Toning Your Sixth Sense Muscle

Intuition

As I drove up the exceedingly steep Gooseberry Hill that leads to my home in the sanctity of a nature-based environment, my mind and my drifting thoughts were interrupted by my intuition. It was a warm and balmy summer evening in the Perth Hills. I’d been driving for about 35 minutes, having just finished playing indoor beach volleyball at a frenetic pace with opponents twenty years my junior, and the sand that had adhered to my exercise-induced, sweating torso and limbs was beginning to drop off onto the carpet with every act of accelerating or breaking.

It was still warm in the darkness and I felt a bead of perspiration trickling down my spine as I turned off the main road and onto our local hill. This eerie feeling that engulfed my senses was not something logical, at least not at first, even though the cynical naysayers could later connect dots back to previous similar experiences. It’s always easy to do that after the unexplained event has concluded. No, this was an intuitive feeling; a sense of danger perhaps? No, not even danger, just caution; just an awareness that something was imminent, something about which I needed to take care. It was as if something was communicating with me in a telepathic and non-verbal way.

Then, as I rounded the corner, my instincts silently yelled at me to stop abruptly. And there it was, right in the middle of my left-hand lane, a tall, dark and imposing streak of fur and muscle.

The Confrontation

The adult male kangaroo was standing bolt upright, flexing every sinew to gain every possible centimetre of height and glaring straight at me, with absolutely no intention of yielding his territory.

He saw that I had stopped, his gaze was fixed and resolute like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, but he needed no words to communicate his message, “You shall not pass!”

The filtered light from nearby houses perfectly complemented the stillness and tranquillity of the neighbouring National Park to create a completely surreal atmosphere, and time was somehow frozen, as if this ‘Prince of the Bush’ had commanded it.

It felt as though we gazed into each other’s eyes, even past my headlights, and our souls spoke the same language, the tongue of Mother Earth herself. He was stern but peaceful, and completely unfazed at the prospect of being run over by a huge chunk of metal, had I not sensed his figure in the night.

I couldn’t help smiling at the majesty of his sheer presence and charisma. He was the Al Pacino, the Godfather of the kangaroos of Gooseberry Hill, but I was his Marlon Brando, and there was a sense of mutual respect. After what seemed an eternity, I decided it would be prudent to resume my journey and not endanger other drivers, so I pulled over to the right-hand side of the road and slowly edged forwards, not wanting to alarm him.

Still showing no signs of being the least bit intimidated by my mere car, he appeared to decide that he could now acknowledge that I had shown him the correct degree of respect, commensurate with his pomp and stature. I swear he nodded at me, and I at him, like two tribal chiefs who had accumulated wisdom that lesser beings could only dream of. I may have imagined it, but he seemed to recognise me, or at least my car, and I was sure he was the one I had almost hit, or who had almost hit me, when he crossed that same road higher up late one night.

As he bent down so that his front paws could commence the awkward, leveraged, hopping motion, he averted his eyes and silently mumbled under his breath that it was time for him to begrudgingly exit stage right. Decision made, his chest raised and he began the world-famous, effortless skip, synonymous with a creature of magnificent grace and beauty. His body was silhouetted supremely as he hopped off back to the Bush.

What Did It All Mean?

The encounter was a meeting of minds in an undocumented language. There was a sense of shared community and connection to each other, as well as to the land that was hosting our brief stay in this dimension.

You may have picked up the feeling that I was moved by the experience. I could easily have hurtled around that corner, as many younger drivers do. My car would have been cactus and his wounds might have been fatal. Yet, somehow Mother Nature intervened and sent me a spiritual warning, not only to slow down, but that something about complying would make it worth my while. My intuition treated me to a special moment; the kind of moment that makes a man pause to reflect about everything, including the fleeting nature of our humble lives in relation to the eternity of our planet.

A mere glance at the night sky above our front garden confirmed that both Prince Roo and I were insignificant, mere blips on a slightly bigger blip in an endless vastness of existence, as well as simultaneously hugely significant and completely at one with the whole shebang.

I had a similar moment in 2005 when I swam alongside the face of a 4.5 metre whale shark at Exmouth’s Ningaloo Reef for a whole 13 minutes, gazing into each other’s eyes, like long-lost soul mates. That was one of those life-changing, totally serene moments I’ll never forget.

Anyway, the point of my story was that we ARE all connected. I’m a humble writer and words are my tools, though I am limited by the extent of my vocabulary to describe the subtle nuances, yet our sixth sense needs no such cumbersome limits. Our intuition transcends the need for conscious language and it is a gift that I believe we all possess, even if the majority of humans have forgotten how to access it. Like they tell you in gyms about toning muscles, with intuition it’s a case of ‘Use it or lose it!’

Our brave new world requires us to be better, to connect more, to collaborate with one another, so I urge you to give it a go and to exercise your intuition, or as some call it, your sixth sense. Unleash your gifts upon the world. Who knows what you, and even the rest of humanity, may discover about your true potential when you do!