it's been referred to as many things a gut feeling women's intuition even a first impression this month we're covering the subject of intuition with today's focus on trusting your gut light from lantern presents knitter spell i'm magical maker katie rempe and i'm the maker of magic james devine join us as we stitch together the symbiotic relationship between crafting and the craft why is it the gut i guess we'll find out but katie have you ever not trusted your gut yeah yeah so you know it it happens for a lot of things but um i do recall at one point microwaving a food item uh for probably a little bit too long and as i was going to pull it out i remember thinking i think i'm going to burn myself on this and sure enough i ignored it reached right in and as soon as i grabbed it i was like if i'd only listened to my gut jim i wouldn't have had to clean up a huge mess and have a minor burn on myself what about you um i remember one time decades ago i was working at a counter downtown actually for a rental car company someone came in to the uh front counter and asked me for change a ten of five and five ones for that twenty and then quickly turned around and asked me for change again for something and i felt in my gut that the he was pulling a fast one on me but i thought i can count i know how to count and so i gave him change again but he was doing it in a way that was very like oh wait oh no no no wait wait wait i need like change for the search for that or whatever and sure enough he shorted me five bucks from that twenty dollars he walked away with twenty five dollars with his fast talking and i didn't realize it until he was out the door and i i was like i knew i was i knew that these kind of little scams happened which is why you know the company policy was like don't give out change because it's just easier to tell everyone not to give a change so i told my manager i'm like i know here's the five dollars i'm putting back in the drawer these are our learning opportunities the hard way right okay what about a time when you did trust your gut oh yeah i like those better probably most recently just the making the decision to leave my previous job you know it's a big decision obviously it's usually easier to stay where you're at it got to the point where the signs for me to accept that it was time to leave were so clear that when i finally said to myself oh i think i have to go it was like a sense of relief the weight that lifted off my shoulder the pit in my stomach that i hadn't really realized had been living there for so long this sense of stress you know just released and i was like oh okay so you know has it been an easy journey no but was i happy where i previously was no so you know i would much rather try something different see how it goes yeah yeah how about you that's really cool trusting my gut well in reflecting on this question i realized i happily realized that i trust my gut more often than i than not trusting my gut and i but i think that's been practice over these many many years i think that if i think about myself in my 20s i probably didn't trust my gut very often or didn't know how to trust my gut but as a palm reader as a psychic as a witch as i think i really utilize my gut a lot i utilize my intuition quite a bit um i mean one of the most obvious that i i have talked about in the past is trusting my gut in responding to the message i first got from you oh yes so if i'll tell the story again because not everyone is going to go through and listen to all the podcasts and find the story this podcast is a result of me getting a random direct message from someone that i had never met those direct messages that end up in your instagram message requests
folder yeah yeah sure enough there was a message from katie and with a legitimate sort of like question about whether i had ever considered people's hands who were knitting who were knitters and i had never thought about that but my partner my boyfriend cloven nitz and my husband richard crochets and it was a relevant question to me because i'm often sitting on the couch with a knitter on my right and a crochet or on my left but i also had a gut feeling i had a sense of oh that's an interesting question and it interests me but i beyond that there was something about the question or the way it was worded or something so i responded and then engaged in a conversation over a direct message and man am i glad because my intuition was right you're one of the coolest people and now we have a podcast over a year old oh my gosh seriously we made a baby together yeah i know right right from our homes yes
in a way i i trusted my gut too because i didn't know you when i first saw you on instagram and just because i saw you on a couple of lives didn't necessarily mean that what i perceived of you being cool would actually end up that you would be cool at which you are like way uh better even than that so you know it it just worked out and luckily we have learned over time to trust our gut because as we said earlier we have ignored it before and paid the consequences right well you know it's also interesting did you know that i was in the puget sound pacific northwest area when you messaged me no it wasn't until like two months later and i didn't know that you were in the pacific northwest when you message me either but that's also what's interesting about trusting your intuition was not only did we totally get along and have conversations