What is intuition?

Is it a magical download from nowhere?

Or is it a high-speed summary of everything we’ve lived and noticed?

When can we trust it? When should we challenge it?

The least we can do is try to understand it.

Old traditions treated intuition as an inner knowing that appears when the mind quiets.

Modern science reframes it as fast pattern recognition and somatic markers in the body.

Either way, the message is the same: there’s a kind of knowing that doesn’t begin as a sentence in your head.

It’s a feeling we treat like an internal compass. A lifetime of reps, emotions, and micro-observations collapsing into a single pull in one direction or another.

Cognitive science sees intuition as automatic pattern recognition built outside conscious awareness.

Neuroscience adds the body to the mix: Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis says emotional “markers” from past events show up as gut feelings that steer choices.

Clinical and spiritual traditions describe it as a quieter, felt sense beneath the noise, sitting opposite anxious rumination or trauma-driven reactivity.

So maybe intuition isn’t one thing.

The body can send at least two signals that both masquerade as intuition.

One is a clear, grounded knowing. The other is a smoke alarm wired by our history, going off at the slightest hint of familiar danger.

Either way, the feeling arrives first. “Something feels off.” “I want to pull back.” “I feel safe here.”

Then comes the part that actually matters. Do we act on the signal or question it?

Does the feeling match what’s in front of us right now? Or does it rhyme with an old pattern: a fear, a failure, an ex, a younger version of us trying to stay safe?

Intuition doesn’t need to be crowned. It needs to be consulted. A seat at the table, not the throne.

Where did you come from? What are you trying to protect? What are you asking me to actually do?

That feeling is not an error-proof compass. It’s a conversation waiting to be had. A signal we get to interpret, not a command we’re obligated to obey.

And maybe that’s the point.

The work isn’t to blindly trust every instinct or shut them all down. It’s to build the kind of inner clarity where we can tell the difference. Where the knowing comes from truth, not fear. Where the direction is chosen consciously, not inherited automatically.

Intuition is powerful. But it becomes wisdom only when we meet it with awareness.

Reflect

What is your intuition actually pointing you toward right now, if you slow down enough to ask it?