My Chest Knew Before My Mind Did
The dawn was already unseasonably warm. Her brown coat absorbed the sun’s early rays, reflecting coppers and golds as she wandered down the hillside into the sandy arroyo. She moved the way water moves through a channel it has carved a thousand times before—unhurried, certain, the weight of her rolling from shoulder to shoulder. The absence of rain strained the environment around her, but her body, robust and ancient, knew what to do. Her weighted, padded feet pressed deeply into the soft, dry sand as she searched for some trace amount of moisture in the early morning softness—perhaps a drop of dew on a cactus rose.
Somewhere behind her, faint at first, came a rhythm that didn't belong to the forest: a two-beat pattern, human, getting closer. Her nervous system ignited, and suddenly she was light and swift, pouring herself back into the forest shadows. The only trace she leaves behind is a string of wide, almost human-looking footprints for me to stumble upon.
My footsteps and breath are labored as I take my morning run up the dry riverbed. Lost in my own thoughts, I’m oblivious to her presence. It had been a difficult week filled with hard conversations, betrayals, and fraught circumstances. My heart is aching from the weight of it all, and I’m caught up in fear-based machinations. My eyes are cast down to the ground as I run, but I’m not seeing anything. That is, until the large paw print jolts me out of my trance.
You’d think I might be scared, especially as the print is fresh, as evidenced by the bear scat close by. But instead, I begin to cry. I sense that nature has sent me a much-needed message through this bear encounter, in response to my heavy heart: Don’t worry. Everything will work out ok. You are protected. You are seen. You are loved. You can trust yourself. Still breathing heavily, I crouch down and reverently trace the print with my fingers and then follow the wandering path they make some ten yards ahead, before disappearing, almost as if she had vanished into thin air.
The impact of the encounter is clear and total. I am shaken awake from my doomy narrative and placed in a different plane of consciousness—one that brings insight and perspective. It’s as if I had been inoculated, the medicine swiftly entering my veins, moving past the blood-brain barrier, and opening my sight into wisdom instead of fear about the situation that I was bringing into the forest that day. I return home feeling brave, and resourced and ready to engage with my situation feeling confident and strong, almost bear-like, with the same weight and groundedness.
Bear paw prints from my morning run
Such is the language of the real world, the world that exists behind the veil of the one we call real but is only just a small sliver of what is truly there. How do I know? Because I’ve spent my life in conversation and communion with that world. It’s a communion that informs my coaching, my entrepreneurship, my relationships, and all that is a part of mundane, ordinary life—an acknowledgment of living interbeing in kinship with one consciousness.
There's a word for this, I'd learn later—claircognizance, clear knowing, a sense some neuroscientists now count among the dozens the body has and mostly ignores (1). Indeed, science now confirms what many of us have experienced our whole lives: that we have far more senses than our mere five of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing.
Until recently, my ability to tap into these other senses has been a kind of quiet secret I have held, for fear of being told I was too woo-woo—a highly disparaging term used to silence those with sight. But the more I live into it, the less I can hide it. And the more I honor it, the more evidence is revealed around our capacities as humans to cultivate such sight.
Some call this the gift of sight.
Recently, by some extraordinary sequence of serendipitous events, six Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in southern India came to Buffalo Spirit Ranch to bless the property and most especially our EQUUS herd of horses and donkeys. How or why all this happened is a mystery. It’s as if the land and animals requested it be so, and the monks heard. My perception of this was validated when the monks finally made their way from the ranch house to the herd awaiting them in the arena.
What transpired is hard to describe. All the animals circled around them as they walked in, including the cats and dogs. A palpable connection formed between the horses and the monks, gossamer threads of interwoven aliveness within an emergent field of co-mingling consciousness, and then a mutual recognition arose from some ancient, primordial shared being. And every one of them – equine and monk – knew and felt exactly the same thing.