we then realized that we live well depending on traffic yeah if there's no traffic we live 40 minutes from each other yeah which is amazing because we could have lived i mean you could have been in maryland or or i could have been in california or who knows where yeah not london who knows well let's get into it we call it trusting your gut i mean why aren't we call it trusting my brain or trusting my spirit trusting my heart trusting my ancestors i mean trusting anything except for my intestine or trusting my digestion or my poop i mean if you think about it the stomach does talk to us a lot like when it's hungry it'll let us know when it's upset it sounds like a thunderstorm so it kind of makes sense that after doing some research i found out that the gut is like our original brain or our second brain nowadays does a lot of the thinking for us it's it's connected science-wise which i know you're excited to geek out about like 95 of the serotonin in our body is regulated uh in this area so it makes sense 95 of the serotonin is regulated by our gut that i'm shocked by that number which also makes me realize why we humans love food so much if this if 95 of the serotonin is regulated by our gut no wonder hashtag pizza well yeah or hashtag chocolate or what eat your feelings in general basically there's science eat your feelings because science yes but also don't eat your feelings because balance it is not insane of me that food helps me feel better mm-hmm even absolutely temporary or even i mean that's a real thing after you had shared some of that we did look at some of the science and i was fascinated with this whole like gut instinct thing and the science of it we'll put some links to some resources we found if you want to stay alive if you want to if we want to keep our brains alive we have to eat and so what we eat and the dangerous foods that are out there we need this constant communication between our brain and our gut to make sure that if there's something poisonous we evacuate it quickly if there's something really nutritious we seek it out again like all of these sort of feedback between the food and the things we eat and our brain are constant and before we had brains of evolutionary speaking we were just eating machines and so you think about a worm or something else it's just made to eat like that is their brain is their digestion the gut area is also your solar plex area happens to be related to the third chakra color yellow which again is like your your emotional system it's um you know how it it's where your energy lives so if you're a person who's always saying yes always trying to people please always trying to fix everything you're going to be depleted by this other side of the same coin if you are just overwhelmed and you can't say yes to anything you could be blocked you know and all of these then manifest as diseases in the body or you know stress which then leads to issues so again it's interesting that it would be connected all to this spot and and i i do believe also that this is likely the area where you know if you are a person who again is a big giver without having too much boundary you could have a lot of accords attached to this area note for episode in the future but like chord healing and like how do we resolve those chords and have a healthy balance with the chords that are there and yeah for sure and think about if you have gi issues how they could be related with the third chakra and whether you're you know they can manifest in physical ways that are very much one-to-one with what's going on if you're um if your connections are blocked and you have a lot of stuff that's building up that you're holding on to versus if you're too loose and you have you know a lot of the gi stuff that's too flowing and too loose or back and forth and you need more balance with that so if you're not feeling well ask yourself you know am i practicing healthy boundaries because if not it'd be a great time to change help yourself out even if for one week you know if you're someone who always says yes just one week say no and just do things that you want or don't do anything and reflect on how you feel afterwards you know did the world fall apart probably not um and do you feel a lot better probably so yeah there's a lot of power in saying no like we've talked about before change also takes time talking about change in those things i practiced doing a vegan diet for a week oh that was very painful because my body wasn't prepared yeah for the amount of legumes i was i was eating oh yeah and making little changes over time are also is also something really good with balance too but the metaphysical side is also thinking about how that contributes to the things that are physically there as well when we are looking for balance and i love that that suggestion which is like am i a people pleaser or am i blocking things or stuffing things down and what is one little thing i could do to practice something a little bit different and then notice what's happening mm-hmm exactly yeah we're never a master at anything we're always learning so i love that yeah that is so true and when we talk about the gut feeling or intuition intuition is often we think about this i'm going to follow my gut i'm going to have a sense in my gut and you talked about sometimes there's a pit in my stomach and is there's some science to that like i used to feel that when i spent too much money i was like i don't