Intuition is an important ability to cultivate to help move us into a feeling of greater balance in life. Paying close attention to subtlety is necessary in order to enhance one’s intuition. In this way, subtlety and intuition are close cousins.

Much of what I find intuition to be is paying attention to subtlety. There is so much there in the subtlety of our minds, our judgments, our beliefs, our fears, our hopes and desires. Subtlety is like a faint voice in the back of our head that when we’re hectic and busy we can barely hear. When we’re immersed in electronics the voice of subtlety is largely blocked from our view. It’s our vague sense of the little things, a gesture, an intonation, a look, or a pause. It’s that taint of a smell in the morning air that tells us it’s going to rain. It’s the feeling we have when we wake up in the morning that give us a sense that something great is going to happen this day.

Subtlety is a whiff of the air of our conscious mind tapping the depths of something mysterious and elusive. It’s not the words we hear, but those we don’t hear. It’s not the obvious, but the unexpected. It’s the feeling we have that our minds try to tell us to dismiss, the sense that we need to follow the path to the right, when our intellect tells us to take the path to the left.

Paying close attention to subtlety brings us closer to intuition, it’s the starting point for moving more deeply into a sense of trust in our own personal knowing of things. Acknowledging and acting on intuition is trusting in our knowing. Paying attention to subtlety is like the first five miles of a Marathon, the portion of the run where we solidify our commitment to go the distance and begin to develop faith in our ability to make it all the way.

When we embrace subtlety, we have completed the first five miles of the Marathon, we’ve made a commitment to ourselves to move in a direction that brings us to the point of fully trusting our intuition.

How much better I think our world would be if we all took time to develop our intuition and the courage to follow what we feel in our bones to be the right path for us.

It begins with subtlety.