What if "intuition" is just a language we've forgotten?

Re-examining intuition—and addiction

This is part of a new series on addiction and intuition called The Intuitive Mirror.
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Upper Kearsarge Lake (photo by the author)

Despite the persistent idea that intuition is some sort of rare, esoteric magic, the concept of ‘gut feeling’ is such a common point of reference that for much of my own life I wondered what could be so wrong with me that I simply…never had it.

Thing is, there was something wrong with me. At the tender age when I was still developing the ability to feel my ‘gut’—or anything else, for that matter—I was numbing those feelings with tobacco, booze, weed, acid, and a shit-ton of old-school 80’s magazine porn.

This went on in one form or another until I became a runner in my forties and began not just to feel better, but to feel a better connection to my body on day-to-day basis. Something happened one day while I was out running that made it clear what I’d been so desperately missing was as simple as the semi-automatic process of putting one foot in front of the other on the trail. It wasn’t an opaque mystery or a colorful aura; it was something real that happened directly in my body, without conscious effort. Most importantly: it was part of me that knew what to do, and that knowing felt incredibly good.

I was finally having that feeling—but it wasn’t in my gut. It was in my legs. Remembering how to feel was what led me, only a couple of years afterwards, to completely upend my relationship with alcohol and go from drinking nearly every day to only very rarely.

Intuition has been described in many ways, from the “still small voice” of God to straight-up clairvoyance^⁠1, ‘knowing without knowing how you know,’ unconscious pattern-recognition, our ‘guardian angel’ or Socratic daimon^⁠2, the ‘sixth sense,’ “the transcendent function of the psyche^⁠3,” a “reflexive self-knowledge governed by a preconscious neural network^⁠4,” ‘the coordinator within^⁠5’—or just “your own taste^⁠6,” or a felt sense of self—and yet even with this encyclopedia of descriptors, intuition remains elusive, an enigma, and contains an inevitable contradiction. It’s something that we’re all supposed to just have—and that, for most of us, remains nearly impossible to pin down.

What’s more, the word “intuition” is most frequently with skepticism. Even people that I know who have studied intuition for years hesitate to emphasize its importance, and amongst serious thinkers the word is still rarely used without disclaimer. The word carries so much baggage that “intuition” doesn’t appear at all in the text of works such as The Extended Mind^⁠7, Annie Murphy Paul’s book on interoception (the felt awareness of the inner state of the body that contributes to nonconscious information acquisition) or articles such as The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments’^⁠8, which appeared recently in Scientific American.

One of the biggest misconceptions about intuition is that it's primarily mystical, energetic, pseudo-scientific, and just kinda goofy, ungrounded, woo. I’m not saying there aren’t ways in which intuition can feel mysterious, numinous, and even luminous, but my experience has shown me that it can also be understood as a very straightforward way of ’knowing without know how I know’ that is grounded in very real felt sensations in the body. Another way to think of it is as a motor skill that like “catching a ball, skiing, riding a bicycle, learning to read and write…becomes automatic with practice^⁠9.“

Intuition feels like a paradox because it’s hard to wrap our thinking brains around something that operates indirectly and speaks its own symbolic language. Anything that originates in the unconscious is going to remain a bit fuzzy at the edges—but that doesn’t make it any less real. Intuition is a basic process of being human, a birthright that we all share. We all do—or can—have access to it, and when we do, it’s with us all the time.

What if “intuition” only seems esoteric because most of us have forgotten what that language sounds and feels like?

How can we learn to understand intuition in a way that gives us a better grasp of this universal human ability?

One of the reasons that intuition is so valuable is that it not only often provides us with an answer about how to move forward, but delivers a felt sensation of joy accompanying the continual process of finding our way that is not only incredibly satisfying but necessary for our sanity and well-being. The corrolary is that one of the reasons we get wrapped up in addictive patterns is because they deliver intense feeling so easily, and even more specifically because they deliver a simulacrum of the real feeling of successful wayfinding, which we’re often missing entirely.

Unfortunately, the pseudo-satisfaction that addictive behavior delivers is short-lived, hollow, and ultimately false. Coming into relationship with a real, felt sense of self opens the door to a way of moving through the world that is so much more actually satisfying that it presents a very real alternative to addictive attachments.

What if you could actively improve your relationship with your intuition—and what if doing so could be one of the most powerful, practical, direct ways to improve your day-to-day quality of life?

…and…

What if improving your relationship with the simple, fundamental wisdom that lives in your own body could be a direct, down-to-earth way to unwind even the most undesirably sticky behavioral patterns?

If you’d like to improve your relationship with your intuition—or if you’re someone who’d like to move past an attachment to one of these persistent, recurring, unpleasant patterns, I invite you to join me for a deeper investigation into the relationship between intuition and addiction.

¹ Body of Health: The New Science of Intuition Medicine for Energy and Balance, Francesca McCartney

² The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman

³ Carl Jung, via The Role of the Intuitive Function in Addiction Recovery, Cary Dakin

⁴ The Well-Tuned Brain: The Remedy for a Manic Society, Peter C. Whybrow

⁵ Training the Faculty of Intuition, Manly P. Hall

⁶ Rick Rubin Says Trust Your Gut, Not Your Audience, Honestly with Bari Weiss

⁷ The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Annie Murphy Paul

⁸ The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments’, Scientific American

⁹ How Does Intuition Work?, Derek Beres

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Questions for you

1. Do you have a good connection with your own ‘gut feeling’? Does it show up somewhere else—or not at all?

2. What do you do when you can’t decide what to do?

3. Have you ever felt like you’re getting a message from your inner self, but weren’t sure whether to really pay attention or exactly what it was saying?

4. What interests you about the connection between intuition and addictive behavior?

5. Is there some addictive pattern or not-all-that-healthy habit of your own that you’d like to change?

Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
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