know what my balance is on my atm but i fee you know way back i'm like oh i feel like i'm spending too much money or i feel like that's not right even though i didn't balance my checkbook yet and sure enough every time i'd be like oh no that was right i i'm i'm on the edge i want to bounce a check remember bouncing a check before overdraft there's a difference between feeling sick to my stomach from fear and i think that this is around like your job like leaving your job like having the apprehension from i'm gonna die because i'm about to fall off a cliff or someone's about to kill me you know pit pit pit of my stomach fear versus the excitement or the standing in the presence of greatness or of potential success or potential freedom or like the fear of being free of the shackles so do you have some insight into like discerning the difference i have always felt like going after the thing you're scared of or apprehensive of doing is always the way to go i mean obviously not to hurt yourself and all that use your judgment right but um or your gut trust your gut ask yourself why are you afraid of this thing are you afraid of this thing i think it's the knowing yourself that allows you to decipher that you know it's is it so new that you don't know what to expect and that's why you're quote afraid or do you just need to re-adjust your mindset to when you feel that feeling know that it's excitement at opportunity we have evolved to have a negativity bias to keep us from eating the poison berries the second time assuming we survived the first time it's like stamped into our memory so that we remember next time we remember things that are not actually threatening more even if they're not actually threatening we remember them so that we don't repeat them and so we end up with this negativity bias and that is part of where this gut feeling comes from and so i think one of the things that we can do is sit and present ourselves and say is this a thing that is going to threaten my actual life or my actual well-being am i am i standing in the presence of potential greatness or of potential death and be in that space um there's a great book called playing big by the author tara moore and she makes a distinction in the jewish tradition of two types of fear one is called pashad which is the fear of danger and the other is your ra which is the fear of like the fear that you experience when like an angel appears and that is a different kind of fear that isn't the fear of like the terrible fear that's a fear of the glory and the greatness of the amazingness of what you see right like oh yeah so i think of that and i think it's good we don't have that in english we don't have it in our culture this distinction of those two types of fears and it doesn't really serve us well unfortunately so i think that's something that we could think about and have that intuition and discern between those two things yes it's especially nowadays it's incredibly powerful for you to recognize when fear is being used against you as a tool it's one of the easiest ways to manipulate people but it's also really easy to recognize once you know it well i think we should take a break and when we come back let's talk about how to apply our intuition to both magic and to making i can't wait we'll be right back hey knitter spell fans are you inspired to incorporate magical making practices into your knitting but not sure how to start well i'm launching two online courses in may that will focus on this very subject i'm excited to announce knitting with color magic and intuitive color correspondences in knitting with color magic you'll learn the basics of color magic and how to apply them to pre-existing patterns your own designs and how to craft an intent based on color combinations then dig even deeper into your personal connection to color with intuitive color correspondences where you'll explore new ways to perceive color and the emotions they emit within you everyone sees color differently and this class takes that into account as each student develops their own list of magical meanings for 10 popular colors to be the first to learn more sign up for my newsletter at lightfromlantern.com all right well let me tell you what i'm up to dance your magic at the international divination event may 20th through 22nd in dallas texas on saturday join djs madame pamita and yours truly james devine as they mix up an epic dance party inspired by studio 54 and the 78 cards of the tarot deck studio 78 a carefully curated song list of vintage dance music each associated with one of the cards from the tarot and accompanied by projections of that card up on the wall baby you will immerse yourself in the good vibrations of the archetypes as you dance the night away grab your tickets at the international divination event dot com oh in our second half i want to ask you jim a couple of questions mainly around trusting your gut how do you think that it really works why exactly so i think that you need three things i think there's always that magic number three shows up all the time trusting your gut i think there's an asterisk with a statement i just want to say um so trusting your gut i think is a function of three things one is self-knowledge one of the biggest axioms that the greeks had was know thyself and there's a lot of different meanings that are ascribed to this this sort of commandment and this idea is like know that you are not a god but it's also