What a great piece. As I was reading, I kept seeing a picture of a pendulum swinging, and it made me think about how in my own experience, whenever I have tried to learn a new (usually socialization) skill, my instinct has been to lean hard into practicing it, studying it, exercising it at every turn.
Inevitably, along the way, I would trip and fall over myself, much like a baby does when first learning to walk. (This cost me at least one dear friendship, maybe more.) Over time I've observed this same pendulum swinging in most people around me. It seems when we want to learn a new skill, it must become THE new skill and it is THE thing that we are focused on practicing and absorbing. Over time, though, the pendulum swings and we find the middle ground of expression—the tool becomes second nature and we are not quite so clumsy.
All this to say, I did this same thing with the concept of intuition, though I think the seed was first planted as an exercise in feeling feelings at all. I didn't understand that a "warm sensation in the middle of your chest" could also be understood as feeling "love." Was that lack of knowledge from trauma, or was that me just being autistic and not having any clear inner mapping of my outer life experiences? I'm not entirely sure.
Over time, I worked on my "intuition muscle" almost exclusively and it landed me in some really tough spots. Like you I feel the teetering between expert knowledge/studies/science and my lived experience/gut. With the help of a therapist, I realized that for me, in a healthy place, the wisdom of the mind and the wisdom of the body are in communication—and my work is to remind myself that one should never be allowed to clobber or silence the other. When I support that communication, things tend to have a steadiness I've found so elusive much of my life. But it is, of course, still a swinging pendulum much of the time. :)
You pose some fascinating questions. If there's one thing I've learned in middle age, it's to listen to my intuition, much as I'm learning to listen to my anger. It doesn't mean my intuition is always "right," but it does mean my gut is trying to tell me something, and I would be well served to figure out what that is. As women, and particularly as working women, we are trained to suppress both our intuition and our anger. We can't live in either of these spaces, but we do need to value them and give them the attention they deserve!
Love this! I think that if everyone focused on sharpening their intuition we would be a bit “further along”. I think living in the patriarchy has convinced us to shut it down. We have to survive after all and it’s a radical act to step outside “the systems” which were built without intuition in mind.
Right now people who strongly live in their intuition are kind of seen as modern quacks.
A lot of my friends who have strongly developed relationships with their intuition don’t live very loud lives either. And they definitely don’t go around saying they follow their intuition. People who are well adapted to know themselves just quietly live dope lives without the need to shout it from the rooftops.
What a thoughtful piece. I find that illness is often the way our body first gets our attention. My autoimmune disease ultimately brought me into much closer connection with myself. Intuition is a slippery thing, and anxiety so often tries to speak as though it's intuition. I've found though that intuition has a calmer clearer voice. If I'm in my thinking mind, if I'm grasping for something I want, if I'm worrying about danger, if my body feels tense.... it's probably not intuition. It's an ongoing work in progress trying to discern between these different parts, but intuition tends to have a calm, grounded, spacious, embodied quality for me.
I really appreciated this post and how you confront the borders of our inner knowing eg via trauma, desires, etc. I find it most hard to access my intuition when I am in a confusing situation that has a lot of facets to it and feelings overlogging the system. Perhaps under your framework it is an opportunity to be kind to myself and say: I have more experience to gain before I can feel comfortably intuitive about this and in the meantime, do the best I can with the information I have.
This was a fantastic read, thank you! I found myself nodding and cringing and questioning my own sense of *just knowing* when you wrote about intuition and fear. I often have a feeling of absolute certainty that something terrible has happened to my kids or someone I love, and it’s only been recently that I can separate that fear out from my strong gut feelings (of which I have a lot and which are sometimes proved correct). Just because i feel something in my gut doesn’t mean it’s a gut feeling though, you know?
And funnily enough I think it’s been my own experiences with weird and complex health issues that’s taught me this. I get physical symptoms that feel very similar to fear, only I’m not actually afraid at the time. Taking a pause to realise that has been huge - there’s a physiological reason for that sensation and nothing terrible has happened! Also, the number of times I’ve been convinced that I finally know what condition I have only to find that no, I don’t, has also taught me that sometimes I grasp on to a certainty, a knowing, simply because the idea of not knowing is overwhelming sometimes. It’s a protective thing, and maybe that’s the intuitive part?
