Reclaiming Myself. Again

Instinct. Intuition. Gut feelings. Or God?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where that inner knowing comes from. All I know is, it’s always there. Quiet. Steady. Waiting for me to tune in.

Lori, remember that time in your 20s when you were dealing with relentless allergies and hay fever? Your nose wouldn’t stop running. You went to the doctor, and they gave you antihistamines that left you groggy and disconnected. Prescription after prescription, none of it working. And then they told you you’d have to take that medication for the rest of your life. You said, “F*ck that.”

You skipped the refill. You started running again. You reclaimed your life.

You did that after your hysterectomy, too. Eventually.

You did it when mysterious hives covered your body. Doctor after doctor said it was idiopathic—medical speak for “we don’t know.” Take a Benadryl. Get over it. But I knew it was something deeper, most likely tied to what I was putting into my body. And then came the aha moment: I was flooding my system with coconut and MCT oil. At best, it caused hives. At worst, my throat would start to close. I removed all forms of coconut from my diet, and the hives disappeared.

You did it with burnout. You remembered who you were beneath all the noise. And you came back.

This is how you know: You can do it again. It’s in your DNA. You know what you need.

You don’t have to stay in survival mode. You can trust your gut. You can reclaim your life. Again. And again.

And yet, I’ll admit, sometimes I forget. I second-guess myself. I poll people. Have you ever done that? Felt uncertain, didn’t trust yourself, so you start asking everyone else what they think?

Brené Brown names this beautifully in The Gifts of Imperfection:

“When I’m making a difficult decision and feel disconnected from my intuition, I have a tendency to survey everyone around me.”

She goes on to define intuition as:

“Intuition is not a single way of knowing—it’s our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason.”

And then she connects it to faith:

“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”

That resonates deeply. Faith is what helps me quiet the noise, stop polling people, and lean back into trust. Trust in myself, trust in God.

Paulo Coelho, in The Alchemist, expands this even further:

“Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.”

That universal current. That still small voice. The whispers of God. It’s not separate from us. It’s within us. Always.

So the path back is simple, even if not always easy: Breathe. Take a break. Get outside. Change your perspective. Drop into your heart.

You know the way back to yourself. You always have.

©2025 Lori Ann King