Wendy Morris .org - community art stories, resources, and creative inquiry

The Project
The Intuition Project was a three-month investigation of intuitive knowing. From January through March, my only task was to follow my intuition from moment to moment. When I began this experiment I had very little understanding of intuition. I simply assumed if I cleared my calendar and devoted a significant period of time to exploring my intuition, I would learn something about it. I made no plans following the conclusion of the project, so I would not be subliminally influenced by expectations about my future.

Everyone in my immediate life agreed to go along with this adventure. Friends knew I might make plans to meet for dinner and not show up. My husband did not know what to anticipate from me. Would I spend time watching soap operas and eating bon-bons? Would I up and leave town?

Note about these photographs: During the four months of The Intuition Project I chose not to keep a diary or take photographs. One of my earliest lessons from the project was the importance of staying in the present moment, and any form of documentation lured me into the future. The images here are re-enactments I created with photographer Carol Inderieden for a presentation at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design six months after The Intuition Project ended.

	WASHING DISHES AS DANCING The threshold between art and life dissolved. Washing dishes became dancing. Before I began the project I did not know if I would even make my bed for three months. Much to my surprise (and my husband’s delight) our home was the cleanest it had ever been. I dropped underneath my negative fixed ideas about housecleaning and discovered a spontaneous desire to create order.
CREATIVE PROCESS SURFING I roamed through my creative process, from writing to drawing to sounding to dancing to writing. I expressed myself in one medium until I felt any inhibition, then I switched to another medium where the creative access was flowing. I surfed creative waves wherever they carried me until the gateway to my unconscious swung as freely as a saloon door. I wrote stream-of-consciousness stories. I stopped reading a book mid-sentence, and picked up the end of the sentence randomly in some other book. Metaphors mixed and images bumped up against each other with great vitality.
	PLAYING TENNIS WITH BEACHBALLS I showed up at the park equipped with tennis racquets and huge beach balls. Sometimes I played alone in several feet of winter snow. Sometimes I invited strangers to play. I always seemed to find someone to play with when I wanted company.
JUST BEING I spent hours lying on my floor, resting, just being. Sometimes I rolled over clusters of rubber balls. Other times I warmed smooth North Shore rocks on my radiator and placed them all over my body. As I lay on my floor, I absorbed the warmth and the weight of the stones.
	ICE GARDEN I drew big pictures of flowers. Just after dawn, I snuck down to the ice rink in the park across the street from my apartment and secretly embedded the flowers on the frozen pond. Later in the day, as young skaters discovered my paper garden, I heard them shriek with pleasure as they tried to convince their parents that there really were flowers under the ice.
OUTSIDE RITUALS I performed odd little improvised rituals in the parks. I followed the geese around the lakes and danced their pathways. I made mandalas in the sand with stones, bark and sticks. At the base of trees, I left traces of my activities for others to discover.
	INSIDE RITUALS Everyday tasks, like brushing my teeth, became moments for creative attention. I converted my toothbrush to a rattling totem, so that each time I brushed my teeth, the sound reminded me to pay attention to what I was doing. In this way, mindless habits became acts of consciousness.

About the Performance
At the end of the three months, my intuition was to extend for another month, so the entire experiment lasted four months. After the fourth month I was hungry for a container of time and commitments so I knew the experiment was done.

Much to my surprise, I finished the project with a performance. I invited sixty people I had contact with during the four months. In the performance I made little demonstrations of what I had been up to:

The walls were covered with hundreds of my drawings.
I read imaginary dialogues with famous people.
I showed complex rhythm games in which my arms and head and feet simultaneously moved in contrasting rhythms.
I role-played a phone call with a dear friend, while dancing in a portable hammock.

The audience was comprised of people who had been touched by the experiment in some way. They wrote and drew their own responses to my show-and-tell presentation. The event felt intimate and playful.

Inquiries

The Intuition Project was a personal investigation of 1) motivation and 2) time.

My question about motivation was, “If I let go of all external obligations, what will I discover about what really motivates me?”

Without any external obligations to guide my choices, I was forced to turn inwards. Dozens of times a day I found myself asking the following questions:
- “What is my intuition telling me?”
- “What is being called for, right now?
- “What might the deepest part of me be asking for?”
- “What do I really want, in this present moment?”
- “What does my whole self want?”
- “What is happening in my body?”
- “What is my gut response?”
My questions about time were, “If I take away the external structure of a clock and date book, what will I discover about my internalized relationship to time? How can I forge a healthy relationship with time, even as the culture I live in is speeding up?”

A Challenge
My own mind was the biggest challenge of this project. Without any outer obligations to distract me, old personal grief rose to the surface of my consciousness, like a splinter. The impact of ancient family history, which I believed I had resolved long ago, exposed itself at another depth. As pain made itself known, I recognized how much the "busy-ness" in my life is a defense against undigested hurts that I do not want to feel. Through my commitment to follow my intuition, I had committed myself to my life at a new level. Apparently, a residue of pain was part of the bargain.

Another surprise was how little resistance I had to this grief. By listening to my intuition from moment to moment, I was developing trust with whatever happens. I even trusted the pain. I learned to surf big waves of feeling, without having to push them away. It was a relief to just be with whatever arose, pleasant or unpleasant.

