Can you really trust your intuition?

Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Ani, how are you?

Ani
I'm very good, Brian.

Brian
Thank you. I'm glad you're here, too.

Ani
Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Glad I showed up today.

Brian
My favorite day of the week.

Ani
Podcast day? Yeah.

Brian
You know what I realized this morning? What? Is that when you can get to the point where you can honestly say that every day of your week is your favorite day of the week, then you really have mastered your life.

Ani
That's true. So are you saying that just because it's every day? Or are you saying that because it's podcast day?

Brian
No, I'm basically- Like you're happy- I'm basically at the point where I can say every day of the week is my favorite day of the week. That's awesome. I can't say every week, every day of the week is my favorite. Sure. That's good. Because then we have to kick you out of here. But there are a lot of weeks where I can say 'Every day of the week is my favorite day of the week'. This is one of those weeks. It was a really great week. It was a great week. We had several meetings with our group programs this week. I did some presenting this week. I had a day where I got to actually do some research for the podcast this week. Every day was just a great day this week. That's great. That's my new goal as I was thinking about it was to be able to honestly say that every day of the week is my favorite day of the week. And that way, when I say today is my favorite day of the week, I'm not lying because I could say that tomorrow, too, and it's still my favorite day of the week.

Ani
That's good.

Ani
That's actually not what we're talking about today.

Brian
That's not what we're talking about at all.

Ani
But I'm really happy for you.

Brian
Well, thank you. I'm feeling good about it.

Ani
What are we on? Episode 85?

Brian
This is episode 85. All right.

Ani
Episode 85. And today we're talking about intuition. My intuition tells me this is going to be a great episode.

Brian
Great episode. Can you really trust your intuition, though, Ani?

Ani
Well, a lot of people think they can. That's actually the Holy Grail search.

Brian
Oh, that people like the intuition is the thing we can trust? Yeah. Does anybody think they can't trust their intuition?

Ani
I don't know. What do you think? Listeners, let us know. Let us know.

Brian
Thanks for coming.

Ani
I think people question it, but I think what I am hearing out there on the streets is that the Holy Grail is if I could just get to my intuition, it would tell me all the right answers all the time. And truth and authenticity. I think I had three people this week get on a call with me, client calls and say, Just want to feel authentic. Intuition has a lot to do with that. To do with, yeah. They think.

Brian
Of course, whenever we have a topic that we're going to talk about, I can't help but go to the dictionary to just understand exactly the word that we're talking about or the word or words that we're talking about. The theme this week is intuition. Can we trust our intuition? I went to multiple dictionary sources. Really? I got three different definitions.

Ani
That must have been on that research day that you were telling us about.

Brian
Yeah, it was a research day from Webster, from an old Oxford English dictionary. I don't remember the other source. But here they are. You ready? I'm ready. The first one I came up with was- I can't wait. The ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. This is an important point. I want to make sure we save this for a little bit later in the podcast. Without the need for conscious reasoning. Another definition I got. An ability to understand or know something without needing to think about it or use reason to discover it or a feeling that shows this ability.

Ani
That's interesting. It's talking about a feeling.

Brian
It's a feeling that shows the ability to not need to consciously reason.

Ani
So what? I feel so confident that I don't have to consciously? Both of them talk about not having to consciously.

Brian
That's why I looked up multiple definitions because I wanted to know in these definitions, what were the confluences of the definitions so I could really understand what this word was about?

Ani
I think this is hilarious, by the way, because a lot of my clients are working with also... They say, they want to follow their intuition, but they also really want to be seen as smart people.

Brian
Oh, that's pretty interesting, right?

Ani
Right. Yeah. And so they get on themselves if they haven't, quote, unquote, thought things through. Anyway.

Brian
Sorry, one more definition. Yeah, one more definition. I also thought that was interesting that every one of these definitions started with the word ability. Anyway. The last one was an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than fact.

Ani
Again, with the rationalization and the feelings, it sounds like what we know is intuition is an ability. It's an ability. If it's an ability, it's something you can develop.