Tibetan monks with the EQUUS herd
One must exercise their gift of sight to recognize these moments. Sadly, such sight is infantilized, shamed, and vilified. Why? Why wouldn’t we celebrate our ability to move between realms—to dance with the gods and commune with the worms? Because it terrifies those who want to control the masses. And it frightens those who might be marginalized for expressing such capacities. The punishment for having and expressing the gift of sight lives in my bones, a historical trauma from all those who came before and suffered unspeakable violence for being different (2). It silences me at the dinner table. It makes me giggle nervously when revealing a truth. It makes me overly cautious when in the company of more linear-minded folks.
I believe we are being called into reclaiming our gift of sight during these times. It allows us true perspective, grants us wisdom, opens doors through which to navigate our lives and our decisions. Remaining loyal to the current-paradigm five-senses model through our contrition, playing small, and hiding our knowing helps no one. Stop playing into the game of undermining sight. Stop saying terms like woo-woo, airy-fairy, fluffy, hocus-pocus, soft-skills,pseudoscience, and tree-hugging that play into marginalizing sight, and instead just own your power.
People ask me how I know things, or how it’s possible that my horses are so present and aware, or how I pull off running an entire ranch alongside a business. I try to express that it’s not me. I’ve stepped into a stream that pulls me towards a collective intelligence that supports harmony and wisdom, and the stream does a lot of heavy lifting. I notice beauty. I watch for signs. I do ceremony and ritual. I allow my imagination to open the threshold between this world and the real one that lies beyond. And when a vision comes, or a poem that wants to be written won’t let me sleep, or yes, when I hear my name called to me by a passing raven, I acknowledge it instead of brushing it off, or telling myself it’s all just my imagination.
Author’s art journal, inspired by interbeing
This doesn’t make me special; it makes me human. I believe all of us have the capacity to see, feel, sense, and know. I’ve dedicated my life to helping people discover that ability so they can live with more dignity. Through you, through those of us who are listening to the deeper rivers of awareness, a paradigm seems to be shifting. Maybe this is the way through the current seemingly impenetrable chaos.
Yesterday, in the dimming early evening light, I was finishing some ranch chores. I walked past one of my hummingbird feeders that I had hung at eye level in a spruce tree and stood near it, gazing at a praying mantis gingerly edging towards the sweet water—an uninvited guest, patient, awaiting her turn. Just then a hummingbird swooped in, hovering not seven inches from my face. She looked at me, pausing for what seemed like hours, then she rotated her body midflight to gaze at the new arrival. The mantis turned her head, as they can do, and returned the gaze. For a moment, the three of us were inside something warm and expansive; my chest knew before my mind did.
The hummingbird flew off, the mantis went on her way, I walked into the kitchen, changed.
Footnotes:
1. To date, scientists have confirmed up to 34 senses. Here is a short list of some of the interesting ones: chronoception – the perception of time, magnetoception – the ability to sense direction, even true north, synesthesia – when two different senses overlap, such as “tasting music” or “smelling color”, and my favorite, the "clairs" – intuitive or psychic senses that mean "clear". Clairvoyance means clear seeing (visions or images), clairaudience means clear hearing (sounds or inner voices), and claircognizance means clear knowing (sudden mental certainty without proof).
2. So much so that many of us bear the historical trauma of descendants of “the burning times” – the hundreds of years from the 13th to the 18th centuries in which vast numbers of the peasant populations of northern Europe were accused of witchcraft, imprisoned, tortured, and brutally executed. The estimates of the numbers of those killed varies from sixty thousand to nine million, but that about 85% of these were women is undisputed. “Were there two million or nine million witches burned?” asks Susan Griffin, an influential American ecofeminist philosopher, poet, essayist, and Emmy Award-winning playwright. “Whatever the number, we must imagine a conflagration, a mass terror, the constant odor of burning flesh, whole villages massacred, children whipped or thrown on the flames with their mothers.”
If this essay moved something in you, there is more.
Every month, I write on a theme like this one, and for EQUUS Collective members, it comes with an audio version of the essay, an Insight to help you carry it into your own life, and the Gathering, a live conversation where we talk through it together.
If you want to keep going deeper than a single essay can take you, I would love for you to join us.
-Kelly
Join the Collective before September 30th to be a part of our first live Gathering. The topic this month is Expanding Your Intelligence Through Your Senses.