A great article, Rachel, thank you. Trained as a rationalist, it's taken me a lifetime to learn to trust my gut. And I think being in a safe place is key.
On DDT. It has saved a lot of lives, but... Kaiser in California took blood samples from pregnant patients in the 50s and 60s and still has them. They're a time capsule. Researchers found that the daughters and granddaughters of women with higher levels of DDT in their blood had four times the incidence of reproductive cancers. See Elena Conis's book
I have not honoured my intuition as much as I should have when i was younger. I want to be someone who can channel it. The idea that I could summon it at will used to scare me. I would often intuit things before they happened when I was younger. It scared the bejeesus out of me, so I slammed the door on that whole thing for decades. Now, that I'm older, and have gotten myself into health trouble because I ignored my intuition and inner knowledge for too long, I'm curious to learn more about how to channel it and use it. I'm opening the door a crack and not going to be afraid of it anymore. If it's a skill I can conjure or develop, I'm open to learning more.
A great exploration of intuition Rachel. From my layperson’s reading, the line between intuition and bias is micro thin in places. Intuition about the threat of coloured skin, about bodies that don’t conform to (or at least approximate) the cultural ideals. Sometimes its love, sometimes its flu, sometimes its bias.
You wrote so graciously what I've been pondering about. I've been practising and learning about discernment as intuition can sometimes be confusing and self-sabotaging. Should I take this business opportunity? It sounds cool at first (my intuition likes it), but it means overbooking myself. Or, I intuitively knew I had an anxiety attack. It turned out I underfuelled myself.
I’ve always thought of intuition as a product of my subconscious mind noticing clues that my conscious mind is overlooking. That might suggest that my experiences play some part in my mind recognizing a situation, good or bad. My traumas resulted in me overlooking my intuition and had me relying on my conscious thoughts, reasoning and not trusting in the feelings. In fact, I never could distinguish one feeling from another for much of my life. I needed a therapist to help me learn what fear, joy, excitement, dread, sadness, happiness, etc each felt like in my body. I don’t really even get any sensations in my stomach except for fear. Sadness makes my fingers tingle. I think that I access my intuition if I quiet my mind and feel for the rightness of something, and I can only tell you that it feels like relief. What my body feels is relaxation rather than tension. Where all the chemicals initiate from to cause this process is unknowable to me, and maybe that micro-inspection would just hinder the process. 🤷♀️
I am learning to acknowledge my intuition which was labeled by my parents as me being “crazy” as a child. Ignoring it most of my life to avoid being crazy, actually caused my mental breakdown and putting myself in many dangerous situations. I have studied the vagus nerve and now completely trust my gut.
This is so resonant. Especially that point, as mentioned below, where inner knowing intersects with trauma. For years, I intuitively connected to people but as these relationships ran their course, I would inevitably realize that the connection came from a deep-seated, unconscious attraction to traumas from my early years. I kept making friends with women like my mother, who was domestically abused by her second husband. How many savior scenarios did I plot my way through over the years? Only to wake up and realize, these connections might be intuitive all right, but the material which created this energetic connection was trauma. After years of counselling, I don't do this any longer. Having said all of this, as these trauma reservoirs have been drained and cleaned, I have become a highly intuitive person who can sense lots of different unseen realities...and the gut sense helps me immensely.
Thanks for this wonderful article. It makes me feel more respect for my intuition, whic I value, but at the same time it reminds me to use it or channel it with responsability.
Terrific essay, Rachel. You addressed a topic we all can relate to and you did so by taking us along with you on a nuanced conversation. So, first, I appreciate the craft.
You make an important distinction between involuntary memory––the taste of Proust's madeleine summoning forth his childhood memories or your presence in a techy office summoning forth traumatic memories–––and intuition, which is a reaction to a present situation. Of course, telling one from the other is difficult.
And the DDT ban in Africa was an incredibly tragic unintended consequences. It doesn't receive a lot of publicity, because Rachel Carson is an environmental icon.
What a great piece. As I was reading, I kept seeing a picture of a pendulum swinging, and it made me think about how in my own experience, whenever I have tried to learn a new (usually socialization) skill, my instinct has been to lean hard into practicing it, studying it, exercising it at every turn.