Brian
Correct.

Ani
It's an ability, and it has something to do with immediacy.

Brian
Immediacy, yeah.

Ani
It has something to do with feelings.

Brian
With feelings, primary.

Ani
Primary to rationalization.

Brian
Actually, without rationalization. It's not even feelings before rationalization. It's feelings without- Without rationalization. Listen to every one of these definitions. How's that for freedom? Without the need for conscious reasoning, without needing to think about it or use reason to discover it, using feelings rather than facts.

Ani
Well, I can tell you that in terms of my clients and our students, that sounds confronting, even though it's the thing that people think that they want.

Brian
Well, this is why this is really fascinating, what we ask, Can you really trust your intuition? Yeah.

Ani
Do you even want to ask that question anymore?

Brian
This is interesting, right? When I looked up then, I looked up a little further, I looked up, where does intuition come from.

Ani
Okay. Just curious. Where did you look that up? Where do people say- Did you ask the chatGPT?

Brian
I did a search for it.

Ani
Did you do a Google search? What did you do?

Brian
I did a Google search for it. It comes up with 'a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious and subconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.

Ani
Well, I don't know. Rapidly sifting through... Okay, so I get what that's saying.

Brian
Where does intuition come from?

Ani
Okay. I did not like the word hunches. I'm sorry, I don't know why. I really did not like that.

Brian
Yeah. It's a faculty in which, I guess, let's say, gut, I don't know, gut hit, hunch, because you can't use intuition in the thing because we're talking about intuition, right? So we're trying to define- Where does it come from? Where does it come from? It comes from the unconscious and subconscious minds rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.

Ani
That's hilarious to me, though, because the thing that people want with their intuition is not actually their past conditioning, but really, our subconscious mind is operating from a place of past conditioned behavior to tell our conscious mind how to think and feel.

Brian
Okay, exactly. You're jumping right to the end of the story here, which is perfect, actually, because why don't we just talk about that, and then we're going to backfill it. Okay. What did you just say?

Ani
Well, the subconscious mind is always telling our conscious mind how to think and feel. Yeah.

Brian
Which means by definition, it's not intuition. Because intuition does not use the conscious mind, does not use thinking, does not use reasoning, does not use facts, based on our three definitions of intuition so far. So what you just said is that the subconscious- Tells the conscious mind how to think and feel.

Ani
Aha.

Brian
Now we need to have a conversation about the difference between the subconscious and the unconscious.

Ani
And the unconscious. 

Brian
As much as we can do in a podcast, because this is deep material to debate and to talk about and think about. But we can give you our framework of how we think about it.

Ani
We can give you our opinion. We can give you our thoughts. My favorite movie is Inside Out, and I know you've probably seen it once, and I've seen it probably 10 times. But one of my favorite bits is when they go into, and I don't remember, to be honest with you, if it's the unconscious, they call it the subconscious. I think they call it the unconscious or something like that. But it has all these clowns and things like that, right?

Brian
I do remember that part. That's really funny.

Ani
The unconscious. Whoa.

Brian
Okay, so here's the thing. So the unconscious mind, the way we think about the unconscious is as the collective unconscious. And the collective unconscious does feed information, knowledge, awareness, knowings into and through your subconscious. Okay, so let's just say that. So the collective unconscious is everywhere. There's no where it's not. The collective unconscious is the reservoir for all of the knowledge that will ever be, ever was, or ever will be. Ever was, ever will be is now thing. The example I use for that, honey, is I think it was, can't remember if it was Galileo or Michelangelo, or I can't remember which character it was historically, way back when they had pictures of flying machines that they drew. Maybe it was Da Vinci. They drew a flying machine. By the way, if you know, listener, who it is, just let us know. I probably should have looked that one up, but I didn't. They could envision. They were pulling the knowledge of a flying machine from the collective unconscious and putting it on a piece of paper. The problem was they didn't have the technology to actually build it. It wasn't until the Wright brothers in the late 1900s, early 1900s.