What I Learned

Without any plans, how do I know what to do next? It took two weeks of being confused before I discovered the most significant learning of the project: the interrelationship between intuition and time. When I am alive to this present moment, I have more access to intuitive knowing than I do if I am sitting in my memories or ruminating about the future. For example, when I ask myself “What do I really want?” I usually come up with a wide range of responses. As I add the phrase, “right now” the question becomes “What do I really want, right now?” and my answer becomes clearer.

I discovered that the most immediate way to return myself to the present moment is to bring attention to the subtle sensations of my body: the feel of the pressure of my feet in contact with the floor, the tension in my shoulders or the undulation of breath in my belly. Paying clear attention to body sensations brings me into the present moment and the next moment simply reveals itself.

Within two weeks I had inadvertently fallen backwards into mindfulness practice, although I don’t think I knew those words at the time and I had no prior experience with formal meditation. In some aspects, the four months were an intensive period of awareness training, not unlike a Vipassana retreat. Vipassana (also known as Insight practice) is a form of Buddhist meditation that involves bringing mindfulness to what is happening in the present moment through bare attention, without judgments that push or pull on the flow of awareness.

Years later when I started reading about Vipassana, I was grateful to discover that others had been doing this moment-to-moment awareness practice for 2500 years. I was relieved to find an actual map of the territory I had accidentally stumbled upon. When I began formally practicing Vipassana in 1990, it already felt very familiar.

Sensation in the body is one of the primary objects for mindfulness in Vipassana practice. The body is a vehicle for brightening awareness of what is happening right now. Although at the time of The Intuition Project I had never practiced Vipassana, I had done many other forms of somatic (body-mind awareness) training, especially Kinetic Awareness and Body-Mind Centering. (For more information, click on Somatic Lineage Charts.) An important distinction between my orientation to body awareness before and after The Intuition Project is intention. The underlying goal in my somatic training had been to become something: a more articulate dancer. The Intuition Project was not about becoming a better anything. Like Vipassana/insight meditation practice, the goal of The Intuition Project was simply to see my life more clearly. This is what I saw: when I remember to connect to the present moment, the next moment simply reveals itself.
A frame of a conscious intention distinguishes these four months from all other four months of my life. In this case, my focus was following my intuition from moment-to-moment. The Intuition Project is an example of a learning tool I think of as intentional framing, which simply means holding a chosen intention for a pre-determined period of time. (For other learning tools, click on Learning). Since The Intuition Project, I often assign a specific intention to a specific period of time. Examples of other intentional framing periods include a month of not-knowing, six weeks of advancing into chaos (click on Pathways, Lifedeathafterdeath), and a year of grace. By framing a specific period of time with a conscious intention, the designated period becomes an intensive experiential research laboratory. This process of intentional framing is a potent learning tool for developing a wiser understanding around a chosen topic.
Synchronicity and minor miracles became the tone of my daily life. Some days I drove my car around the city with no destination in mind. As I drove I just noticed, “turning right here; now turning left…” One afternoon, my car landed in front of a stately old mansion I had never noticed before, across from Lake Calhoun. I entered the building to discover a Japanese man, wearing traditional Buddhist robes, giving a lecture about Zen to a group of children. The mansion was the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, and the man was Dainin Katagiri-roshi, its first abbot.

I showed up places I was not invited, and people seemed to expect me. Names popped into my head and new relationships began. One morning, while lying on my floor, a name kept repeating over and over in my mind of a woman I had heard of, but never met. An hour later I found an envelope in my mailbox addressed to me, but enclosing a letter meant for her. She was, like me, one of five hundred faculty members at the state university. The letter had fallen out of its envelope and a secretary had mistakenly sent her mail to my home, even though our names were nothing alike. The woman (who taught in the Psychology Department) was about to embark on a Ph.D. program in Creativity and the Arts. She invited me to be an advisor for her program. As I stopped being surprised by the constant flow of synchronicity, I began to take for granted that this universe is woven together with a magic I will never understand.
I was surprised that The Intuition Project spontaneously concluded with a performance. I entered this project at the end of the first decade of my professional adult life, a period marked by intense career building and ambition. The Intuition Project liberated me from the veneer of careerism I had come to associate with my work, especially around the act of performing. I returned to a primary clarity about the value of performance in my life as a whole. I perform to digest my life and connect with others. Through The Intuition Project performance, I recognized a “virtual community” of people whose lives had been impacted by the activity of me just following my own intuition. At the performance we came together and acknowledged an interconnectedness that was real, but invisible. Performance is the most comprehensive way I know to integrate what I learn and to share it with a lot of other people all at the same time.
The period of my life that most resembles The Intuition Project was the six months following my daughter’s birth in 1998. The main difference is that instead of following the flow of my own inner momentum, I followed the flow of hers. The Intuition Project prepared me for parenting in ways I could have never imagined. It gave me a taste for being in the present moment and allowing the next moment to unfold, which is the essence of being with a baby. The Intuition Project also burned off a lot of my ambition to "be somebody" in the outer world. This turned out to be very convenient as a new mom, given how little status our society grants to the work of raising children. Much of the suffering I witnessed with other new mothers was due to a drastic shift in identity. Our new mom and baby class was haunted with unspoken cries of "Who AM I?!?!? The Intuition Project paved the way for me to accept the "not-knowing-who-I-am" transition phase of motherhood. In fact, I experienced not-thinking-I-knew-who-I-was as a huge relief, like finally dropping a heavy overcoat. Eighteen years later, I still incorporate what I learned from The Intuition Project into my everyday life. It was a four-month exercise in deep listening.

Resolutions
I resolved to listen more deeply, to myself and to others.