Hunch: the power of intuition

You may call it a ‘hunch’ or think of it as a ‘sixth sense’. But, whatever we call it, no one ignores the value of intuition, that internal warning that helps us avoid certain dangers or find solutions that are difficult to find.

Intuition is not a gift of few, neither a gifted issue nor even less, a gender issue. I mean that, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all intuitive. We all carry an inner compass that, even if we don’t fully understand how it works, is ready to guide us in the difficult art of navigating our own lives.

Those of us who have children or little brothers We will never forget the developed perception that all babies enjoy: it is surprising to see how they immediately know who loves them well and very much, or in which ties in their environment conflict and tension abound.

When reason prevails

The intellect of people has, by definition, a single resource to try to understand external reality: reason. That is why it repeats, over and over again, the same mechanisms. Reason fixes beliefs, draws conclusions, compares and weighs up to, in the best of cases, discuss reality, replacing what is perceived by an improved version, by an interpretation.

This, in turn, leads us to substitute the old for other new affirmations until arriving at some satisfactory concept, even temporarily, of the external.

In other words, logic and reason are, by definition, “indirect” methods. that go around and around reality, adding thousands or millions of perceptions and interpretations until they achieve an internal image compatible with their own current belief system.

They say that one day memory and pride argued heatedly:

“It was like that,” said the memory.

“It can’t have been like that,” said pride.

They say that they measured their forces by looking at each other… and that memory gave up.

Lean on feelings

Unlike the logical conclusion of reason, “realizing” chooses an almost opposite method: that of relying on the experiential, on feelings or on the imaginary. Try to relate to things, people or situations suddenly, globally and spontaneously.

If the consequence of the rational is to understand a problem and evaluate possible solutions, the consequence of “realizing” is, instead, intuiting the essence of what is happening and visualize a way out or a different understanding of reality.

There are different types of intuition. For some authors, it is even different for each person. For most of us, it is a sensitive experience in which a single look seems to be enough to fully perceive a situation or in which a single word allows us to capture the characteristics of a person we did not know.

Only intuition can help us to establish useful relationships, similarities and differences between seemingly unrelated things.

Thus, intuition seems to penetrate things until it captures their essence, its structure or its evolution, its past or future, pushing from there a series of associations that we could describe as a basically spiritual response.

By definition, intuition is inexplicable knowledge, instinctive and artistic reality at a specific moment that allows us to reach decisions or conclusions without having to go through the explicit or conscious processes of formal thought. Many times, this process is associated with the ability to anticipate some event, to anticipate what will follow or, at least, to perceive what not everyone perceives.

Of course, the disbelievers also appear in this area., who maintain that these intuitions of the future are the mere result of chance. When these scientists are argued about the frequency of these episodes, they suggest, not without reason, that this statistic is always flawed by the fact that what is imagined takes on value and is remembered when it coincides, but is completely forgotten when it does not. is.

The writer Mark Twain ironized saying that “a man with a new idea is always a madman until the idea triumphs. So, he becomes a genius”.

For us, and without wishing to be conciliatory, intuition is one more tool on our list of resources. It is neither the only nor the most important, but it is a tool after all.

It is a resource that we all have and whose merit we should not despise. In fact, it is a potential that, like all of us, we can develop and exercise.

Can we intuit the future?

Fate is a concept present in almost all religions and cultures; It is more or less defined with the idea that everything is predetermined and/or is part of a larger “plan”. From this point of view, intuition would be the ability to connect with what is already “written”.

according to the gaze of reason, which evaluates reality as the complex interaction of many cause-effect relationships, the future is always the logical and forced consequence of the already existing reality. From this point of view, if one had enough memory of everything that happened and recorded exactly everything that now happens, it would not be difficult to anticipate what will follow.

Intuiting would be the expression of a momentary and inexplicable access to those complete and global databases that allow anticipatory or brilliant conclusions.

We all know that, many times in everyday life, it is enough for us to look at a person we know or are close to to realize that they are tired, sick, sad or scared, especially if we look at them with the eyes of our hearts and even more so if that person is important for us. But if this intuitive mechanism is normal and natural, then why don’t we always have it available?

One of the great components of the power of intuition is being available, being unconditionally connected to internal reality, as children do. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says in his dedication to The Little Prince, “all great people have been children before. But few remember it.

It’s this amnesia of what we were which seems to condemn us to lose, at least, part of the wonderful intuitive potential that we had as children.

As adults, the more we reject things, the less we understand them; the more desires we have, the less available we are for other things. The more we focus on one thing, the less broad we become.

To intuit is to know what is happening and, for that, you have to be willing to see. Open up to change, give up power, have a global vision and let yourself be surprised

They are characteristics, all of them, associated by modern science with the activity of the non-dominant cerebral hemisphere (the right half of the brain, in right-handed people).

How to practice intuition

It is for what has been said that many of the methods developed by neuroscience and that we now know stimulate these brain areas could safely serve to strengthen our intuition.

And, also, let’s listen to our body, imagine ourselves doing what we didn’t doLet’s look at the world with almost childish interest and attention, let’s laugh and play like children more frequently.

Here I propose a simple exercise to start our intuition and be able to listen to our powerful internal compass.

Let’s Chill sitting comfortably. let’s imagine we entered a lush forest. We can feel the freshness and smell of the leaves. We come to a clearing in the center of the forest. There is a circle of stones there. let’s take our time and then we enter the circle of stones. an old man appears in the clearing and join us in the circle. Let’s take a deep breath and let’s ask him a question about something that matters to us. let’s attend your answer. let us thank and let us say goodbye to the presence and the place. Let’s go back to our place in the present and meditate on the response received.