Tuning Into Intuition
By Lily Jedynak, Ph.D. on December 17, 2023
Dr. Lily Jedynak is an exceptionally gifted multipotentialite. As a professional coach she helps women to flourish as they bring their gifts to the world. She holds six university degrees and is passionate about creativity as a writer, musician, and artist. She lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
Tuning Into Intuition
I decided never to ignore my intuition again after I was robbed.
When friends suggested dining at a local restaurant, I felt a vague unease.
Not wanting to be a party pooper I went along and dismissed the rumble in my gut. This was my first mistake.
As we began to eat dinner, two men sat at the table next to ours. Glancing at them, my unease returned. I thought to move my handbag to the floor instead of leaving it on the bench next to me and ignored the impulse. This was my second mistake.
Midway through dinner, an energy shift caught my attention. Something had happened between the two men. One of them imperceptibly nodded to the other. My body tensed but I squelched the feeling yet again. This was my third mistake.
The evening progressed and the two men left the restaurant. My friends kindly paid for my dinner as a birthday treat. We hugged and parted ways.
Once home I realized that my purse had been stolen along with the usual credit cards, medical paraphernalia, driver’s license, five dollars in cash, and a bit of coinage. My inner voice screamed, ‘I told you so!’
Credit card cancelling ensued and new cards were ordered. All the while I berated myself for ignoring the signals my intuition had given me three times, no less. Why hadn’t I trusted myself? Why had logic prevailed? Why not value this inner guidance and act on it straight away? As it turned out there were plenty of reasons why this wasn’t easy. I’ll save that story for another day.
After the robbery, I paid closer attention to my intuitions, gut feelings, instincts, sixth sense, spidey senses. Countless times I asked my husband a random question and he’d say, ‘I was just thinking about that.’ Or, ‘How did you know to ask me that?’ Feeling braver, I also voiced my intuitions among close friends. And then, when it felt appropriate, with those who consulted with me.
I researched it: ‘intuition’ from the Latin word, ‘intuenor’ which meant ‘to see’. Different types of intuition: clairvoyance (I see), claircognizance (I know), clairsentience (I feel), clairaudience (I hear), clairalience (I smell), clairgustance (I taste). I discovered there were nuances: expert intuition, creative intuition, social or relational intuition, and temporal, situational or experiential intuition. Some might call it dimensions of intuition: phenological, evolutionary, biological, epistemological, computational.
I noted different physical sensations: tingling, chills or goosebumps, vibrations around my legs, a tickling between my eyebrows, a sudden warmth infusing my entire body, an opening ‘swoosh’ at the crown of my head, a caress at the left side of my forehead as if to clear something away, a gut thud, hairs at the base of my neck standing up, shoulder tension.
I had visions and wrote about them as they appeared. I had hunches – a sudden rush of feeling – about people I knew. I had premonitions about people I hadn’t even met yet. I had prophetic dreams and other vivid, emotionally charged dreams that could have been past lives. Sometimes I had sensations of an inner, backward tumbling into blackness, followed by floating, and an interconnected feeling of oneness that was often accompanied by euphoria. I followed the golden thread of what brought me alive, infused me with energy, and made my heart and mind burst with technicolour joy.
I thought of intuition as playing or dancing with subtle energies that flowed from a timeless source into the physical universe. Spiritual insights floated around me. I tuned in as if I were an antenna and interpreted them.
Intuition began to play a major role in my creativity as an artist, writer, and musician. I’d access flow states and from that open, calm, detached, mindful, still, clear space or void – Stanislav Grof’s and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work springs to mind – a deep whisper or resonance would give directions, ideas, and insights. I’d see an image, impression or colour that guided my next step. I’d carry a small notebook to write down the words that slid into my awareness like a sigh. Sometimes the intuitive ‘downloads’ would be intense, frequent, and at other times sporadic. The more creative energy I had for a project, the bigger the intuitive influx. It fed on itself the more I trusted it. In turn, it became a source of inspiration. I opened the books my intuition directed me to open, located the articles I suddenly needed to read and talked with the people it impelled me to engage with.
Tuning into intuition is a storyteller’s nirvana. Perhaps many a writers’ outputs are at least due in part to this deep, rich, and plentiful resource. Some creatives assert that their creativity is dependent upon opening to spirit and allowing this energy to flow through them.
Could intuition be more ‘powerful than intellect’ as Steve Jobs claimed? Albert Einstein called it the ‘only real valuable thing.’ Woo woo is generally considered a no no in the scientific world, but intuition has been studied and it’s alive and real. Some suggest theoretical physics ‘Multiverse Theory and Quantum Entanglement’ offers clues. There’s also the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the brain’s so-called ‘axis of intuition’. Then there are ‘mirror neurons’ or the ‘mirror neuron system’ (MNS), that interconnected network of cells in the brain. While we’re at it, let’s throw in the ‘entangled minds’ theory, suggesting mind-to-mind communication. These theories are way above my paygrade but hey, trust your hunches, especially if you’re in a good mood, and be a little discerning. Don’t be so open your brain falls out. Be safe. Keep breathing. Enjoy harnessing your all-knowing inner GPS and use it to navigate the great ocean of life.
There’s so much more to write but to end this blog I’ll finish the story I started with. A few days after the robbery, someone knocked on my front door at home. I opened the door to find a young man holding my stolen purse. He said he’d found it discarded on the pavement with its contents scattered. He’d located my address during the retrieval. I gratefully thanked him and offered a financial reward which he refused. I asked him if he liked to drink wine and he said yes. I gave him a bottle of red wine and sent him on his way. My faith in humanity was restored.
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