We’ve probably all had ‘gut feelings’ that we couldn’t explain but ended up being very accurate. For me it can be hard to listen to them when I can’t explain them. But we actually have more neurons in our gut than we do in our brain. Isn’t that mind-boggling? Now, as it turns out, it’s really hard to extract nutrition from the gooey mess our stomach sends down to our gut so a lot of those neurons are tied up in digestion. But our gut and brain talk to each other constantly and not just about carbohydrates.
If you need to put it in a box you can explain, it’s this - intuition is our subconscious recognizing patterns and predicting the future far faster than conscious thought. Deja vu can also be connected - to process something faster than we’re consciously aware so it seems like it already happened. Another juicy tidbit is that a huge portion of our perceived reality is actually our brain predicting what’s going to happen next and serving it up to our sense to basically confirm or deny. It also fills in gaps, adds context to stimuli, filters it, and a host of other input processing. It’s quite possible our subconscious is smarter than we can even imagine and knows what’s going to happen.
Buttttt, we also have scientific evidence that our hearts & minds can become coupled, synchronizing, when engaged with each other and other wild phenomena that suggest our brains are reading far more than our five senses are perceiving.
That’s where the phrase ‘sixth sense’ comes from. We know there’s something very woo-woo going on, but we can’t fully explain it. My mom had two instances in my childhood of intuition so strong that it looked from the outside like she knew the future. She was a nurse and always told us to ‘walk it off’ when we got hurt. Tough love. But one weekend my parents were going out of town and my mom was freaking the fuck out about me getting hurt. There was no reason. There was no risky activity I was going to be doing. She freaked out so much that she literally called every hospital in town and sent over my stats and her contact information in case I landed in one.
Two days later, while they were out of town, I had a car accident and landed in the hospital. The hospital had all of my info handy. We never doubted her intuition after that. Now, with some extra mental gymnastics, you could find some explanation for this outside of soothsayer stuff, but maybe we should just embrace and harness this patchouli-smelling concept.
And I’ve learned over the years that it’s actually a skill! Just like we use physical exercises to build skills with our senses we can use mental exercises to build our intuitive skills. And, rarely discussed, we can actually talk to our intuition and ask it questions. We can have conversations with our intuition about our life, our future, and even about other peoples’ futures. But there are some caveats.
Intuition is not emotion. Emotions are powerful forces in our mind, but they can be very complex and influenced by our environment, hormones, and even what we have eaten that day. Intuition is that background signal you have to turn everything else off to hear. You have to listen differently. and if you feel emotions rise up, you know it’s no longer your intuition talking. Intuition is a whisper.
Intuition is also like Mr Spock. Intuition is very literal and needs extreme precision. If we want to directly ask it things we have to ask clear, simple questions. Asking things like ‘will I succeed in my job?’ is so subjective - what’s the definition of success in this question? Financial success? Happiness? Career-advancing? Do you want one of those things more than the others? Intuition can’t give clear answers to complex questions. It can give you a gut feel that you can run with, but not in a conversation.
Intuition doesn’t speak english, or any other linguistic/semantic code. Written/spoken language is an agreed-upon social code that our brains can use, but the complex waves of neural firings are processing way too much information at once to slow it down to words. Dreams, flashes of memory, random imagery that only makes sense in larger context are all parts of the brain’s preferred language. You have to learn to interpret and look past the surface to try and understand what the images mean to you, based on your experiences.
It takes practice and analysis to understand our subconscious signals, but once we do it can start to feel like a crystal ball. When I was deep in intuitive practices I went to the horse tracks with friends (I have witnesses!) to test my skills. Calm and curious I picked six winners in a row and on race seven I decided to try a trifecta bet - picking first, second, and third, in order. I was a poor college kid and I knew it was super-risky so I only put $2 on the bet. I won $2,000 on that $2 and as my pick for third crossed the finish line in third I screamed something like “I’m king of the world!!” earning me skeptical side-eyes and weird looks from my friends. Then they all wanted to know my pick for race 8. I lost the last three races because my emotions were now tied up in it. I’ve only been back once and didn’t pick a single winner, I tell myself because of the pressure of that amazing day.