Developing Your Intuition

What is intuition? How do we develop it, and why does it matter?  In this post, I want to share some techniques for developing your intuition, particularly surrounding nature and natural settings, and some techniques and practices that you can do to do so.  To me, intuition is one of the nature-based ancestral skills that is really useful to cultivate so that we can better interact with the world around us, and take more care doing so.

Intuition is an inner knowing that we get–it often does have physiological responses, like the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, a feeling in your gut, or a carrying tension in your body.  On the other side, perhaps you are drawn to something and you can’t explain why, or you just keep feeling that you need to do a certain thing, or follow a certain path.  All of this would be classified as intuition and surprise surprise, modern culture doesn’t really acknowledge such a thing.  We do have some ways of phrasing and talking about it: you have a  “a gut feeling” or an “instinctive feeling” or “a knowing.”  Some people talk about it as a “good” or “bad” feeling, as in “Hey friend, heads up that I have a bad feeling about this…”  So while it is talked about, we don’t really train in it or think about it much.  Some people really pay attention to their intuition and others don’t even recognize that is there.  Part of this is because modern culture doesn’t allow for anything that is unexplainable, unobservable, or not part of a reality that can be measured by machines.  So the idea of your gut, your inner senses, or being able to feel things through extra-sensory perception is considered hogwash.

But hey, this is nature spirituality and druidry, and we do recognize that a metaphysical world exists, that our subconscious is a wild and complex place, that our souls transcend a single life, and that spirits are in the living earth.  So building back a relationship with our own intuition and paying attention to it can really matter.  I am specifically writing this post for a few new druids I’ve been talking with lately–they are interested in developing their own inner spirit communication skills (which I have already covered on this blog in my plant spirit communication series: parts 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4; as well as in my spirit journeying series parts 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4).  But what I haven’t covered on this blog is intuition itself–which is a very important part of any of the above deeper work!

Defining Intuition and Your Relationship to Intuition

If you ask researchers, they would say intuition is “non-analytical mental functioning” where you can gain information without your conscious mind understanding how you’ve arrived there.  In other words, you know something even though you haven’t thought through it all or don’t even seem to have all of the pieces. Interestingly enough, some of the most successful people in the world (such as CEOs of big companies), successful medical professionals, stockbrokers, and others do often pay attention to it and follow it.

Intuition is a space of knowing without knowing, of body-based knowing, as we began to explore above.  This is where you have strong feelings that may manifest in your body: good or bad–a good feeling, the hairs raising on your arms, your body going tense, a bad feeling in your gut, butterflies in your stomach, feeling pulled or led in particular ways.  Intuition is body-based– your body may know something that your mind doesn’t know, and your body signals to you something you should pay attention to.

Where does this come from? I have my own theories–I think it is part of our human birthright.  When I look at animals that aren’t human beings, they spend a lot of time in their intuitive and intuitive place–using minute clues, being deeply embedded in their landscape, and doing things that are necessary to survive, even based on small amounts of information.  I think that we evolved, just like other living beings on this planet, with these skills. While modern life may try to make most of our intuitive and instinctual skills useless, we still have them and we can pay attention to them.  Jungian psychology is helpful here–our subconscious, the collective unconscious, and the past experiences that make us up (even if they aren’t in our conscious minds) are all part of this picture.  I also think it may be subtle messages from spirit and from our own souls.  The truth is, I don’t even think it matters so much about where intuition comes from or what you believe about it–but what is important is that all of us have it, although not all of us pay attention to it.

I also think that as we are transitioning from a life-destroying civilization to a life-honoring one,  it is really good for us to start to return to our own humanity, our own bodies, and our own intuitive selves.  Intuition is part of this–what our own bodies and subconscious know as best for us, for our lives, for the world we live in.  I would argue that there’s a growing sense of collective wrongness and many of us are feeling that in our guts right now–because the world is spiraling out of control.  And so, leaning into that and making a change can be another good use for these sets of skills.

So how do we begin to listen and pay attention? The rest of this post will offer some insight.

Reflecting Back and Identifying Intuitive Moments

I think the first thing that can be helpful to do is to think about times when you had a strong intuitive sense about something.  Write about it, talk about it aloud, share it with a friend.  Consider these questions — can you answer them? How would you answer them? How might this change based on the situation, if you can think of several?

• What did you feel?
• How did this intuitive sense manifest in your body?
• How long did you feel it?
• Did you follow your intuition? Why or why not?  What happened afterward?
• What did you learn from this experience?
• Do you generally trust your intuition? Why or why not?

If you don’t have any time you can remember, maybe you haven’t been paying as much attention as you could to your intuition–which is useful and important information to know!