Brian
I don't know what year that is either. Should have looked that one up. Listeners, if you know exactly, for some reason, 1908 is in my head, but I don't know. If you know what year the Wright brothers flew, let us know. It wasn't until then that they actually had the technology to build the flying machine. But the knowledge for airplanes has been there forever. Character back in the Middle Ages, basically. Probably wasn't Middle Ages. It wasn't then. Tell me what year it was. It's probably the Renaissance period, which came after the Middle Ages. Probably more accurate thing. I'm not a historian. I just want to say I'm not a historian.

Ani
It doesn't matter to me, but I'm sure it matters to somebody.

Brian
It might matter to somebody. So I just was like, please let us know. I have total humility around that.

Ani
If you're done with that- I'm done rambling, take it away.

Brian
I made myself dizzy. Go ahead.

Ani
I'm wondering, if this person who was imagining the flying machines way back before they could be invented was saying to themselves, I wish I could follow my intuition. And what they do is they sit down and they make this thing that then everybody goes, You're crazy. Because that's what's in there is all knowledge that ever was or will be.

Brian
Exactly. So it's tapping in. The collective unconscious, if you think about it, it's like the internet. That's essentially now becoming the reservoir of all information that you could ever want or need. Then we just have learned how to tap into it with our search engines thing. It is becoming a metaphor, if you will, for how the universe operates. We have this collective unconscious that brings us information exactly when we need it based on whatever our desires are and whatever our intentions are. The universe is always feeding us this knowledge through the collective unconscious. And then we have our subconscious mind. And you already noted, our subconscious mind is...

Ani
Tells our conscious mind how to think and how to feel.

Brian
Because it's conditioned. Our subconscious mind is trained and it's local to us. I have subconscious conditioning. You have subconscious conditioning. Your subconscious conditioning is trying to figure out what my subconscious conditioning is trying to do and doesn't understand most of the time. So our subconscious conditioning is local to each of us.

Ani
Yeah. And it's conditioned, it's trained, and it needs to be so it can be efficient and work really good.

Brian
Exactly. All that stuff. So the collective unconscious is non-local. It's everywhere. There's nowhere it's not, and has all of the knowledge ever that will be forever. Our subconscious is local to us and primarily works on information from our past that we've already been programmed with, thing. This is the way I like to conceptualize these things. Okay, so let's come back to intuition for a moment. If intuition is an ability to identify a felt quality state or knowledge devoid of reason, then it would make sense to me that intuition is essentially information or knowledge transferred from the collective unconscious. Sure.

Ani
Sure. I'm over here thinking about how so many people want to follow their intuition because they think that if they could just tap into that, that they would be beautiful, rich, successful on all kinds of societal judgment how we judge success kinds of planes. It's been my experience that when people tap into their intuition, really develop a relationship with intuition, what they get is It's true fulfillment. True fulfillment, not just the... I mean, sometimes that leads to things like the material riches and the outward success and stuff, but it really leads to the true fulfillment But I just think it's funny. I've done it, too. If I could just follow my intuition, I'd make a million dollars.

Brian
Anyway. The problem is if we're trying to follow our intuition, we're using our conscious mind, and that actually cuts off the intuitive flow based on the definition of intuition that we're operating from.

Ani
Speaking of cutting off the flow, one of the biggest things that happens with people is that they do actually tap into some intuitive information, but then they cut it off, and then they start to question themselves, and they actually think that that was intuition. A big part of the definition was the ability which I think we'll talk about in a second. But this other part is it happens in a moment. It's not that you get an intuition and it lasts for five days. Good point. Because what happens is people get an intuitive hit, and then three days later, they say, Well, I definitely shouldn't do that. That's rationalization. Exactly. But then they say that that's intuition.

Brian
Exactly. This is why we're talking about, can you really trust your intuition? Because I think what you're saying, when I hear what you're saying, Ani, is that people actually mistake resistance for intuition. Yeah.

