Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In

# 23 Anxiety or Intuition? Trusting Your Inner Voice

• Sari Stone • Season 1 • Episode 23

Share episode

Send us a text

Navigating the subtle line between anxiety and intuition can be challenging, especially for those of us working to overcome old patterns of worry. During a recent trip to Los Angeles, a seemingly normal airport departure turned into a powerful lesson about trusting myself and recognizing when my body is signaling genuine intuition versus habitual anxiety.

Take Aways

• Recognize when anxiety may actually be intuition trying to get our attention
• How old conditioning can make us doubt ourselves even when we're right
• Learn the differences between anxiety and intuition in our bodies
• Explore how different upbringings affect our responses to stress 
• Learn how to listen through our fears 
• Find the courage to trust yourself when it might make you seem "too much"
• Embrace affirmations that strengthen self-trust and inner wisdom

Please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend, leave a review, or share it with a family member who's navigating the balance between self-trust and old conditioning. Your growth matters, your intuition is valid, and your journey is unfolding in divine time.


Thank you for joining me!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Just Count Me In a podcast about coming home to yourself and finding your expression, figuring out who exactly you came here to be, also known as living your best life. I'm Sari Stone and I'll be your host. Hey, welcome back. I hope you had a great week and you're enjoying this new moon energy and you're enjoying this new moon energy. This actually was an episode that I recorded after visiting my daughter in California back in November, but I really wanted to share it with you now. It's about trusting your gut when your intuition might sound a little bit like anxiety. But well, stay tuned and listen. This is for anyone on a journey, especially growth-minded parents, teens, curious people who are learning to trust themselves again and are relatively you could be relatively new at it, or you could be in this work for a while, as I've been. Still, these things come up Today. We're diving into a really delicate, confusing space, because sometimes it is hard to know whether we need to listen to our intuition or whether we are just falling back into old habits of worry and control. So if you've ever asked yourself is this my inner knowing, am I right on, or am I just being anxious again, this episode is totally for you.

Speaker 1:

We just returned from a beautiful trip to Los Angeles to visit my daughter and my son-in-law and my little great, my little grandbabies, and it was magical just being with them. She just moved and I was there helping with the boys. Let's be honest, I was just really playing while she unpacked. It was just one of those trips where everything flowed and I love being in her presence so much. There was laughter connection. And then we got to the airport to head home. We had our boarding passes, everything was fine. We were definitely more than enough time, my son-in-law was awesome at being on time and I was calm, a little sad about leaving, but calm. But then all of a sudden I started getting hit with these waves of I'm just going to call it like it was. It was anxiety and it caught me off guard, because I am not someone who fears flying.

Speaker 1:

I do have a tendency sometimes to shift into like a hyper vigilant mode, like kind of like double checking, everything needing things to go just right, scanning for anything that could go wrong. It's kind of the shadow side and I've worked hard to quiet it over the years, but it definitely pops up from time to time. So when I noticed the feeling. I tried to just breathe into it and ignore it, to be honest with you and push it away, but that voice kept coming back. Just that you better check things again. Then I noticed we were in the terminal and I noticed that our flight wasn't showing up on the display. I kind of blew it off and my husband was like just, you know, relax, just it's going to show up. I'm going to go get us coffee. And, honestly, that voice, the one that was trying to chill me out, trying to tell me to just not be the old me, just kept saying something is wrong and the uneasy feeling kept getting worse. And here we are.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to change this pattern of trying to control things and worry about things needlessly. And here's where the conflict came in for me and it might come in for you, like this sometimes Like do I trust that nudge, like, if it's a quiet nudge, that something's not right and go with it, or do I dismiss it, just assuming that I'm relapsing into my old behaviors? I am one that tends now, 90% of the time, to just go with trusting my gut, trusting my heart. But with these old behaviors, these old obstacles that I've worked so hard to overcome. I was afraid that I was relapsing into an old pattern and that's walking a tightrope for many of us, especially those of us doing inner work. It's easy to kind of gaslight ourselves when we've outgrown a former version of who we were, but sometimes the very things we're trying to still outgrow still serve us in certain moments.

Speaker 1:

Anxiety is not always the enemy. Yes, you heard me say that Anxiety is not always the enemy. It's been a survival mechanism. It heightens awareness, it gets us moving, it sharpens our senses and it can be the voice screaming when we're not listening to the whispers that something is wrong. Sometimes it's not even anxiety at all. Anxiety is just a name that we gave it and it's actually our intuition, which wasn't getting our attention, and it's just. It disguises ourselves in a new costume, like if you're not going to listen to me when I make your chest tight or I make your stomach feel like there's a knot, then I'm going to make your heart pound and I'm going to keep doing something to get your attention. Because it was a knowing that something wasn't right.

Speaker 1:

So, after sitting with the rising uneasiness for too long, I finally listened to the part of me that said you need to go ask and check. So I took a deep breath, kind of swallowed my pride I know my husband was probably disappointed that I reverted back to my old worry war itself. In this case, thank goodness I asked because, guess what? We were in the wrong terminal. The airline had made a mistake. We got checked in, we had it on our boarding passes. We were completely in the wrong terminal. Our flight was boarding somewhere else and we had 20 minutes to get there before the doors closed.

