The power of intuition

By Lionel Wijesiri

One morning last July, Kanthi T., 36, woke up thinking about her pap test, scheduled for the following month. Even today, she cannot explain exactly what made her call her doctor’s office and move up her appointment to that week. “It wasn’t that I had symptoms, just this “gut feeling” that something wasn’t right,” she says.

Her test revealed stage 1 cancer, and by the time she had a portion of her cervix removed in September, it had advanced to stage 2. Kanthi may not be able to account for that feeling, but she’s glad she acted on it: “My cervix has healed and everything looks healthy.”

Take Dinesh S., 32, a field sales representative, who remembers having the same kind of gut feeling - and is alive because of it. It was 10 years ago, one morning he was travelling to meet an important client. It was a winding country road. There were no obvious warning signs. It was raining, but his driver was a very careful person who was working with him for over 10 years.

Since they were driving slowly, Dinesh had taken off the seat-belt and was enjoying a snack. “But, something told me to put on my seat-belt. I got this sense - part spiritual, I guess, but part physical. The best way I can describe it is just a really strong gut feeling in my body. It wasn’t scary, just matter-of-fact. So I buckled up.”

Moments later, the driver lost control of the car, slid and slammed into a tree. Emergency workers told Dinesh, who was unharmed, that without the seat-belt he would have been crushed. (The driver had minor injuries.)

Gut feeling

The word “gut feeling” mentioned by both is intuition, and right now it’s slowly becoming an obsession in many Western countries. Maybe it’s the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, which advocates the “power of thinking without thinking.” Or the growing acceptance of alternative medicine and its focus on listening to our bodies. Maybe it’s our addiction to TV shows such as Medium and House, in which intuition trumps evidence.

Have you ever had a “gut” feeling and not listened? Most likely it cost you “big time.” Ours is a culture that has not yet given full credence to the inherent wisdom of our spiritual nature. The fact is we have a source of intelligence within us that most of us seldom use; it’s known as our intuition. Intuition is a sixth sense that seems directly connected to the creative intelligence of the Universe.

We’ve all had hunches - moments in which we act without quite knowing why. Recently, I was reading a book written by David G. Myers, PhD, a psychology professor at Hope College and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils.

Dr. Myers says: “Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason. These insights swim to the surface of our attention and ask us to do something. Some are big decisions:

For example, See the doctor now; marry this man; don’t get on that plane. Others are barely perceptible: There’s something off about that new guy in accounting - be careful mechanisms. It’s a means of taking you away from danger and steering you toward what is good for you.”

Skill

Gradually, the science of intuition is shaking off its uncertain connotations, as experts become more sophisticated in understanding where it comes from and how to measure it. They’re also increasingly confident that most of us have substantial talent for intuition, and that it influences us more than we realise.

Experts say intuition probably evolved as a skill that saved time. “Intuition is fast, based on pattern matching,” explains John Allman, PhD, head of a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology that focuses on brain evolution.

“Our brains are constantly comparing current experience with the past, trying to find a fit so that we can make a quick decision. When we find a match, often in a fraction of a second, our intuition boils down a lot of experience into a simple, visceral metric: I feel good about this or not.

Trust

“Assuming everything in your emotional world is stable,” he further elaborates, “you shouldn’t have to force yourself to ‘listen’ to your intuition. It’s already there.” Yet many of us ignore this tool - or worse, respond to urges that are misguided or the product of a fevered imagination. Fine-tuning your intuition will help you make better decisions whether you’re buying a car, making new acquaintances, or solving problems at work. It could even save your life. Without any conscious effort, brains of Kanthi and Dinesh were acting like an automotive-safety computers, running facts, previous information, and sensory input at lightning speed. This kind of intuition isn’t mystical. It’s an automatic, intelligent response to situations each of the two had previously learned about or experienced. Dr. Myers says that the more experience we gain, the more we recognise patterns and associations, “just like a chess master can glance at a board and immediately know the next move.”

Psychologists never really doubted the reality of intuition - in fact, Carl Jung, a pioneer in the field, believed it was one of the most important abilities humans have.

Intuition is a gift that each of us possess, and like all gifts - all abilities, all talents - some go to waste and others rise to great heights and big achievements. The choice is yours, and that is good news because the power lies within you.

Intuition is for real and whether you believe it or not does not change the fact that it exists.

Intuition may not seem all that important to you if you trouble yourself with cultural pressures, the popularity contests in high school and college (even years later), the images from media and the advertising world, and the other nonsense that pulls us away from true harmony with the self at the expense of so much suffering later.

But when it comes to making decisions about what to do with the rest of your life, with your career, with your relationships, the societal and familial pressures that seep into our subconscious are irrelevant. It is our intuition alone that can play the pivotal role. Turn to your intuition in these times, turn inward and ask yourself what feels right. I turn to my internal compass to tell me if each decision feels right, and that subtle change has led me into the greatest choices of my life since I started to consciously apply it. Can you start to do the same?

Trust your instincts. When you’ve weighed all the options and there is no obvious, rational choice, intuition is really all you’ve got.

Meditate. Clearing your mind of repetitive thoughts and worries will make it easier to listen to your intuition. Find a meditative technique you are comfortable using and practice

Listen to your gut feeling. It would not let you down.