Inevitably, along the way, I would trip and fall over myself, much like a baby does when first learning to walk. (This cost me at least one dear friendship, maybe more.) Over time I've observed this same pendulum swinging in most people around me. It seems when we want to learn a new skill, it must become THE new skill and it is THE thing that we are focused on practicing and absorbing. Over time, though, the pendulum swings and we find the middle ground of expression—the tool becomes second nature and we are not quite so clumsy.
All this to say, I did this same thing with the concept of intuition, though I think the seed was first planted as an exercise in feeling feelings at all. I didn't understand that a "warm sensation in the middle of your chest" could also be understood as feeling "love." Was that lack of knowledge from trauma, or was that me just being autistic and not having any clear inner mapping of my outer life experiences? I'm not entirely sure.
Over time, I worked on my "intuition muscle" almost exclusively and it landed me in some really tough spots. Like you I feel the teetering between expert knowledge/studies/science and my lived experience/gut. With the help of a therapist, I realized that for me, in a healthy place, the wisdom of the mind and the wisdom of the body are in communication—and my work is to remind myself that one should never be allowed to clobber or silence the other. When I support that communication, things tend to have a steadiness I've found so elusive much of my life. But it is, of course, still a swinging pendulum much of the time. :)
You pose some fascinating questions. If there's one thing I've learned in middle age, it's to listen to my intuition, much as I'm learning to listen to my anger. It doesn't mean my intuition is always "right," but it does mean my gut is trying to tell me something, and I would be well served to figure out what that is. As women, and particularly as working women, we are trained to suppress both our intuition and our anger. We can't live in either of these spaces, but we do need to value them and give them the attention they deserve!
Love this! I think that if everyone focused on sharpening their intuition we would be a bit “further along”. I think living in the patriarchy has convinced us to shut it down. We have to survive after all and it’s a radical act to step outside “the systems” which were built without intuition in mind.
Right now people who strongly live in their intuition are kind of seen as modern quacks.
A lot of my friends who have strongly developed relationships with their intuition don’t live very loud lives either. And they definitely don’t go around saying they follow their intuition. People who are well adapted to know themselves just quietly live dope lives without the need to shout it from the rooftops.
What a thoughtful piece. I find that illness is often the way our body first gets our attention. My autoimmune disease ultimately brought me into much closer connection with myself. Intuition is a slippery thing, and anxiety so often tries to speak as though it's intuition. I've found though that intuition has a calmer clearer voice. If I'm in my thinking mind, if I'm grasping for something I want, if I'm worrying about danger, if my body feels tense.... it's probably not intuition. It's an ongoing work in progress trying to discern between these different parts, but intuition tends to have a calm, grounded, spacious, embodied quality for me.
This is well laid out, thank you. I often struggle with discerning the difference between my intuition and my fears.
I really appreciated this post and how you confront the borders of our inner knowing eg via trauma, desires, etc. I find it most hard to access my intuition when I am in a confusing situation that has a lot of facets to it and feelings overlogging the system. Perhaps under your framework it is an opportunity to be kind to myself and say: I have more experience to gain before I can feel comfortably intuitive about this and in the meantime, do the best I can with the information I have.
This was a fantastic read, thank you! I found myself nodding and cringing and questioning my own sense of *just knowing* when you wrote about intuition and fear. I often have a feeling of absolute certainty that something terrible has happened to my kids or someone I love, and it’s only been recently that I can separate that fear out from my strong gut feelings (of which I have a lot and which are sometimes proved correct). Just because i feel something in my gut doesn’t mean it’s a gut feeling though, you know?
And funnily enough I think it’s been my own experiences with weird and complex health issues that’s taught me this. I get physical symptoms that feel very similar to fear, only I’m not actually afraid at the time. Taking a pause to realise that has been huge - there’s a physiological reason for that sensation and nothing terrible has happened! Also, the number of times I’ve been convinced that I finally know what condition I have only to find that no, I don’t, has also taught me that sometimes I grasp on to a certainty, a knowing, simply because the idea of not knowing is overwhelming sometimes. It’s a protective thing, and maybe that’s the intuitive part?