to know thyself to know who you are and to have that self-knowledge and to seek that self-knowledge as we seek self-knowledge as we seek ourselves and seek to know ourselves and to know who we are our intuition in my opinion in my view grows and deepens and becomes something that serves us i think that our intuition needs an access it needs a place to ground otherwise it's just random floating bubbles of you know rainbow bubbles that are floating along like someone's you know has a bubble machine down the street and we're chasing one thing after another and we might get lucky sometimes really system there's nothing to ground it or or ground it in and i think that my intuition has gotten so much better a because i i'm practiced with my intuition as a professional psychic but i'm also older and wiser and i know myself so much more as a human so i have to say that that is what i believe is true now why the asterisk because of course there is psychic unknowable random like what how how the heck i had no business knowing that information yep and yet that information was given to me and i have to say that yes that happens and that's a real thing so i think number two on this three point these three points that i have and these are in order of importance second most important is knowledge of your craft or and i mean that with the lowercase c with like knowledge of the craft of knitting or painting or crochet or weaving or cooking whatever the craft is that you do and then craft of the capital c uh with your magical craft with your practice in the you know magical work that you're doing and if you're knowledgeable if you understand what the four elements are and what they mean and how they show up if you're knowledgeable in a magical tradition and you're trained in it if you have that knowledge and you have yourself knowledge you're starting to build a good foundation for your intuition to pull from and to be then grounded against something even more tangible and uh a system or of a mental model for it to you know bounce against oh now i understand how these colors go together with the the yarns that i picked oh now i understand how these elements inter interrelate in this magical working that i'm doing for instance yeah good color and and then finally it's the skill do i have the skill to hold the knitting needles in this way or to do this yarn over or to you know actually understand how to do this color work deftly and quickly or carefully and slowly either way do i have the skill to write these sigils in a way that is clear you know craft this ritual overall and facilitate it for this 30 people and so these are practice in your skills that then are the third level of that that build upon knowledge of the craft and the knowledge of myself and so i think it's this little pyramid type of diagram that i think helps with the foundation of intuition and we have those built i think that that then can apply be applied to anything but especially where we have a gap so to the level at which i have those built and don't get down on yourself if you don't have those things you are fine you are perfect where you're at you're growing those things you're working on those things maybe you're new to witchcraft maybe you're new to knitting maybe you're new to cooking or painting or whatever it is that's fine yes you're new to discovering yourself you've just come out of a very restrictive religious environment and you're just discovering witchcraft or magic that's great we're inviting you to take to discover and to welcome you with love to enjoy the process yes yes so you can apply this intuition now to where you're at and know that it's going to be a beautiful exploration and you can apply this where you have a gap in knowledge so you don't currently know something and you can use your intuition while you seek knowledge how many times have we used our intuition when we didn't know something and we pulled a book off a shelf and we found what we were looking for or we've opened the book to that spot and we've been like oh that's just what i was or we've talked to somebody and the conversation was just isn't it funny i was just thinking about that thing and i needed to know and it came up or we asked the universe for something and then someone shows up and they deliver the information or something really related to the information we were seeking mm-hmm so it shows happens oh i know me too it happens so often it also helps when we're saying oh i don't know what crystal's best for this working i wonder what crystal and i don't have a way to get that knowledge maybe i'm out in the middle of the desert or somewhere and but this seems like from what i do know it would work and i'm just going to use my intuition or i found this plant and i didn't bring a book with me or it isn't in the book that i have i'm just going to use my intuition don't eat unidentified plants or rub them in an orifice or anything but i can use it in a or breathe or smoke but i can use it in a in a ritual way that's safe and i can use my intuition in that way so that was kind of a long answer but what is your reflection on that i agree totally if you don't know what you want and what you're thinking then having intuition is meaningless probably you're gonna write it off really quickly and and do nothing about it for making you know i have used intuition in terms of like what color am i gonna pick for this person you know okay yeah part of it is i