“Follow your intuition.” “Listen to your gut.” “Decide from your heart.”
These have turned into wellness buzzwords, repeated so often they’ve stopped meaning anything. For a long time they made me a little annoyed, honestly, because I had no real idea what they meant.
Not because I wasn’t in my body. I’ve danced since I was a child, practiced yoga for years, worked out most days. But moving, flexing, and lifting isn’t the same as listening.
Listening to the body means something else: following what’s right for you. An inner knowing. Intuition, ultimately.
A life aligned with intuition feels less like a string of decisions and more like a flow. Things arrive instead of getting forced. You notice more of what’s actually happening around you, because you’re not fighting yourself to get there. It feels free, almost effortless.
Go against it, and life gets heavy. Decisions feel indifferent. Doubt and overthinking creep in.
A quick experiment. Read this first, then close your eyes.
Recall a time you felt low. Not devastated, just genuinely down. Close your eyes for a few breaths and notice your chest, your neck, your shoulders.
Open your eyes again: shake it off. Shake, shake, shake.
Now recall a time you felt completely free. Something that felt easy and alive. Same few breaths, same attention to chest, neck, shoulders.
This time you probably won’t need to shake anything off. But you can if you want to.
If you did it, you likely noticed the difference.
Feeling low: shallow breath, tight chest, stiff neck.
Feeling free: deeper breath, open shoulders, maybe even a small smile.
That difference doesn’t stay in the exercise. It runs underneath ordinary life, constantly.
You want to speak up and can’t. Your throat tightens.
You do something that doesn’t match your values. Your chest goes dense.
You’re stressed or exhausted. Your shoulders know it before you do.
Two things, mostly.
One is upbringing: the quiet lesson that life has to look a certain way, that you need to earn a certain amount of hardship before you’re allowed a certain outcome.
The other is trauma, the patterns that keep us looping through the same response because it once kept us safe. Mine, for example, was the flight response: leaving before something could really touch me, because leaving is what I learned to do.
I learned this the hard way, quitting my entire life in one forceful move. I cried for days. Everything felt heavy and dense, and forcing it only created more heaviness, more density.
What actually shifted things was slower. Sitting with pain I’d been carrying in my stomach for months. Staying with it through breath and movement instead of pushing past it. That’s when things started to flow again. Not always the way I expected. Just me, responding to life instead of running from it.
There is a way back into the body. You can find it too.
Follow the circle for a few breaths before reading on.
What might come up: tingling, emotion, an old memory, an urge to move. Let it. Don’t force anything. If your mind takes over, come back to your breath. It always returns you to the present.
Please only do this if you feel resourced enough right now, and not in a moment of real fear or agitation. This isn’t a substitute for medical or psychological care.
If you’re currently in therapy, managing a significant mental health condition, or you’re just unsure whether this is right for you, check with your provider first, or reach out to me directly before trying it alone. If it brings up more than feels manageable, reach out and we can work through it together instead.
1. Find a resource. Take a few slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Scan your body for anywhere that already feels okay today, maybe your hands, maybe your feet. If nothing in the body feels available, borrow a memory instead: a place or a person that settles you.
Stay with it. Breathe into it for a few moments. What’s the texture there? The temperature? How big is it? If you chose a memory, picture it in detail.
See if the feeling can expand. Can it move into other parts of your body?
2. Find what’s tight. Bring to mind something in your life right now that carries stress, pain, or doubt. Notice where your body responds: chest, throat, shoulders, stomach, wherever it shows up.
Stay with that too. Breathe into it. Notice its texture, its temperature, its size.
3. Connect the two. Settle into a steady breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Keep breathing and notice what shifts, especially in the part that felt heavier.
If it gets to be too much, pause. One deep breath, back to your resource.
4. Keep following. From here, keep following whatever wants attention. A sensation, a memory, an urge to move. Let it happen without deciding in advance what it should look like.
5. Close gently. When you’re ready to close, let any movement settle. Lie down, put on something quiet, and give yourself a few minutes of stillness to let it integrate.
The body already knows the way back. All it’s asking is that you listen.
If any of this brought something up you’d like support with, reach out. I hold this kind of space for people regularly, and I’d be glad to accompany you. Doing it with someone else can feel safer than doing it alone, but the feeling itself is the part that can’t be skipped. That’s what actually shifts things.
Intuition doesn’t arrive as a clear voice. It arrives as sensation: a subtle pull, a quiet tightening, a sense of ease or unease, long before the mind has caught up enough to explain it.
But when the body is busy managing old stress, old fear, patterns it never got to finish, that subtle signal gets buried under something louder. The nervous system is doing what it learned to do to keep you safe, and it doesn’t have much bandwidth left over for the quiet stuff.
That’s why you can’t just decide to trust your gut more. If the gut is still holding tension from years ago, what you’re hearing isn’t intuition. It’s the old pattern talking.
Feeling what’s actually there, the tightness, the held breath, the bracing, isn’t a detour from finding your intuition. It’s the only way back to it. You have to clear the static before you can hear the signal underneath.
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