I can share one of my best examples.  At my previous job, I had an older, male student that I always felt very uncomfortable with.  He was always very nice, all smiles and pleasantries to me, but there was something that I just felt wasn’t right about him.  I treated him like all of my other students, but also kept up my guard.  I had him for several semesters, and nothing happened, but the feelings remained.  One day in a semester he wasn’t in one of my classes, I received an email from him, and I had the strongest feeling about that email–he was asking for help in navigating what he called a problematic situation with another faculty member.  Trusting my intuition, I told him I wasn’t able to help him and that he should reach out to the department chair. Soon after, the situation exploded–he had been stalking multiple faculty members, bringing a gun into the classroom in his bag, writing narratives about women being forced against their will, forcing women to read this awful writing and all this other stuff.  A week later, it was in the national news and it became a very scary situation and eventually led me to one of the reasons I left Michigan and returned to PA. When I look back at this whole situation, for almost two years, I had this bad feeling. Although I personally never had any issues with the student and our interactions were always pleasant, there was just something that always had me on guard.  If you had asked me, I could not put my finger on what it was. Sometimes I even doubted that it was a real thing, that I wasn’t making it up. But I stuck with my gut in this case, and it really paid off.  What if I hadn’t listened? Would I have ended up being one of the people who had their lives threatened or were being stalked? Several people even left the profession over this situation and how it was handled by our campus. It’s hard to say, but this was the moment where I committed to myself that I would always take the time to A) check in with my intuition and B) follow my intuition.  Since that time, I’ve been able to steer clear of two other really disturbing situations tied to my work life by simply trusting my intuition.  I have a couple of other examples that are this powerful, and all of them have taught me the importance of honoring my own intuition.

One of the things I learned from this experience was that intuition is a quiet thing for me: I could miss it, I could dismiss it, and I could simply be too busy to check in with myself.  I found through this experience that I had to nurture my intuition, to honor these feelings, and to slow down enough to check in and listen to what my body was telling me.  On busy days at work or when I was running around a lot, I could easily miss what I was feeling.  Especially in a longer situation like the one I described above, I could also easily second guess myself or logic my way out of it, and that could lead me to bad consequences.  This taught me a lot about both the act of checking in and taking a pause, and also, in really listening to my intuition and not letting my brain logic my way out of it!

Your Relationship with Intuition

Part of what the above exercise does is help you evaluate your own relationship with your intuition. Do you trust your intuition? do you follow your intuition? Why or why not? The problem that a lot of us have is that our own anxiety, fear, or other strong feelings can get in the way. We can talk ourselves into something or out of something, even if our intuition says otherwise. Intuition is that instinctive first reaction and we need to trust that–it is before the wheels of our minds start turning and talking us out of it. The gut response.  You can work to identify what those intuitive moments felt like so that you can identify them again.

Strategies for Deepening Your Relationship with Intuition

So now that you’ve had some time to evaluate your intuition and where you are, let’s talk about some techniques for nurturing, building, and honoring our intuitive selves.  These include both more spiritual and more physical, including some coming out of the bushcraft and survival movements.

Take a Pause and Check in with Yourself

Intuition is often pretty quiet in everyday life. It can just be a small tug, a quiet feeling, paying attention to your gut. I have personally found that if my intuition is really loud and strong, that’s a very serious situation that has the potential to be very dangerous. But hopefully, those situations don’t come around much! Thus, intuition is much quieter for a lot of time.

Taking a mindful pause can be a very helpful way of honoring and cultivating your own intuition.  It doesn’t take much time – 5-15 seconds.  I do this: when I encounter a new situation, meet a new person, or have a new opportunity arise, I just take a pause. Just pause, sit with it, and most importantly, check in with my own feelings. I stop talking, step away or just pause what I am doing and ask – What am I feeling right now? What does my gut say? Where does my body lead me (see more on body radar, below)?  Where might my feelings lead? Do I have a strong sense of a situation or not?  This can literally take 10 or 15 seconds to check-in.  The key is training yourself to do it.

Paying Attention to the World Around You

Another part of intuitive exploration to me is giving myself time and space to really be observant in the world around me. That is, to ditch the screen and get into the green as I’ve recently written about!  We can’t check in with ourselves if we aren’t paying any attention.  I like to take note of new things–new people, things that have changed, and really open my senses up for new moments.  When I meet new people, I take pause. When I enter a room or house or new place, I pause. I look around, I observe, and I interact.  Again, this allows space for intuition to flow in.

