activating the sixth sense 〰️
a tale of wildness, peripheral vision of the mind, and mountain lions
You know when the hair on your arms starts to stand up? That instinctual chill when your body knows more than your conscious mind. This phenomenon is known as ‘piloerection,’ aka goosebumps. A person cannot voluntarily contract the muscles that make this happen meaning this chilling bodily sensation surpasses our conscious state of awareness. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, master storyteller, Jungian, and author of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves,’ explored a deeper explanation for goosebumps, describing it as our soul’s foresight that provides us an early warning system. “Among the Inuit it is said that both fur and feathers have the ability to see what goes on far off in the distance, and that is why an angakok, shaman, wears many furs, many feathers, so as to have hundreds of eyes to better see into mysteries.”¹ It’s like a sixth sense is turned on. The soul is always working behind the scenes and subtly making its knowing known to us.
I say this because my sixth sense was exceptionally alive on this random Saturday that was weird in every aspect: Mercury was in retrograde and it had just rained for a week straight in LA––the energy was fabulously funky, so what better time to go hike to a waterfall in Malibu. It was 4pm by the time I arrived and as I ogled at the normally brown, now lush green LA landscape, I sighed knowing sunset was quickly approaching. I would have to cut my hike short any second as the last bit of sun fell behind the mountains. I had just accepted this fate when I suddenly heard giggling mixed with gentle bickering behind me: A couple had also started their hike late! I ended up walking to the waterfall with them, ignoring my qualms about hiking past sunset and uncontrollably chuckling after getting hit square in the forehead by a tiny waterfall pebble.
By this point, it was dusk, still bright but gray, and something inside of me told me it was time for us to head back. As we walked along the narrow out-and-back trail, the hair on my arms began to prickle. The brush on either side had grown high from the rain, easily 6 feet+ making for unavoidable tunnel vision and clammy palms. I jumped. Something scurried a few feet ahead of us…a fucking bunny. It was hopping across the trail, all cute with its lil white cottontail. I was being paranoid.
The couple was babbling about something behind me, small talk that I couldn’t keep up with for my entire body felt like dog ears when they perk up into fuzzy triangles. We had walked a few more steps forward when I heard a very low, unfamiliar noise. I stopped us––“wait, did you guys just hear that?” They paused to listen. Nothing. Then a dove suddenly fluttered up from the brush with a low coo sound. “No, that was just the bird,” the guy said. He was right, I was off my rocker.
It’s ironic that we gaslight ourselves, questioning our own realities that we’re experiencing in a singular moment. This distrust in our own intuitive bodily signals is a result of the normalized disconnection to our bodies––more specifically a disconnection to our most animal-like, wild qualities that have been deemed as ‘uncivilized,’ or too witchy. As Pinkola Estés states, “we fervently point out how other creatures’ natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not surrounded by the same, as though we are not affected also.”¹ We have forgotten that we too are animals, that we too are part of nature, that we too have an inherent animalistic ‘nature’ as homo sapiens.
As this truth rushed into my mind on the trail, I suddenly remembered I was an intruder. I wasn’t just a woman on a hike, I was a middle-of-the-food-chain animal with nothing but pepper spray and a camera around my neck trespassing across territories run by apex predators. It was then, after the dove flew away, that I took three more steps forward and heard the absolute last thing I wanted to hear: A deep, low, guttural growl coming from 10-20 feet away. A mountain lion. Without a doubt. We couldn’t see where it was coming from because the brush was so high, but we knew it was incredibly close.
Mountain lions, or pumas, are stealth hunters meaning they stalk their prey until they are in the perfect position for a single-pounce kill.² Because they live solitary lives, their bodies are not meant to struggle or fight with the prey due to the high stakes of getting injured and not being able to feed/fend for themselves like e.g. an African lion potentially could with the help of their pride. So overtime the puma’s entire hunting strategy has evolved into an exquisite ambush––one that once you, or the prey, realizes what’s happening, it’s too late. They go for the back of your neck, biting around but not into the vertebrae (thanks to the nerve endings in their main canine teeth that help them literally feel what they are biting into) to quickly paralyze the prey (eliminating any possibility of a fight) and then finish them off.
So when the couple turned around to start running back down the trail, camp counselor Kristen mixed with a ton of adrenaline + puma fun facts kicked in. “Do not run,” I said in the sternest voice that has ever exited my mouth. The moment you run, their hunting instincts kick in and they see you as prey. We had to slowly walk backwards with our eyes pinned on where we heard the growl. When we were a bit further away, we could quickly pick up large rocks to throw (if needed) without crouching too long because when crouched, you look like their classic 4-legged dinner.
