Create Your Own Intuition Doll and Bring It To the Bedlam Farm Open House

Intuition.  It’s not something that’s valued in our society or taken seriously.   For most of my life I didn’t trust my intuition, I couldn’t even recognize it in myself.

I came to know it through my art.  Little by little over the years, it made itself known.  Then I started quilting in the Gee’s Bend tradition.  Which is all about intuition.  The only rules are what looks good to the person making the quilt.   So, as the quilter, I have to know what I like.  I have to know what colors or patterns I think work together, not what someone else thinks, not by doing what  I saw someone else do, not by knowing color theory.

Then I have to trust myself enough to sew all those pieces of fabric together and believe that when I’m done, (which is not dictated by a standard size or pattern) that what I’ve created will be just what I want it to be.

I didn’t know it, but with each quilt I created, with every intuitive decision I made, I was strengthening my intuition.  It’s a process, first I feel it, then I trust it then I act on it.  It’s  acting on intuition  that keeps it growing.  Like exercising a muscle.  When I act on my intuition, it manifests in the physical world, and the results can be witnessed, made real.

When I read the story of Baba Yaga in Clarissa Pinkola Estes book Women Who Run With The Wolves, I was enchanted with the idea of the Intuition Doll.   In the story, Vasalisa is given an intuition doll by her mother before she dies.  Her mother tells her that when she needs to make decisions she should ask the doll, then listen to what she tell her.   Traditionally, the practice of  trusting and developing our intuition is passed on from mother to daughter.  Which is what symbolically happens in the story.

After reading this, I made my own Intuition Doll.

Then I imagined a whole bunch of Intuition Dolls, all made by different people.  I saw them hanging on the front of our  barn.

So now I’m putting it out there.  Make an Intuition Doll and bring it to the Bedlam Farm Open House the weekend of October 10th.   I’ll hang them on the front of the barn and we’ll have an exhibit of all the different dolls.  Dolls that come straight from your gut.  I don’t know what they’ll look like, only you know what your Intuition Doll looks like. 

If you have an Intuition Doll in you, create her and bring her to the Open House.  And  she or he will be in good company.  Who knows what will happen when all those Intuition Dolls get together.