Ani
Resistance and their conditioning, the self-sabotaging, make sure we keep ourselves safe. Exactly. Which, by the way, is the subconscious mind's job is to keep us from changing because its job is to efficiently keep running the current programming.

Brian
Yeah. So both of these systems, if you will, the intuition system, which comes through the collective unconscious through our subconscious, and also our subconscious conditioning itself, both have sensory pathways associated with them. So how do we tell them apart? It's the question.

Ani
Well, that's a really good question. And I think for me, it comes back to this idea of ability, Brian. We stand on stages, and if we're doing Q&A, people inevitably ask us- how can I know? Follow my intuition. What they're really looking for is for us to be able to give them a hot tip to be able to just do it right now. It's an ability that we can acquire and get better at, but it's about developing a relationship. It takes time to understand how we work as humans and as individuals so that we can see what's going on in our subconscious mind and use our conscious mind to really watch and witness the subconscious. So we develop this really wonderful relationship with how we work. But it's an ability, and it takes time to develop that relationship.

Brian
Yeah, for sure. And I think about intuition, again, being an ability. And to me, intuition feels, I'm not going to say intuition thinks because it doesn't think it feels. To me, intuition feels like a bright idea. There's a sense of brightness. There's a sense of insight associated with it. It's actually something I haven't thought of before because I'm tapping into a collective knowledge that has all the information that ever... I just happened to tap into a piece that I haven't been locally previously aware of. Where the subconscious, it's aware of my past history, so I must have become aware of it. If I rethink something again, then I've already thought it before, then it's already in my system. It's part of my subconscious. So by nature, an intuitive hit is a bright new idea. It's a new idea, yeah. But it's not only an idea in my... I'm not thinking it. It literally lands. I feel it. I feel it. It's a state of almost like wonderment that I imagine whoever that was, drawing the flying machine was probably so involved with that. They weren't actually thinking about how this would work, and I don't have the materials.

Brian
It's just like a stream of consciousness. Stream of consciousness. Creative process, right? Stream of unconsciousness, I guess, creative process.

Ani
Stream of unconscious creative process. Because it would actually make sense that if they were really using those just logic faculties that they would start to rationalize and think about it in a different way that would interrupt the flow.

Brian
Exactly.

Ani
Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point. Yeah. So what happens with a lot of folks is they do tap into those... Oh, that's something else I wanted to say. They tap into those intuitive hits, but then the resistance to that comes up so quickly, they can't tell the difference. It would make sense. You were talking about a bright idea. It would actually make sense that we don't see it as a formulated thought or could put words around it. It makes sense that it shows up more as a feeling quality, because if it was showing up as this fully formulated thought that we could express and we can see, well, then it would have been something we could think about before, we've experienced before, or we have all the... Our brain needs some time to catch up with what file folder to put it in the filing cabinet. Where does this go in all of the past information I already have to conceptualize this new thing? But when it first shows up, it would make sense, actually, it shows up in a feeling. Yeah. People get intuitive hits, but then they don't follow them because the resistance that comes up, they then think is their intuition.

Ani
And so what happens is they cut themselves off. One of the things that we like to point people to is intuition will show up. You said a bright idea, but you also said it's like a feeling. You used another word. Wonderment.

Brian
Wonderment. It feels like a feeling of wonderment.

Ani
It shows up as a feeling of expansiveness. Correct. Yeah. And that expansiveness may then turn into contraction. But when you're feeling contraction, that's some resistance. We are inherently, as spiritual beings, limitless beings that are constantly moving towards more evolution. That's an expansive thing, if you think about what I just said. We're limitless, expansive beings moving towards more evolution, expansion. So the intuitive hits are actually going to feel like a sense of expansion. So one of the ways that you can quickly, here's your hot tip. There it goes. One of the ways you can tell if you're calling your resistance intuition is if you're calling a feeling that feels contracting intuition. That is not intuition. Intuition feels expansive.