Such a thought provoking letter - thank you! 💚
A great article, Rachel, thank you. Trained as a rationalist, it's taken me a lifetime to learn to trust my gut. And I think being in a safe place is key.
On DDT. It has saved a lot of lives, but... Kaiser in California took blood samples from pregnant patients in the 50s and 60s and still has them. They're a time capsule. Researchers found that the daughters and granddaughters of women with higher levels of DDT in their blood had four times the incidence of reproductive cancers. See Elena Conis's book
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-sell-a-poison-the-rise-fall-and-toxic-return-of-ddt-elena-conis/17131461
Also Rosanna Xia's series in the LA Times on DDT dumping off the California Coast.
There are alternatives.
I have not honoured my intuition as much as I should have when i was younger. I want to be someone who can channel it. The idea that I could summon it at will used to scare me. I would often intuit things before they happened when I was younger. It scared the bejeesus out of me, so I slammed the door on that whole thing for decades. Now, that I'm older, and have gotten myself into health trouble because I ignored my intuition and inner knowledge for too long, I'm curious to learn more about how to channel it and use it. I'm opening the door a crack and not going to be afraid of it anymore. If it's a skill I can conjure or develop, I'm open to learning more.
A great exploration of intuition Rachel. From my layperson’s reading, the line between intuition and bias is micro thin in places. Intuition about the threat of coloured skin, about bodies that don’t conform to (or at least approximate) the cultural ideals. Sometimes its love, sometimes its flu, sometimes its bias.
You wrote so graciously what I've been pondering about. I've been practising and learning about discernment as intuition can sometimes be confusing and self-sabotaging. Should I take this business opportunity? It sounds cool at first (my intuition likes it), but it means overbooking myself. Or, I intuitively knew I had an anxiety attack. It turned out I underfuelled myself.
I’ve always thought of intuition as a product of my subconscious mind noticing clues that my conscious mind is overlooking. That might suggest that my experiences play some part in my mind recognizing a situation, good or bad. My traumas resulted in me overlooking my intuition and had me relying on my conscious thoughts, reasoning and not trusting in the feelings. In fact, I never could distinguish one feeling from another for much of my life. I needed a therapist to help me learn what fear, joy, excitement, dread, sadness, happiness, etc each felt like in my body. I don’t really even get any sensations in my stomach except for fear. Sadness makes my fingers tingle. I think that I access my intuition if I quiet my mind and feel for the rightness of something, and I can only tell you that it feels like relief. What my body feels is relaxation rather than tension. Where all the chemicals initiate from to cause this process is unknowable to me, and maybe that micro-inspection would just hinder the process. 🤷♀️
I am learning to acknowledge my intuition which was labeled by my parents as me being “crazy” as a child. Ignoring it most of my life to avoid being crazy, actually caused my mental breakdown and putting myself in many dangerous situations. I have studied the vagus nerve and now completely trust my gut.
This is so resonant. Especially that point, as mentioned below, where inner knowing intersects with trauma. For years, I intuitively connected to people but as these relationships ran their course, I would inevitably realize that the connection came from a deep-seated, unconscious attraction to traumas from my early years. I kept making friends with women like my mother, who was domestically abused by her second husband. How many savior scenarios did I plot my way through over the years? Only to wake up and realize, these connections might be intuitive all right, but the material which created this energetic connection was trauma. After years of counselling, I don't do this any longer. Having said all of this, as these trauma reservoirs have been drained and cleaned, I have become a highly intuitive person who can sense lots of different unseen realities...and the gut sense helps me immensely.
Thanks for this wonderful article. It makes me feel more respect for my intuition, whic I value, but at the same time it reminds me to use it or channel it with responsability.
Terrific essay, Rachel. You addressed a topic we all can relate to and you did so by taking us along with you on a nuanced conversation. So, first, I appreciate the craft.
You make an important distinction between involuntary memory––the taste of Proust's madeleine summoning forth his childhood memories or your presence in a techy office summoning forth traumatic memories–––and intuition, which is a reaction to a present situation. Of course, telling one from the other is difficult.
And the DDT ban in Africa was an incredibly tragic unintended consequences. It doesn't receive a lot of publicity, because Rachel Carson is an environmental icon.