Have you ever had a sense about something before you could explain it?
A feeling about a decision, a subtle discomfort in a situation, or a quiet knowing that didn’t quite fit into words.
Many of us have learned to dismiss those experiences. To prioritise logic, evidence, and what can be clearly articulated. And while those are important, they are not the only forms of information available to us.
In The Signs, Dr Tara Swart describes intuition not as something mystical, but as a form of knowledge held within the body and subconscious. It is the result of patterns we’ve learned, stored, and integrated over time – information that sits just outside of conscious awareness, but still influences how we feel, respond, and make decisions.
The challenge is not that this information isn’t there.
It’s that we’ve often stopped noticing it.
The Role of Attention
What we pay attention to shapes what we experience.
This is something that becomes particularly clear when we consider how the brain works. Rather than taking in everything equally, the brain filters and prioritises. It highlights what feels relevant, meaningful, or familiar – and lets the rest fade into the background.
Dr Swart refers to this as saliency: the brain’s ability to direct attention towards what matters.
Over time, this process becomes self-reinforcing. The more we attend to certain thoughts, feelings, or patterns, the stronger those pathways become. And equally, what we don’t attend to becomes harder to access.
This is why trying to “get rid of” thoughts or feelings can feel ineffective. From a psychological and neurological perspective, the brain doesn’t easily delete pathways. Instead, it strengthens alternative ones.
Which means that change is less about elimination and more about redirection.
Noticing what we want to grow, gently returning attention there, and repeating that process over time.
The Intelligence of the Body
Another reason intuition can feel elusive is that we tend to underestimate how much information the body is already processing.
Most of us are familiar with the traditional five senses — sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. But scientific understanding has expanded this significantly. We have a wide range of internal sensory systems that continuously monitor things like balance, temperature, pressure, heartbeat, and even immune responses.
This is sometimes referred to as interoception — the ability to sense what is happening inside the body.
These signals are constantly feeding into the brain, shaping how we feel, how safe we perceive our environment to be, and how we respond.
So when people describe feeling “disconnected” from their body, it’s not that nothing is happening.
It’s that the signals are not being noticed, interpreted, or trusted.
Stress and the Loss of Signal
One of the most consistent patterns I see is how stress affects this process.
When the nervous system is under sustained pressure, attention narrows. The brain becomes more focused on immediate threats or demands, and less able to notice subtle internal cues.
Dr Swart highlights that stress can cloud intuition, making it harder to recognise and interpret signals that would otherwise guide us.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a protective response.
But it does mean that if we want to reconnect with that quieter layer of information, we need to consider the conditions our system is operating in.
Not just what we think, but how we feel.
Creating the Conditions for Awareness
This is where creativity, rest, and sensory experiences begin to play a role.
Activities that are often dismissed as “non-essential” — engaging with art, spending time in nature, listening to music, reading, or simply slowing down — can shift the nervous system out of a heightened, reactive state.
In that shift, something important happens.
The system becomes more open, flexible, and more able to notice.
Rather than forcing insight, we create the conditions in which insight can emerge.
Rather than trying to control every thought, we allow different thoughts to become accessible.
A Different Way of Thinking About Change
There can be a tendency to approach personal change as something that requires effort, discipline, or fixing.
But much of what we’re describing here operates differently.
It’s not about becoming a different person, it’s about noticing what is already present; the signals, patterns, and the subtle shifts in feeling and attention. And then, gently, choosing where to place our focus.
Over time, this changes how the brain organises itself. How the body responds, and how we interpret our experiences.
Coming Back to What You Already Know
If intuition is a form of stored knowledge, then reconnecting with it isn’t about learning something entirely new.
It’s about remembering, and creating enough space to notice, enough safety to trust, and enough repetition for that awareness to become familiar again.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
“What’s wrong with me that I don’t know what I feel?”
But instead:
“What might already be there, waiting to be noticed?”
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