HOW TO TRUST YOUR INTUITION

How do you build intuition? How does it come to you? How do you know it's intuition and not just conditioning, or fear?

These are the questions I get asked the most. We know our intuition is part of our feminine power but in order to access that power we need discernment. Because if we can’t tell the difference, we either bypass every instinct out of self-doubt, or we follow every anxious thought and call it a sign.

We are also living through a strange moment with so much AI being introduced. For the first time in human history, we are being sold intelligence… as a utility, something to purchase from outside ourselves. This is training us to look outward for answers that have always lived within. I think we have to exercise the inner knowing muscle so we don’t get too lazy and lose our ability to access inner wisdom regularly. 

This is why the practice of connecting to your own body is not just a wellness concept right now. It’s a form of sovereignty. 

What is intuition?

The “knowing” feeling you get when you just know… that’s actually just your body knowing before your brain has language for it. A tightness in your chest before a conversation. A warmth in your belly when you walked into a room that felt like home. This is not mysticism. This is biology.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying people with damage to the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for logic and planning. Here's what surprised him: these patients were still intelligent. Their reasoning was intact. But they couldn't make good decisions anymore. Why? Because the prefrontal cortex receives signals from the body — and in these patients, that connection had been severed. Without the body's input, the brain couldn't function properly. Damasio called this the somatic marker hypothesis: your body "tags" every experience with a felt sensation, and those sensations are essential data your brain uses to navigate life. This isn't a theory — it's been replicated across peer-reviewed research for decades.

And then there's your gut. Your enteric nervous system — the network of around 500 million neurons lining your digestive tract — processes information completely independently of your brain. Researcher Michael Gershon documented this extensively, calling it our "second brain." So a gut feeling isn't poetic language. It's a real biological signal from a real neurological system.

Intuition cannot only be explained with science though… it’s the voice of your soul so we look to ancient wisdom teachings to explain that. In almost every spiritual teaching the heart is the seat of the soul and the voice that our soul or spirit speaks through. Thats why we say “follow your heart.”

So when we talk about intuition, we're holding two truths at once: your gut is sending you data, and your heart is speaking a language that goes beyond data.

This is about learning to hear both, and trust what you hear.

The difference between intuition and fear

This is the work — learning to distinguish the two. And it does take work, because they can feel deceptively similar at first.

Intuition is quiet and still. It is a calm knowing that doesn't need to argue its case. It simply is. It arrives as the first impression, before the mind starts negotiating. It feels spacious — often as a sense of opening in the chest or belly. Even when the answer is difficult, there is a quality of rightness underneath it. It doesn't flatter you or shame you. It has no agenda.

Fear feels loud and urgent. Anxious, pressured, spinning. It escalates when ignored and tends to catastrophise or project into the future. It lives in the body as contraction — tightness in the throat, the chest, the gut. And it is personal and charged — loaded with old stories, past wounds, the voice of someone who once made you feel unsafe.

Here is the simplest way I have come to hold this: your intuition will speak to you in statements. Your anxiety will speak to you in questions.

When something arises, ask yourself: does this thought expand me or constrict me? Is it calm or charged? Is it about present reality or an imagined future? Does it repeat and escalate? Intuition whispers. Anxiety insists.

One more place to feel this distinction: if you notice yourself making a logical plan and getting "back in control" — that is fear, not intuition. Intuition doesn't need control. It simply points.

Trauma complicates this, honestly. When the nervous system has been trained to anticipate danger, it starts flagging safety as threat, and threat as familiar. This is not a failure of intuition. It is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect. But protection and guidance are not the same thing. This is why nervous system regulation is not optional for intuitive development. It is the foundation. A dysregulated nervous system cannot transmit clearly. The signal gets lost in the static.

Soothing the nervous system so the messages come through

The polyvagal theory maps the nervous system across three states: ventral vagal safety, sympathetic activation, and dorsal vagal shutdown. Intuition is most available in the ventral vagal state — when the body feels genuinely safe. When the amygdala is activated, we cannot access subtle inner guidance because the body is busy keeping us alive, not pointing us toward truth.

The ancient systems knew this in their own language. In Ayurveda, ojas — the deepest vitality — is depleted by stress, overwork, and scattered attention. In TCM, when kidney jing is exhausted, the zhi — willpower and deep inner knowing — becomes clouded. Rest is the precondition for wisdom.

Intuition is not a gift some women have and others don't

It is a relationship. And like all relationships, it deepens with attention, with trust, with time.

Intuition comes when you trust it. When you release control. It is a quiet knowing that whatever you need to know will show up in the moment you need it. Your body has been collecting data your whole life — every experience, every relationship, every moment of joy or grief has been encoded somewhere in the tissue, the fascia, the felt memory of being you. Your body is already in conversation with more than you can consciously access.

The practice is simply learning to listen… and when.

Why your intuition peaks at menstruation

There are certain points in the cycle when the signal comes through more clearly — and it's not random.

In the late luteal phase, research into cycle-related changes in hemispheric lateralisation suggests that the right hemisphere — associated with pattern recognition, non-linear thinking, symbolic processing, and holistic knowing — becomes relatively more active. You are quite literally thinking differently. Then at menstruation, oestrogen and progesterone are at their lowest. The prefrontal cortex — the planner, the editor, the social performance manager — is less metabolically active. What remains is something closer to the unmediated signal. What you actually feel. What you actually know, before the constructs have been assembled.

In many Indigenous and earth-based traditions, women on their blood were considered to be in ceremony — the veil between worlds thinner. They would withdraw not just for rest, but because their visionary capacity was considered so potent it could interfere with the outer world's workings. Depth psychology would say this is when the ego's grip loosens enough for the Self — the deeper organising intelligence — to speak more clearly.

The inner critic is louder in PMS. But so is the truth-teller. Part of the work is learning to distinguish them.

To harness this time of your cycle make it a practice to capture without editing. Get your thoughts down — voice notes, phone notes, journal pages — without filtering. All in one place, to revisit and make sense of later. Eventually you’ll start to see patterns and be able to tell which ones are the inner critic or fear or protection vs. true intuitive guidance. 

The practice of listening

Stop trying to receive. The more urgent your desire to access intuition, the more it retreats. Instead, create space and time for listening and nothingness. The things you most need to know tend to arrive when you stop reaching for them — in the most ordinary moments, the walk to the car, the shower, the space between tasks. When the subtle body awareness is clear, it makes way for intuition.

The deeper states — theta and delta — are the gateway to intuition, memory, and self-healing. These are not states you force your way into. They open when you are no longer performing.

Practice noticing where you feel it in your body. The voice of intuition is always quieter, earlier, and more somatic than the thoughts that follow it. And it is always present tense. Learn to distinguish this from the voice of an old story — pause when something rises, and ask: have I heard this voice before? Does it sound like someone else?

A teacher once told me that spirit — or intuition — will show up when you show it that you are making time for it. Just like a friend. The practice she gave me was simple: go to a bench in your mind and sit there as you would sit to meet someone you deeply admired and respected. Show up present. Not distracted. And just wait. The second part of the practice — the harder part — is the dedication to listen and remain open even when nothing comes. This is the showing up. This is the work of being devotional towards your body, not disciplined.

This is the work and what every practice in the app guides you back to. Not adding more to your plate or giving you a protocol to follow when you’re already exhausted. But slowly, gently, cyclically — returning you to the intelligence that has always been yours.