James Redfield: How Intuition Gave Me Confidence
Basic to personal and spiritual growth is feeling confident, and thus knowing what to say and when to act, as we pursue our lives.
The key to building such confidence, in my opinion, lies in pursuing spirituality until we connect with the Divine Intelligence that lives within us. This feels like a “download of our larger selves,” or “integrating the rest of who we really are.” People use these phrases because that’s how the experience feels! We become inwardly stronger and more knowing. And it is from this understanding that we gain a larger sense of confidence.
To explore this idea, I’d like to tell you about my personal experience. From an early age, I grew to think of myself as an introvert, someone who was intelligent but not really wired for being an out-front leader. I usually avoided drawing attention to myself at all costs, preferring solitude. Hence, as the years passed, I gravitated to more interior studies and wound up being a therapist working with one client at a time, usually closed up in an office.
This idea of myself dramatically changed one day during a camping trip to an old-growth forest. I had purposefully gone alone on this trip because I felt I needed to think about my life, which was going nowhere fast. I had recently wanted to pursue writing but had spent months staring at an empty page with nothing to say. Flashes of inspiration were coming, but I was constantly second-guessing everything. The confidence just wasn’t there, and my ego was asking: “Who am I to write a book, anyway?”
Then a life changing experience occurred. I was sitting at a campsite near the top of a mountain, looking out at the cascading hills below. I had finally tired of trying to figure it all out myself. If the writing was going to happen, I knew, I was going to need some spiritual help. With that thought, my mind just naturally drifted into a powerful daydream, an Intuition, where I saw a vision of everything that would later happen with my books.
I saw each manuscript as a vague image as if they existed as an idea and would have to be fleshed out in content. I even saw myself traveling and speaking with the books, and answering questions about the experiences I was discussing. I also had another key insight. I realized all I could do with the books with only the outgrowth of the personal counseling work I had already done. This work had been my key preparation, but it was time to move on.