Speaker 1:

And if you've ever been to LAX, it's no joke. It's very crowded, very hustle, very packed. And we are not 20 anymore. Okay, so we can't just sprint like you see in the movies, people sprinting through the airport gracefully dodging other people. And it didn't look like that when we did it at all. The first thing we did was look at each other and thought, okay, are we going to panic, go to blame? Are we going to start blaming each other, blaming the airline, and get mad and demanding justice? Are we going to freeze or do we just kind of run? I looked at Stan, he looked at me, we said nothing at all and we just took off. Now here's something I haven't really talked about yet.

Speaker 1:

My husband and I come from really different upbringings. He grew up in a household full of trauma, where it was safer to just not believe in good things because disappointment was inevitable. Hope was dangerous. I grew up in a house where there was, of course, enough dysfunction for sure, but my internal world was always full of belief. My mom used to call me her Alice in Wonderland child. I could dream up 10 impossible things before breakfast. I lived in the realm of possibility and my imagination was my reality. For me, even in chaos, I always chose belief because I do believe. It's like a knowing that I have.

Speaker 1:

So when we are under pressure, like that sprint across the terminals, these parts of us tend to come out. He tends to revert to the practical we are not going to make it, I'm not even going to try. And I tend to revert to the magical we're going to make it. I see us on the plane. Thank goodness, I'm really married to a saint and I told him I'm going to go. I'll hold the plane for you or go. If you can go faster than me, try to hold the plane for me. They told us it was impossible and that the gate was going to be closing and I still could see us on the plane going home. So the polarity that we have really plays out in different ways in our relationship. It usually balances itself beautifully.

Speaker 1:

In this moment, I just had to hold the line of belief for both of us. We didn't run like Olympians. It wasn't graceful, it was like two grown adults trying to defy time and terminal logistics. But somehow in me something new we were going to get that flight. We got there just as the clock turned 9.01. I watched the digit change on my watch. Technically, they should have been locking the doors. They didn't care that they had sent us to the wrong terminal. They clearly weren't concerned. But luckily, luck was on our side as it usually is for me, and the pilot had been slightly delayed. So, just as they were letting the passengers the standby passengers board, the pilot arrived and we were those people that ended up on the plane just panting out of breath the last few people and we made it.

Speaker 1:

The miracle is not that we caught the flight. The real miracle is what it woke up inside of me. I realized, once I settled down and got my nervous system back to safety, that I had doubted myself, despite all this work I've done, even when my instincts were right, that I almost let the fear of being too much stop me from acting on what I knew was a situation that we needed to investigate. So that old part of me, the one who equated worry with love and worry with being an adult, was still present. But really, that part of me is honestly no longer in charge anymore. No longer in charge anymore. This experience reminded me of a bigger truth, I guess.

Speaker 1:

Healing doesn't mean never feeling fear. It means just knowing how to listen to yourself through it. It means asking okay, is this anxiety or is this actually awareness? Is this my old pattern or is this my intuition? Maybe most importantly, it means believing in yourself, believing in the most evolved version of you, even when she's whispering or the old voices are screaming. So I'm going to ask you where in your life do you still second-guess your inner knowing and how do you physically experience intuition versus anxiety? What's the difference? That's what I had to look at within myself, where I just stopped, breathed and then really gave a deep thought to when is it coming from my head and when is it coming from a knowing? When is it coming from a knowing that I have that something's wrong.

Speaker 1:

What were you taught about worry or responsibility growing up? How does that affect you now? I, honestly, was taught that responsible people worry and that it's part of being a parent, it's part of caring about somebody. They would say I'm I was really worried about you. Or I would say I was worried about you, as if I, the worry was taking some kind of action. Worry doesn't do anything, okay. Worry is just a total waste of time. But it took me years to unravel that and still, once in a while, it'll crop up. My husband's really good at calling me out on that. He'll say you know, you're warding again like we're awarding.

Speaker 1:

When was the last time that you believed anyway, even when others didn't? And what part of your past still tries to run the show? When you're under stress, how can you lovingly thank yourself and then take it to a new place, lead it from your current self? So these are some of the affirmations that I've been using since this experience. I trust my inner voice, even when it speaks in whispers. My intuition is wise, it's grounded and it's connected to the truth. I believe in myself. Especially when I'm under pressure, I am guided by presence and faith. I'm no longer ruled by old patterns.

Speaker 1:

So thank you for listening to this episode of Transform your Life. Just Count Me In. I'm hoping that you found some value here and, if it resonated, please subscribe to the podcast. That really helps support me. Share it with a friend, leave a review, share it with a family member, and if you know anybody who's navigating that balance between self-trust and being aware of old conditioning, let me know.

Speaker 1:

Your growth matters, your intuition is really, really valid and your story, your journey, is unfolding in divine time, but it doesn't mean that things are always going to be perfect just because things are unfolding exactly as they should be. When we are ready for something and we ask for something, the universe is going to keep giving it to us until we are that energetic alignment, that same energetic vibration. And if there are some things in the way, if there are some obstacles that need to be cleared, something like this may happen, and in my case it was self-doubt and not believing in myself enough, so there were some things I needed to work on there. So until the next time, trust the whisper and just count me in.