Growing up in Switzerland, my family never really talked about inner guidance or gut feelings. So… when I first heard the word intuition in my early twenties (I know, later bloomer!) after moving to Australia and diving into meditation and new ways of thinking I suddenly felt deeply understood. Maybe I wasn’t as naïve, irrational, or stubborn (although that one’s debatable) as my parents thought I was. Maybe I was just trusting my intuition… quietly relying on something within. A deep knowing.
Sometimes I felt a little bit like an alien, not in a bad way, just a little different. But over time, I’ve come to understand that from a metaphysical perspective, we’re all deeply connected.
Suddenly, all those decisions I’d made that felt so right, even when no one else understood them, had a name. Intuition. I wanted to know more…
I tried to make sense of it through science; reading research papers, listening to neuroscientists and psychologists, trying to find language for something that had always lived just beneath the surface. I even began weaving this theme into my keynotes on courage. Interestingly, after almost every talk, someone would come up and say, “That reminder about intuition… that was exactly what I needed.”
What is intuition? And where does it come from?
I’m still learning and figuring this one out, but I’d like to share some findings through both a scientific and spiritual lens.
Let’s start with the scientific view. Intuition is your brain working at lightning speed beneath the surface. It’s a blend of memory, pattern recognition, emotional intelligence, and experience. Your unconscious mind processes vast amounts of data and serves it up as a feeling or a knowing… often before your conscious mind can catch up. It’s not magic. It’s deep wisdom, accumulated over time. Some believe it’s wisdom gathered not just in this lifetime, but across generations… and maybe even lifetimes.
But that still doesn’t explain the whole picture. What about those eerie moments when you think of someone and they suddenly call? When you feel an urge to check in on a friend, only to find they really needed you, or were just thinking about you? What about those seemingly random decisions that lead you to the exact right place, without logic to explain them?
Albert Einstein was known for relying on this kind of intuitive intelligence, trusting it to guide him to scientific breakthroughs long before the equations followed.
I also explored other philosophies, belief systems, and sacred texts. Many Eastern traditions speak of intuition as a personal thread connecting us to a greater field of intelligence, a universal consciousness. In Hinduism, there’s Brahman, the underlying reality that connects all things. In Buddhism, the idea of interconnectedness and collective awareness echoes this same truth. In the West, Carl Jung spoke of the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of archetypes and human experience.
I like to think of intuition as our own personal large language model (LLM) or life language model, constantly learning, updating, and offering guidance based on the energy, experiences, and data streaming in from the universal field. A kind of soul-technology that doesn’t run on code, but on consciousness.
But what if your intuition feels cloudy, like you can’t hear, sense, or trust it clearly?
A beautiful reader from Taiwan recently wrote to me after reading The Courage Map. She asked a brilliant question: “Your invitation in the book is to trust your intuition. But isn’t that dangerous? Not everyone’s intuition is accurate. Sometimes it’s clouded by prejudice, emotion, or trauma. Why do you trust yours so much?”
I sat with her words for weeks before responding.
Intuition itself is always right. But our ability to hear it clearly isn’t. Life layers us with noise, conditioning, fear, trauma, cultural expectations. These distort the signal. So the real work isn’t about developing intuition… it’s about removing what blocks it.
It’s about becoming aware of our own patterns, wounds, and labels and gently doing the work to understand and unlearn. Peeling back the layers. Asking, again and again, “am I acting from fear or from love?”
Fear is urgent and tight. Love is calm and clear.
How do we reconnect with our inner compass?
How do we shed the layers, return to our essence, and from that place begin to trust ourselves again?
- Raise your energy. Your frequency. Your vibration.
Before you roll your eyes and file this under too woo woo, stay with me, this part is backed by science. When we raise our vibration through love, presence, and stillness, we tune into clearer frequencies. Your biology shifts. Your perception sharpens. I’ll share more on this in a future piece.
- Create stillness. Whether it’s meditation, journaling, or a slow walk in nature, slowing down helps you tune in. For me, it’s walking barefoot on the beach with my dog in the morning. The sound of waves, the wind in the trees, the bird song… really paying attention to what’s around me, feeling gratitude, connection… brings me back to myself.
- Listen to your body. Intuition often speaks in whispers rather than words, through a sudden tightness in your chest, goosebumps, or a strange calm in the chaos. Some people are clairvoyant, receiving guidance through mental images or flashes of insight, clairaudient, catching intuitive hits as words, sounds, or internal voices, clairsentients, feeling things deeply, an emotional shift or a gut punch or claircognizant, just knowing something without being able to explain why.
Pay attention to what energises or drains you, your body is a barometer for truth. Steer clear of drama queens or kings who distort your inner signal (do send them love though). And don’t become one yourself. Stillness sharpens the signal. Noise drowns it.
- Heal what clouds the signal. Old wounds, outdated beliefs, ancestral baggage, they can all mute your inner guide. Therapy, shadow work, and self-compassion are powerful portals to reconnection. Work with people who can help you untangle the stories that no longer serve.
- Release the need to get it perfect. Intuition is a compass, not a guarantee. Sometimes you’ll misread it and that’s okay. Every experience, even the messy ones, sharpens your skill and deepens your trust.
And remember, intuition doesn’t shout. It whispers. If your inner voice feels faint, meet it with gentleness. Approach it with curiosity, not blind faith. Bit by bit, the signal becomes clearer.
Trust yourself. You were born with intuition. It’s been with you all along, and it always will be despite the noise.