for incoming signals to snag on old damage. Which means when something arrives from outside my own system it moves through fast and it moves through loud.

I know this can look like overreaction from the outside. I know not everyone lives this way. But here’s what I’ve learned. What looks like too much feeling is often just feeling accurately. The problem isn’t the volume. The problem is that most of us were trained to turn it down before we could hear what it was saying.

That morning at the light my system was saying something very clearly.

People talk about intuition like it’s a special gift. A clear voice. A vision. Something you either have or you don’t. That’s not what it is. Intuition is your emotional system doing its actual job. Reading the environment at a level your conscious mind can’t access and reporting back in the only language it has. Feeling. Physical response. A sudden shift in the quality of the air.

You are not a passive receiver of reality. You are a participant in building it. What you feel about what you see is how your experience gets constructed. Which means what you do with that feeling matters enormously.

In shamanic work I track. I follow a thread from the surface down through whatever layers are underneath until I find what’s actually generating the experience. Most people stop at the first layer, which is usually the one their social training installed. The polite response. The reasonable interpretation. The one that keeps things comfortable.

Two harmless people expressing their faith. Right. Let’s track it and see what’s really there.

What would be behind their motivation? They’d say they’re spreading the word of God. I’d say they’re spreading the word of their God, which is already not the same thing. Hidden in that distinction is the energy that says our way is right and yours is wrong. I was raised religious. I know how this works. It isn’t really a choice. You spread the word or you risk hellfire. That’s not love driving them out onto that corner. That’s fear wearing love’s face. Which means what looks like a benign couple with signs is actually an inversion. The surface says rejoice. What’s underneath says comply.

Follow it further and you find two thousand years of it. The inquisitions. The burnings. The colonial machinery that used that cross to justify atrocities I don’t have room to name here. The systematic dismantling of every indigenous way of knowing that existed before the church arrived. The infrastructure built specifically to make ordinary people doubt their own perception, their own body, their own interior life. All of it still moving. Still transmitting. Through two smiling people on a corner on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Their smiles were real. I don’t doubt that. They believed what they were doing was love.

That’s the most dangerous kind of transmission. Not the one delivered by someone who knows what they’re carrying. The one delivered by someone completely sincere. Sincerity is the perfect disguise. It disarms the very instinct that would otherwise protect you. Your training says they mean well. And while your training manages your response, the actual signal walks right past your defenses.

My dear friend Sophia told me once during a reading that I know too much. Sometimes I think she was right. Now that I have the vision I can’t turn it off. And I’ll be honest with you. There are days that’s a lot to carry. Feeling the complexity behind the ordinary is useful right up until the moment it becomes overwhelming. Which it does sometimes.

But here’s the alternative.

Every time you feel something and ignore it you lie to yourself. Small lie maybe. Necessary by the standards of wherever you grew up. But your emotional system registers it. It learns its signals don’t matter here. Over time you stop trusting yourself. And a person who doesn’t trust themselves needs something outside themselves to provide certainty. A doctrine. A community. An authority that tells them what their feelings mean and whether they’re allowed to have them.

One ignored feeling. That’s where the spiral starts.

Now imagine billions of people running that sequence. Not for one lifetime but for generations. All of that unfelt material going somewhere. Accumulating. I have felt what that produces. Not as a concept. As a presence. A darkness with weight and temperature. A collective reservoir of everything felt and immediately abandoned by everyone who was ever told their feelings were wrong, excessive, dangerous, sinful, or simply inconvenient.

It’s enormous. And it is not yours to live in.

That is a choice. One that becomes available the moment you understand what you’re looking at.

Back to the light.

When my body recoiled, when my fingers came up, when the window went down and something came out of me that I hadn’t planned, that wasn’t me losing control. That was my emotional system being trusted enough to act without interference. The rawness wasn’t distortion. It was precision. I was feeling exactly what was there to feel, minus the editing.

I got out of the way and let it move.

That’s the whole practice. Not the years of journeywork. Not the frameworks or the vocabulary. Just that. Feel what arrives. Don’t lie about it. Follow it down to where it’s coming from.

Your emotional system has been trying to tell you something. Probably something inconvenient. Probably something that would require you to change something, say something, or stop pretending something is fine when it isn’t.

You’ve been talking yourself out of it.

What would happen if you stopped.