The sky was getting darker and I was mentally preparing to receive a near mortal wound through my white puffy jacket. During my adrenaline blackout, I imagined how the scar would heal and how soft the fur would feel during the physical altercation. None of us had service so we had to use the emergency call thing on your phone (yes, it does in fact work) to get a hold of Malibu patrol. They figured out our location and were about to send a ranger to escort us out when we were suddenly graced by absolute angels: ~ fellow hikers ~. One after the other came a couple, two guys, and then another duo, totaling us to an intimidating 9 humans vs. 1 puma. Given our numbers and that one guy had a taser and pocket knife on him, we felt ‘safe’ (enough) to walk past the puma on our way out without a ranger.
By now, it was pitch black out. We all were hooting and hollering and jangling keys to make it clear to the puma where we were and to hopefully scare it off. Despite my entire body still shaking from the adrenaline, the other hikers were still hesitant to believe us: “Are you sure it wasn’t a coyote?” Then, in near perfect timing, we passed under a large oak tree and heard from above that unmistakable, guttural growl: One greeting us as we approached and then one final goodbye as we continued our way out of its home.
They say that wolves, like humans, are pack animals and that when our ancestors would see them in the wild, they would feel some sort of kindred spirit, some unspoken understanding of one another’s ways––a silent cross-species “I see you.” But with the puma, it was like encountering an unworldly being––a deeply solitary creature that is only with its own kind for mating and then for a little over a year with their babies before they’re set off to fend for themselves.
After googling ‘mountain lion encounter spiritual meaning’ every other day, I read that “once the mountain lion comes down from its place of dwelling they become a symbol of what is wild or unconscious within us that is not yet fully understood.” They represent the part of us that is unknown, present but dormant, waiting to be awakened. And when you encounter something inherently wild, the wild inside of you cannot help itself but be stirred, for it is finally in the presence of its sister after so long apart––how could it not rejoice?
I can still hear and feel where the frequency of the growl penetrated my stomach if I sit in silence. When I replay it on YouTube (0:40) and hear the slight crackles like from stoking a fire, it radiates an ancient warmth from the top of my navel to the divot beneath my sternum. It permeates to the exact midway point between my heart and my solar plexus: a delicate area of flux that feels like the standstill when a coin is in between heads and tails. That location of the body holds both our mighty core strength and our softest, most vulnerable fleshy-ness. Ironically, this growl’s sensation was lying dormant next door to the area in which I had been cultivating my softness over the past few years. And with one penetrating growl, this puma flipped my coin of softness, revealing the other side to be aggression—a fierce protectiveness of the self that is harnessed power rooted in self respect, not uncontrollable rage. In finally feeling the tension of their polarity, I realized they cannot exist in totality without each other.
Like the sixth sense, some of our inner strengths that are lying dormant within are beyond our conscious awareness and control. But maybe that is okay. Alan Watts states in his book ‘The Way of Zen’ that “the true mind is no mind.”³ Everything works best when you allow it to naturally perform, something he calls “non-active functioning.” When we get out of our own way and “let one’s mind alone, trusting it to work by itself,” we become the source of “marvelous accidents.” “This “peripheral” aspect of the mind works best when we do not try to interfere with it, when we trust it to work by itself––’tzu-jan,’ spontaneously, ‘self-so.’”
Your wildness is flickering softly in a slumber, waiting for the right gust of wind or droplet of gasoline to awaken it into its fullness. Connecting to your non-active sixth sense and allowing it to function freely is the small breath that stokes the small flame. The sixth sense is more than just goosebumps, it’s this invisible level of awareness we have mixed with our mind’s peripheral abilities that together can feel like divine intervention. Like angels secretly watching over us, warning us, guiding us. It is our reminder of our innate connection to the divine. As stealth is the unique, wild nature of the puma, divine consciousness is the unique, wild nature of the human. We mustn't forget our true wild ways. For when we trust the sixth sense, we trust that we are always being guided.
3 Quotes 💡
Rick Rubin, record producer, on the goldilocks-like balance of creative work:
“Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.”
Déjà Rae, writer/poet, on taking your time:
“Everything starts small. Our culture has fooled us into thinking that instant gratification is the way this world works. That big things come overnight, that dreams are achieved all at once. But the truth is, good things take time, they take patience. They take the unshakeable faith that what you feel inside of yourself is so fundamentally true, there is not a person in this world that can strip you of it. Keep going friend. Time is always on your side.”
Unknown:
“If you are feeling buried, remember that you’re actually just being planted.”
3 Symbols
🐌 Snail (slowing down somehow allows us to move faster toward our goals)
🌱 Seedling (re-centering with a beginner’s mindset, we can always begin again)
🧲 Magnet (magnetizing what I want to myself)
3 Mantras 🪷
I lean into the growth that comes in the liminal.
My gifts are meant to be noticed and shared with others.
Creating is how I connect to the divine, for I am a vessel for divine creation.
With love,
Kristen 🐌 🌱 🧲
Sources:
¹ Pinkola Estés, Clarissa. Women Who Run With the Wolves. 1989.
² Childs, Craig. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. 2007.
³ Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. 1957.