What is My Value Under Capitalism?

Learning to tell the difference between intuition and impulse

August 25th, 2022
Strathcona, Vancouver, Canada

I had a session with an intuitive yesterday and I asked her about my health. In prepping questions for our session, asking about caffeine or sugar or weed never crossed my mind. Work. Love. Money. Travel. All the usual suspects. But my own embodied health? What a concept.

It took her suggestion, and after we’d crossed the work and travel bridges, for me to ask —

“About my health… I’ve tried out cutting out caffeine and sugar. I want to know what’s best for my body and I’m just not sure…”

She looked at me and laughed. “Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know.” I laughed. “Because I like to push the edges of things?”

She nodded.

“Or because I like to punish myself?” I suggested. “I don’t know. It’s a journey.”

“Hm.” She paused, before blowing my mind. “It’s not about the food, it’s about the stress.”

My mouth dropped as this truth ran down my ear canals and into my brain.

It’s not the food. It’s the stress. Ugh. Yep.

I asked about weed next and she gave me another answer I already knew — that using it wisely is about intention and not escape. Same as the food. Then she told me that I’m very intuitive, that I need to spend more time grounding, and reminded me that the easiest way to tap into my intuition is to sense the feeling in my body and recognize when I feel myself contract and when I feel myself expand.

Maybe people out there really do hold all the secrets, and I’m just too stubborn to listen.

I want to be tapped into this sense of intuition all of the time, but sometimes I struggle to access that feeling. There are too many stories in my head, too many impulses swirling. Are the impulses my intuition? Or are they my conditioning? How can I tell the difference between the two?

I wonder this as I scroll through Tik Tok, watching everyone give advice, preaching at me like they…