Guidepost 5 — Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty

Who doesn’t crave a bit of certainty when it comes to careers, love, purpose, and the future? I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t appreciate even a smidge of predictability. It helps us plan our day, week, month, and year. Truly, I get it. Knowing what's coming is essential for making plans and adjusting accordingly. Having said that, the constant pressure to have everything “figured out” doesn’t exactly bring peace of mind—it breeds anxiety, self-doubt, and perfectionism.

Our brains, thanks to evolution, are designed to find patterns and predict the future. We often borrow these patterns from past experiences, which is helpful at times, but not so much when we start ruminating. This mechanism, while beneficial, can spiral out of control when hijacked by uncertainty, leading to chronic worry and distress. We tend to forget that the only truly certain time we have is the present.

Let me share my rollercoaster relationship with certainty and uncertainty. My first pregnancy was a breeze. From conception through the first trimester, the worst I faced was heartburn, and only when I ate bread and risotto! Random, right? The second trimester was smooth sailing—positive appointments, belly measurements on track, clear urine tests, optimal weight. Everything was peachy. At 39 weeks, my midwife was on holiday, so I saw a different midwife who as the norm is in the latter stages, measured me. She raised concerns when my belly measured 35 weeks, setting off alarm bells. Heartbeat was strong, but they were worried. Unfortunately, a 3 p.m. Friday appointment meant no immediate scan, so I was told to monitor myself at home and head to A&E if anything seemed off. (Seriously, what’s a first-time mum-to-be supposed to “monitor”? Or even attribute to be “off”)

As luck would have it, labour started on Sunday night. When I called the labourline to book into my midwife-led unit, they informed me I had to go to the hospital due to notes on my pregnancy indicating I was now high-risk. Yep! Unexpected and out goes my so-called birth plan. This was my reality check with certainty versus uncertainty.

I remember leaving that appointment, my head spinning with terms like placenta calcification, stillbirth possibilities, and halted growth. Just an hour earlier, I was certain of a normal pregnancy, and suddenly, I faced the uncertainty of even having a baby.

I gave birth the following week, surrounded by uncertainties, but ultimately walked out of the hospital with my baby—four days later! What kept me going from Friday to Monday? Two things: faith and intuition. Intuition got me through the weekend, and faith saw me through the birth. I’ll be using Brené Brown's definitions here, rooted in her extensive research. I relate to the terms in her expansion rather than a dictionary based definition or the religious understanding of faith.

Intuition is our ability to hold spaced for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we’ve developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith and reason.

Faith is a place of mystery, where we can find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of out fear of uncertainty.

Without leaning into my intuition, getting through the weekend would have been tough. I trusted my instincts and the knowledge I'd gained throughout the pregnancy. I also took a long walk on the Saturday which  helped center and calm me, plus I think it kickstarted labour. Dissecting medical terms on ‘the infamous google-doc’ would have spiralled me into anxiety, hence making things harder. In my experience, tension is the uterus' enemy when it comes to effectively getting your baby out.

Since then, I've learned that uncertainty is a constant companion in parenting. There's no guarantee of how things will unfold. I can plan and prepare, but that doesn’t ensure perfection. Take birth plans, for example. My carefully crafted plan flew out the window the minute I left that midwife appointment, even though I didn’t know at the time. On the day I called the labourline, I found out I was high-risk and needed to be in a hospital with a team ready for anything—my worst-case scenario and definitely not part of my birth plan! With faith, I trusted the new team around me and thankfully, had a healthy baby at the end.

As our children grow, we can care for them as best as we can, but we can't guarantee their health will always be perfect, how their day at  nursery or school will go, the friends they make, how they’re treated by others or how caregivers and teachers treat them. The list is endless. I rely on faith, as defined above. It’s freeing and reminds me to savour the present moments even more.

Later, I'll dive into how letting go of the fear of uncertainty helps with  letting go of perfectionism and letting go of numbing & powerlessness from guideposts 2 & 3 respectively.