Body Radar

This technique was taught to me by Jon Young, Nate Summers, and Sarah Fontaine in their 2021 Intuitive Tracking course (which was an amazing experience, and I wish they’d teach again sometime as I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in nature spirituality!)  Jon studied these techniques from many different places, including from the San people or Bushmen in Africa, who are an indigenous tribe who still a hunter-gatherer way of life. They see connections with other beings as ropes and cords.  Their philosophy is that we are all connected by energy, which they would identify as either strong thick ropes (to those we are very close to) or just the smallest cord (to those who are less connected or new in our lives).  By those, I mean any people, not just human people, so we can apply this to anything: trees, birds, mushrooms, and the like.

This first technique can be done in any setting, but it is particularly fun to try and practice in an outdoor setting to see where your body leads you.  The outdoor setting can be somewhere you go all the time or somewhere new–it doesn’t really matter and you will get great information either way.

The technique begins by having you stand in a relaxed way–don’t lock your knees, don’t tense up your frame, just stand in a way that is loose and ready to move. Take a few moments to ground and center yourself in your body.  Breathe in, empty your mind, and really be present with all of your senses. And then, you can either ask a sacred question (a question that you would like to seek an answer to, see intuitive tracking below) or just allow your body to direct you.

Feel your solar plexus and your gut and see what direction your gut is pulling you.  You can simply allow yourself to go in that direction, not making judgments but just experiencing whatever might be there.  This technique can be quite enthralling and wonderful and you can find all kinds of things.  Sometimes I find things I was specifically looking for (e.g. I lost my set of pruners out on the land and my body radar leads me right to where I dropped them the day before).  Other times, I find wonderful things I wasn’t expecting but are really delightful.

You can even do this technique by closing your eyes over a paper map, and then moving your hands around until you stop on a point that feels good.  Go there, see what there is to see and where your intuition has led you.

I believe this technique is a great way of getting in tune with your body and practicing intuition in a natural setting.  If you practice this once a week, you’ll soon be very attuned not only with your own body but with the broader living earth and your interaction.

Intuitive Tracking Techniques

Tied to the body radar technique, Jon shared that the Kalahari Bushmen in Africa recognize connections with other beings as ropes and cords–these cords extend from our own solar plexus to other beings (being meaning anyone or anything, in the animist sense). For some beings, we have very thick ropes between us because we have a strong energetic connection–think about your spouse or child or parent, your close pets, and even things like your favorite tool or piece of clothing. We develop these energetic connections over time and interactions.  Other energetic connections may be fresh and new–that’s a little tiny string. I pay attention to the catbird call for the first time and we have an interaction–now there’s a string there, connecting us.

If we are seeking something or tracking something, we can use these cords to help lead us there.  After practicing this for a few years (to find lost keys, missing chickens, and also tasty mushrooms) I think that the way I see this technique is that intuitive tracking is a specific application of tuning into your body radar and using your intuition, but also layers on a spiritual component of connection.

The other part of this is asking a sacred question.  This comes from the Tom Brown school of thought–he believed that asking the question, the right question, a good question, could lead us to all sorts of things using these techniques.  The question can be anything meaningful and important, “What do you want to show me today, land?”  or “Is there something I need to see or do today?” or even, in a farm emergency, “Can you help me find my missing chicken?”  Once we ask the question, we can put it out to the land for an answer.  Feel that point in your body, in your solar plexus.  See where it leads you and what comes of it.

Again, this is something that humans have been doing for a really long time and it is something that can take time to learn and practice.  But is certainly is worth doing!

Trusting Your Intuition and Building the Skill

Just like most other things, it usually takes us time to open ourselves back up to these kinds of practices.  If we lived in a different time or age, things like intuition may have been an important part of our education in our culture.  But in our case, we have to relearn many things that were simply part of our human birthright.

This is to say, it takes time to build your relationship with your intuition.  It takes time for you to be in a mindful place to listen, to pause, and to be aware.  It can take time to practice some of the exercises I’ve offered here, but these exercises certainly do offer rich rewards!

Another part of it is that once you start paying attention, it may take time and experience for you to learn to trust this part of yourself.  But it is well worth doing!

Concluding Thoughts

I hope this was a helpful discussion to build your own intuitive skills.  I feel like a lot of these things — intuition, spirit communication, working with our dreams, etc, are things that are really useful skills to have as a nature-connected person or druid, but they are often the kinds of things we don’t talk a lot about or get a lot of training in.  I’m grateful to have learned these techniques from others, and to pass them on.

If you have any other techniques or thoughts on intuition, I would very much love to hear them–please share in the comments so we can build knowledge together.

Announcements

I wanted to share that my friend and co-author of the upcoming ReVisioning book (released in 2025) Nate Summer is doing a survival skills class and also a free webinar this Wednesday tied to the class to learn more.  Here’s more info.