What is intuition & how do you develop it?

I recently visited the emergency room at my local hospital, this time as the patient. What did my intuition say about this visit? While my symptoms suggested something scary might be happening, my felt sense was calm. My sense of my body was that this was a non-lethal illness, however the symptoms were concerning, so in we went. Happily, my intuition was correct and I’m in a bit of pain, otherwise fine. How did I know this was my intuition talking not wishful thinking? Do you know when your intuition is speaking to you (and do you listen)? What is intuition anyway?

My online dictionary defines intuition as “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”

So where does this “immediate” understanding come from?

After reviewing different concepts of intuition, I’d like to suggest that intuition is our animal self, our embodied (brain included) primate self that is always scanning our environment for safety, connection with other primates, food, shelter, and mates. In a natural environment, this part of us is exquisitely aware of our surroundings and our connections to both the natural world and other humans. This part of us tracks a lot of information that never reaches the conscious mind, that story-creating, rationalizing self. Information that only reaches consciousness when we perceive danger. Our animal self perceives in a gestalt, a holistic view of our world and registers changes in pattern quickly.

As an example, while we were seated in the waiting room of the ER, I was aware that my animal self quickly scanned the environment and noted, among other things, that there was a security officer stationed in a small office opposite the waiting area. (Good position to “keep an eye on things.”) While I was talking to my husband, the guard got up and left the office. My animal self immediately noticed this and alerted me that the guard had left. I have a fairly good connection with this part of me, and trust it to tell me when something important is happening in my environment. 

The species humans have been most successful at domesticating is ourselves. In doing so, our animal self voice has been muted. We no longer need the acute animal awareness or our surroundings in modern industrialized life. That doesn’t mean our animal self isn’t there. It is there but we don’t believe it has anything useful to say, and that’s a great loss. The art of honing intuition comes in noticing and calibrating your body senses in order to use this information in your daily life.

Calibration comes from first developing a connection with your animal self, and second, testing or investigating the signals that reach your conscious mind. This takes an openness and willingness to learn the language of the body-mind. With patience and repetition, you can learn to distinguish its signals. This is often felt as an urging or a sensation or an image, rarely a word. When such a sensation arises, and with the story-making mind on pause, notice what might be true about that impulse. Over time this becomes a conversation between the animal self and the conscious mind that can be very useful. Of course, this is especially true in the case of a sense of danger as is clear in the work of Gavin de Becker in his Gift of Fear masterclass.

Here are four other explanations of intuition. See what makes the most sense to you.

Rory Miller, in his book, Living in the deep brain: connection with your intuition, offers this view. He identifies four levels of awareness.

(1) The intuitive, animal self, that processes raw sensory data and memory to identify whether to approach or avoid basic necessities like food and shelter. This part takes over in a survival crisis and will fight for survival.

(2) The next level of complexity is the part that names what the animal self experiences. If I stub my toe on an unexpected branch on a hiking trail, this part says “ouch” and looks for the branch.

(3) More distant still from the animal self is the comparative self. This part compares what we are currently experiencing to prior experiences and evaluates those. 

(4) Finally, most distant from our animal self is the social self that asks what will others think of me. If we use our social self to decide whether to run from a tiger that somehow got loose from a zoo and is wandering the streets, we realize we may be lunch! Clearly Miller thinks that intuition comes from our animal self, and it’s messages are often squelched by the social self.

Carlos Castañeda, the mystic and writer, talked about seeing as a way of perceiving beyond the constraints of consensus reality.

“The difficulty,” says Castaneda, “is to learn to perceive with your whole body, not just with your eyes and reason. The world becomes a stream of tremendously rapid, unique events. So you must trim your body to make it a good receptor. The body is an awareness, and it must be treated impeccably.” And “The world has been rendered coherent by our description of it. From the moment of birth, the world has been described for us. What we see is just a description.” Moving beyond that description to connect with our actual senses is prerequisite for honing the skill of seeing.

Bert Hellinger, founder of family constellation work, has an interesting take on intuition and seeing. In his book, Love’s Hidden Symmetry, he says, “When I observe someone’s behavior, I observe what he or she does, but the person as a whole escapes me. When I see a person, I take them in as a whole. Then, although many of the details of what they do may escape me, I grasp with immediacy (apprehend) what’s essential about them, and I do this in service of that person as “Other” (page 205). About intuition, he says, “I experience intuition as a flash of understanding that shows me where to go, that orients me toward the future. Intuition comes without my doing anything. Seeing is different. Seeing means that I open myself completely to complex connections and allow them to work in me, to affect me” (page 206).

Finally, Eugene Gendlin, used the term “felt sense” to describe our whole body-mind response to our situation. He developed a process called focusing (which is a good way to develop your intuition). It has these basic steps:

1. Step back from what you think you know. Let the voices in your mind float past. If you meditate, you will be aware of the urge to grab these idea/thoughts and be carried off by them. Let them go.

2. Sense your situation without judging or naming, just sensing.

3. Feel your whole body response to your situation. Emotions will come and go like thought waves; resist the urge to grab and auger in on any particular emotion, instead stay with the whole body sense of what is unfolding.

4, Allow a word, thought or image to arise that resonates with your awareness of your life situation to emerge.

5. Act if appropriate, and beware the social mind’s urge to edit and impose social norms.

Are you in touch with your intuition? How do you describe that experience? How do you know when you are experiencing intuition and when desire or emotion are present instead? What experiences of your intuition have you had? Please share. I’d love to hear from you!