know the person and i know what kind of colors they like however also there's only a limited amount of yarn in front of me perhaps in certain amount of colors so which one of these with the limitations would they like best and sometimes the intuition is knowing the person well enough that you should just ask not everyone likes a surprise and sometimes they appreciate the surprise better when they can be a little more involved in it and i have to say that's the kind of person i am and maybe that's because i'm a control freak gym okay a little bit didn't you come up with a term yes in fact uh so when knitting i would often find that i would be doing something and for some reason i would think oh did i do something wrong did i nah it's fine it's probably fine and i have coined this term as knit tuition many times jim i have ignored my knitter's intuition and then found myself pulling back rows and rows of work to go back and fix the thing i wasn't paying attention to but apparently knew somewhere i've gotten much better at noticing that one because ripping out to drag i love that term knit tuition and i think that if you're a cook you have a cook tuition and if you're a crocheter you probably have a crochet tuition maybe that's what a sculptor feels like if you're one looking at a block you know i remember being in a um fine arts class in my early college days and getting a big rock of soap stone to carve into something and i was like but it's just a stone i didn't have like the conceptual mind at that point when he was like well you know so-and-so just saw the sculpture in there and then carved it out and i was like what so um i think that's maybe part of intuition as well you know it's that inspiration of newness kind of in the same realm what do you think yeah my first degree is in fine art i remember telling my mom even as a young kid she asked me because i would draw all the time she would say what's the most inspirational thing to you and i looked at her and i said i think i was like seven and i said a blank sheet of paper
i know out of the mouths of babes right dang i didn't think about it i mean i didn't think it was very profound at the time she told me this later also but i've always thought that a blank sheet of paper was the most inspiring thing because oh my gosh i could draw anything on that blank sheet of paper we were always encouraged to express ourselves creatively what's your opinion what keeps us from trusting ourselves do you think that there's a block i think personally some people don't like taking on responsibility of things so when you commit to making a decision like that whether it's to trust your gut or not you know that's still a choice you're making so i think if you're not the person that wants to even take the risk you're probably not even going to want to look at the signs but again i think that's part of knowing yourself maybe those people don't really know what they want so it's it's hard for them it would be an impossible or a huge anxiety for those types of people to get the blank paper because everything's possible and thus it's a crippling thing you know isn't that kind of ironic yeah like overwhelming analysis paralysis yeah exactly it's way easier to create in most cases uh when you have some guidelines to follow yeah that's true there is studies around creative constraints being actually spurring more creativity than uh like a green field as a social scientist oriented person you know our society is not really set up for us to trust our intuition in the patriarchal capitalist misogynist all the things you know society that we have it isn't like we are socialized or we're taught or we're supported to trust our intuition yes instead we are really taught observational science and there's good reason for that for sure and we're not taught any other sources of wisdom and we are in a society that is really christian more than it is anything else no matter how we're raised at home so the idea of intuition is very restricted to specific ways in which it's appropriate and following that intuition is something remarkable because it's not normal or normalized or really allowed in some in common societies so i think that that's something that also blocks us from thinking about it all the time or feeling like it's able to be used in a common way i think that's something to also give ourselves a little grace around like it isn't something that you were really made that was really made okay yeah right well and if anything some of the connotations make it sound like a bad thing i mean women's intuition oh only women can do it because we're emotional we can do it like i know what they're trying to say through that you know yeah mother's intuition only mothers have it about their children that's okay it's not okay for men to have intuition we are socialized out of that like we're not allowed to have strong intuitive sense that's very much a toxic masculinity that's ingrained into men that we are not allowed to be intuitive and it's heartbreaking because it kind of destroys sensitive men a lot of ways that's why you know little [ __ ] jimmy was called too sensitive huh i'm not the only one i mean there's many other men who experience that or who were sensitive as children who then mask themselves for safety and don't express that and there's other people who do that too because they were brought up as that's double worship or that's evil or you know you're too sensitive