When have you ever sung words, or listened to lyrics knowing they deliver something deeper that you don’t as yet understand?

What music, songs, or lyrics bring you to a moment that captures exactly where you were, what you felt: the tears, the laughter, the grief, the purest emotion that you can’t put into words?

Music is unmediated and beyond the power of words, but our heart intelligence understands it instantly and the intuition behind some of the greatest music every written has the power to show us a future that we only dimly understand intellectually but understand emotionally.

This is intuition and there is a science to understanding it

I am wholeheartedly passionate about Joni Mitchell and her music. Her songs have played a pivotal role in my life and I am fascinated by the way she navigates her creative process. I recently watched an interview where she gives her own assessment of how intellect and intuition are related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RujocOTwZk0&feature=related

“Well, my intuition is more accurate than my intellect.  My intuition will tell me – like, first of all the instinct is like a computer chip; it’s like Shakespeare on a pinhead. You get a lot of information very fast. Now if you want to expand on that you’d have to go to your intellect to expand it, to tell it, but you would know with instinct a tremendous amount . . . Intellect is a lot slower. It’s a good tool, but it’s linear and I think there are other ways that knowledge comes that are clearer and quicker”.

Joni’s words got me thinking about the scientific nature of our intuition and if the intuitive knowledge that Joni refers to can be explained by quantum physics and what the HeartMath Institute refers to as the “Science of the Heart”. Quantum physics defies our physical intuition about how the world is supposed to work. In the quantum world, objects resist such classical banalities as “position” and “speed,” particles are waves and waves are particles, and the act of observing seems to change the system being observed.

So what does this mean for Joni Mitchell and my longstanding appreciation of how she composes her songs? It means that I now understand that everyone sees a different truth because everyone is creating what they see.

When Joni talks about her intuition being more accurate than her intellect, I wondered if Nikola Tesla would agree with her statement when he states that “My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists”.

Intuition is a deep knowing or sensing and can be described as the “feeling like reaching out and feeling something in the dark, but not with our hands, with our minds”. Blind people often sense a wall before they get to it, this is intuition and it operates from our subconscious mind (Nelson, 1993). As we learn to become more intuitive, more of our subconscious mind becomes more conscious and this creates expansion in our awareness. This is why science has a place in understanding the intuitive process in our reality.

I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all

Both Sides Now (1969) – Joni Mitchell

HeartMath researchers, and many others around the world, have conducted controlled and scientifically validated studies to determine how human intuition works. This research has helped validate what we have believed for a very long time: the heart is the source of wisdom, higher intelligence and intuition.

As a current participant of The Institute of Intuitive Intelligence Third Level program, I wanted to further explore the scientific and quantum nature of how Joni’s intuition process works.

I remember that time you told me, you said
“Love is touching souls”
Surely you touched mine, ’cause
Part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

Case of You (1971) – Joni Mitchell

A primary definition of intuition is the ability to understand or know something without conscious reasoning. There are three types of intuition – implicit knowledge, energetic sensitivity and nonlocal intuition. I believe that Joni creates her music by using nonlocal intuition, which cannot be explained by past or forgotten knowledge/implicit processes; or by sensing environmental signals/energetic sensitivity.

I wish I had a river so long,
I would teach my feet to fly.
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

River (1971) – Joni Mitchell

When our rational mind communicates with words, our intuitive mind communicates with a feeling and for the most part, is nonverbal (Myss,1996). Deepak Chopra explains that there have been many breakthroughs in science to seeing reality as a whole and the common sense world that we live in (Nelson, 1993). Deepak suggests that our perception leads us to believe in space and time as one gigantic nonlocal activity and even though you think you see yourself in a mirror, you are actually seeing one state of your physical body. That one state, accessible through the five senses, isn’t the whole. The whole also includes the quantum state of the particles that make up your body (Adams, 2017).

Our cranial brain intelligence may try to make rational sense of this, but “our intuition is actually a functioning of our heart intelligence, not our cranial brain intelligence. Unless we are willing to accept that we are one with all there is, we cannot start to change our minds about our true nature and we cannot truly hear our intuition”. (Adams, “Spiritually Fierce” – 2019). The results from the HeartMath research appear to provide compelling evidence to suggest the physical heart is connected to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of time and space: the heart’s wisdom can help us discern our issues, communications and decisions more than we know.

Understanding that our minds have over-evolved and that intuition holds our heart intelligence, is a gift that Joni Mitchell shares with the world through her song writing as she explores this strange and beautiful atomic world. Her music has allowed me to experience her joy, wonder and pain through her lyrics.

Joni Mitchell. You are my Quantum Queen.