Brian
Yes, exactly. I would agree 100%. That's actually exactly what I was going to say. Well, how about that? That's it.

Ani
Maybe we're tapped into the collective unconscious together.

Brian
We're both feeling that same way.

Ani
Or perhaps our subconscious minds are both entrained in that belief pattern.

Brian
Perhaps. But I agree with you, Ani. One of the crimes, I would say, that we perpetuate against ourselves is when we have an intuitive hit to take an action. We know somewhere in us, it's right. It just feels right. I would say a true intuitive hit feels right, and subconscious resistance feels wrong. Yeah.

Ani
That rightness might feel right for a split- A split second.

Brian
Millisecond. Then as soon as it feels wrong, then because our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind what to do, our conscious mind then tells our conscious mind that the wrong feeling is actually the intuition. Exactly. Because we value intuition so highly. We do. Because we value people who have intuition. We value people who follow their... Now, by the way, we all have intuition. I think what we really value is people who actually follow their intuition. Because you look at any successful people out there, what they're really doing is they're following their intuition. Anybody who has created anything new that no one else has created before, and by the way, that might not be something that everyone values to do that. But at the same time, even creating something new is creating something different than you have right now. If you want something different than you have right now, then you have to, by definition, create something new. Why not use your intuition as a guide for next steps to create the new thing that you want? Or like we talked about in a couple of episodes ago, take that quantum leap. The intuition is a part of that process to jump from a lower orbit to a higher orbit by disappearing in between.

Brian
God knows what happens in between these things.

Ani
What I was going to say was if you're listening to this and you're like, Oh, my gosh, I can't do that. Listen to the podcast last week where we were talking about the negativity bias, protectivity bias, because that point right there is like, when we feel the intuition and we don't do it, why don't we do it? It's really pointing towards something we're afraid of.

Brian
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Ani
This is such a great conversation.

Brian
Yeah, totally. So that crime really is that. And we've both been in conversations with people, Ani, who have said yes to taking a program or taking a next step that would change their life, that would absolutely change their life. And then you talk to them a day later and they say, No, I can't take that step now for a whole list of reasons. By the way, those are the reasons that the subconscious is telling the conscious mind why. But then even the worst part is someone says, it's just I'm getting an intuitive hit that I'm not supposed, that I shouldn't do this. When just the day before, they had a true intuitive hit that this is exactly what they were supposed to do.

Ani
Sometimes we can't take it back. Sometimes we can. I was working with a client who had this intuitive hit about hiring some help, and they told me about it. It was in that moment of inspiration. They're like, Oh, I should hire some help with this. Then the exact person to help them with this thing showed up in their life. That day, they freaked out, and they told me, I have decided that my intuition is telling me I definitely should not hire help, and it shouldn't be this person. We had this great conversation about exactly what we're talking about right They ended up realizing that they were calling the resistance intuition. We called it what it was, which was resistance. They ended up hiring the person and had a really successful outcome. They were able to take it back. We can't always take it back because the decisions that we put in place, and we're not always aware of it. Our greatest hope is that we're helping you to become aware of something that you were not aware of before because that awareness building is so important to the empowerment of your life.

Brian
Yeah. The answer for today really is, if you want to change your life in a profound way, can you trust your intuition? Yes, but you have to make sure what you're following is actually your intuition and not your subconscious resistance that you might be calling your intuition. Because when the subconscious mind tells the conscious mind what to think, it's pulling in that rational mind, and intuition does not include thinking. It only includes an ability to know an internal felt state as being all the information that you need right now to be able to step forward.

Ani
I'll bet if you're listening today, your thinking mind did a lot of work. So this might be one that you download and you listen to a few times and let it digest, maybe share with a friend you can have this conversation with, because when you do that and you're both listening to it, then you can talk about it.

Ani
This is some deep stuff.

Ani
So download the episode, think about it, listen to it, feel into it, experiment with it. I'm so excited for you.

Brian
Thanks so much for joining us again this week for another episode of the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Look forward to seeing you again next week. Bye-bye.