On Intuition

Trust Your Inner Knowing in a Changing World

A gorgeous soaking rain moved through the Sierra foothills this week. Over an inch, at a nearly record early date. Gratefully taking some of the edge off fire season. I still haven’t quite adjusted to that long stretch, May through October, without a drop. This week felt like a cleanse on every level.

Nature felt it too. The plants that had settled in to endure yet another six weeks of heat and dry popped back into vitality overnight. The grasses that had gone brown glistened with green highlights. So hopeful. The moss on the black oaks plumped and turned vibrant, as if the last five months hadn’t happened. The earth went soft and moist. The dust that usually coats you head to toe after a hike was gone. Something in the whole system eased. For all of us.

There have been other surprises too. If you follow astrology, you too may have felt this eclipse season in its full glory. For so many of us, it has been intense, bringing to the surface what has been sitting like a low-grade fever just beneath, ready to be acknowledged and released. If you weren’t able to welcome and witness this uprising, or if you struggled to trust what you were really being called to, you surely were not alone.

That is what we explored at the salon last weekend. Trusting our inner knowing in a changing world. It was beautiful to watch what moved through when we made space and invited spirit back into the body. And it was humbling, too, in the places it asked us to simply welcome and listen. Sometimes a low-grade fever is not telling you what to avoid. It is telling you what to acknowledge and shift.

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I believe every one of us carries a deep well of inner knowing.

It is our most natural resource. Our innate way of being. It flows on the frequency of our own core essence, our spirit. Not the loudest voice in the room. The clearest one. Our grounded sense of true north.

It has always been there.

We were just never really taught about it. How to find it. How to trust it. How to let it lead.

We come from a culture that reveres the mind and what can be proven. We were taught to look outward for the answers, to the next expert, the next book, the next voice that sounded more certain than our own. Or to follow the blanket solution that works for everyone else, even if it doesn’t feel good to us. And it is not only culture. Most of us learned early, inside our own families, that the body’s signals were inconvenient, or too much, or simply not to be trusted over what the adults in the room had already decided was true. So, we adapted. We got quiet where we needed to use our voice, and reasonable where we needed to trust the pull in our gut. The knowing did not disappear. It just moved underground, buried a little more every year under the noise. The advice. The old story on repeat.

We are living in a tumultuous time, and so much of what surrounds us right now is unreliable, or built to look reliable when it is not. Even the mind, left to its own devices, is mostly running on old news. Past inputs, replayed as if they were current. Your inner knowing works differently. It reads what is true now, not what was true then. It does not hand you a universal answer. It hands you the one shaped for you, and trusting it is one of the surest ways to stay in integrity with yourself, moving in the direction of your own highest good.

I will also clarify here that when I talk about intuition, I am not talking about telling the future. Intuition is about reading the energetic field of the present, or near-present, multidimensional reality. Not just what you know in your mind, but what is present in the energetic field itself. What many of us are remembering now is something much older and more innate. That everything is energy. Including you.

And you do not need any experience with this. You do not need to believe you’re “intuitive.” You just need to be a little curious about what is already true within you. If you are curious, read on, and see what you find through your own inner knowing.

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Intuition is like music. It speaks through vibration, and the practice is learning to read the frequency of the notes. But before we can read the notes, we need to clear the field. After all it’s hard to see clearly through a dirty window. Or if we want to keep with the music analogy, it’s hard to hear clearly through plugged ears. In any event, there is a lot of noise out there. There is external noise: the news, social scrolling, overstuffed schedules, overstimulating environments, too many opinions competing for your attention. Internal noise: the mind that will not stop narrating, fear, approval seeking, the old stories you shape your life around on replay, reading the current moment through the lens of the past. Each one is a distraction from presence and embodiment, pulling you out and away from yourself.

Clearing it is an ongoing practice. One that you cultivate so that you have access to in the moments you need it. It is also one you return to each time you go looking for guidance. Mindfulness. Breath and centering practices. Intentionality. A little discipline, like putting the phone down instead of reaching for it. Space does not arrive on its own very often in our world. You build the capacity for it, and then you create it, moment to moment. Receiving the guidance of your intuition is not only about getting an answer. It is about the state you are in when you go looking for it.

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Once the field is clear, you begin to listen. Intuition rarely arrives as language, though it can, especially from guides. It most often arrives as sensation, as a whisper, in the gap before the mind gets involved. Some notes feel like a closing. A pulling back, a flatness, an unmistakable no. Others feel expansive. An opening, a lean forward, an aliveness that wants to move. Neither needs to be interpreted right away. It only needs to be noticed and trusted more than the commentary that follows it. This is the place to start.

It also helps to mind the gap. The sensation, the whisper, the light of your intuition arrives in the gap before your mind gets involved. A lean toward. A pulling back. A note, clear and simple, playing underneath everything else. Then, almost instantly, the mind steps in. It narrates. It doubts. It negotiates. That gap can be tiny, but learning to notice it, creating even a little distance between the signal and the story your mind tells about it, changes what you are able to hear. It is part of why I practice Non-Sleep Deep Rest, or Yoga Nidra. You can read more about that practice in another series on this Substack. The practice clears space in the moment, and it builds your capacity to clear that space on your own, whenever you need it.

Practicing intuition doesn’t require belief. It requires attention, and a willingness to trust the whisper before the mind steps in with its opinion. Like anything unused for a long time, the muscle is not gone. It has only gone quiet from disuse. It returns the same way it left: gradually, with practice, every time you choose to listen instead of override.

By now you already know you do not need experience for this, or a belief that you are intuitive. Curiosity is enough. I invite you to give it a try. I would love to hear what you notice.

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I spent most of my life being deeply intuitive without realizing it or trusting it. It took a decade to unlearn the override, and then to cultivate the inner capacity to trust what I was receiving. In this series, I hope to offer what I wish I had known all those years ago. I hope to help others reclaim this part of themselves. The world needs us all to show up, embracing our gifts.

Come curious. Come home to yourself.