or stopped feeling that or because it was wrong because what they felt their intuition was invalidated and so since it wasn't reliable enough then it must not be right yeah or it was misinterpreted yeah or it was or it's scary i don't wanna i had a feeling that grandma died and then i found out she did and then i shut it all down because i was too afraid i had a client like that mm-hmm yeah or you shared it with someone and now they're afraid of you or freaked out you know yeah even if you're okay with it right you sure have it yeah you share with someone and they freak out and then you realize that you'll be ostracized if people find out that you have this gift yeah i would actually say that is the number one reason that i uh hesitated at telling people i was involved or interested in any of this for the longest time was just like oh well you know there's crazy katie again doing her weird things and i guess we'll just leave her alone to do that and yeah you know you're one of the weirdos luckily we are the weirdos mister exactly well i don't know about you but i learned a lot in this episode yeah what are some of the things that really stick out to you from this episode i mean really kind of reflecting on on the like patriarchal women kind of put down of this a little bit and how you know it should be talked about as power instead of something to be feared yeah women's women's power is definitely to be feared that's why women are oppressed but this is also true of everyone who's oppressed oppression theory exists and the root of that is if we let anyone who is oppressed gain power the reason we oppress them the queer people the black and brown people and the women is so that they don't gain power because the people in power are terrified of it which means you have incredible power yeah and they're standing on a thin foundation that's right that's right so resist yes rise up what am i going to reflect on for the week my brain is in my intestines as much as it's in my head maybe even more so this weekend my husband and i are always saying the nose nose but i think it's kind of part of the our digestive tract it's like oh right like intuiting things with my gut and that my gut is actually part of like the food and the digestion and all that i'm really gonna like take that on and think about how physical food and my digestion and my intuition and my knowledge how those are combined i'm really grooving on that so that's what i'm taking away from this week we wanted to do our card pull in a little bit different way one of the things that we wanted to do with our card pool is to associate our card pool with the topic that we're talking about can i do the card poll do it please okay so the question for this week is what card will guide us on using our intuition going forward all right so you ready katie let's pull three of cups this is like the perfect card for this intuition there's three people it's a water sign for emotions the cups i mean it looks like they're having a great time which when using intuition i find that being in a better kind of party state of mind actually kind of high vibrational frequency really helps and i feel like that's where these people are at yeah i think about the number three like that magical number three keeps showing up all the time yeah and i think about how our intuition is often informed by symbols like when you were leaving your job didn't you say that you kept seeing signs yes or symbols to do it like show me a sign and like that number three is often part of that and yeah the water this is a water element this is about emotions and we feel emotions in our gut a lot of times as i think about the flow like look at their robes and their hair like there's a lot of flow and and intuition is a lot about being in the flow and i love how the detachment like you said detachment when we're dancing and having fun and we're detached then the intuition could just like come to us but when we have this grip on something and we're thinking about it like you know this isn't a sword's card of thoughts or gripping a sword there's a great great quote about trying to grasp water like you can't hold on to the water while you're in the water but you can relax and float so that's the insight around intuition for this episode and i hope that's useful well if you have any insight on our card or if it's towards the end of the week and you've had something happen around this card we'd love to hear from you you can always drop us an email at knit a spell podcast gmail.com and we'll read it on live well not live but you know live recorded all right well we'll see you all next time on knit a spell thanks thanks for listening if you enjoyed the show consider sharing it with a friend leaving a review on itunes and spotify or following knit a spell on instagram you can also subscribe to the like from lantern youtube channel to enjoy full episodes of knit a spell and see our happy faces you can also learn more about ratings classes and events going on with your favorite maker of magic james divine by visiting thedivinehand.com and subscribing to his newsletter then follow jim's fun and interactive instagram account at divine hand gym keep up with katie the magical maker by subscribing to her newsletter at lightfromlantern.com you'll even receive a free knitting pattern as a thank you gift then follow katie on instagram at lightfromlantern for even more magical making tips see you next week
