Can You Hear Yours?

Hello and welcome to a new episode of De-Stigma Dialogues. I’m your host Tamara and thank you for joining me as we start our discourse on Intuition. This is the second theme of our big three for this season. Just to recap, this season we are exploring Motherhood, Intuition and Career and these were chosen because I do believe them to be interconnected. While Motherhood and Career can occupy opposing sides on a spectrum, I see Intuition as the bridge that can connect them. So let’s dive in…

Musical Interlude: Intuition by Ellie Goulding

Personally, I can say that it took me a while to hone in on my intuition. In fact, I still have moments where I am unsure exactly what my intuition is trying to say and that’s because it is consistently at war with my conditioning. I grew up as the first daughter and child in the family so I was heavily invested in people pleasing and the over-achieving type A personality, which has now been determined by the mental health brigade as symptoms or side effects of first-born / first-child syndrome… yes that’s a real thing, just like middle-child syndrome, who knew? But let’s stick a pin in that for now. As you know I love starting any discourse with a definition, so…

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Intuition is “the ability to understand or know something immediately, without conscious reasoning.” To further that, the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines intuition as “the power or faculty to attain direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” I mean the very definitions allude to the ‘supernatural’ or the ‘unknown’, right. After all, intuition IS a ‘feeling’, an ‘emotion’ which, let's face it, places it smack dab in the middle of the feminine realm...

Musical Interlude: Witchcraft by Frank Sinatra

In the past and to some extent even today, intuition is met with distrust and disdain because it is something that is inexplicable, intangible and unprovable. As a ‘feeling’, an ‘emotion’, intuition is consistently dismissed and discounted in favour of ‘facts’ or hard-core ‘evidence’. In a patriarchal society that leads with the ‘male’ mind, intuition is something that has been conditioned out of us, females so that we could function as man’s unconditional and unquestioning subordinate. Think about it, we are told and taught to place more weight and value on what can be proven, what is tangible, what we can see and touch etc. but in so doing, we learn to ignore or switch off that which we can’t, our intuition.

I mentioned earlier that my intuition was and continues to be in a constant fight with my conditioning and by that I mean that I have been trained and conditioned to follow through and lead by example. As the first born and a female, I am also a people pleaser which unfortunately for women is also a common side effect of the society we live in. I can announce though that I am well on the road to becoming a ‘reformed’ people pleaser, YAY for me! Anyway, in my attempts to not disappoint, I often ignored my gut feeling (just an aside, this exact term, ‘gut feeling’, I’m gonna circle back to), so anyway, I’ve often ignored my intuition or gut feeling, to the point that at times, I couldn’t interpret what it was trying to tell me. Is the roller coaster in my stomach or the hairs standing up at the back of my neck, or the general ‘feeling of doubt or unease’ because something is good or bad? Most times, it turns out that I was being warned against something but I only recognized that AFTER the fact. How many times have you gotten a feeling that maybe you don’t want to do something, or go somewhere or someone just gives you the ick, but you can’t say exactly why and you ignore it or push past it, only to have it be a disaster? And conversely, how many times has it turned out to be a blessing? I’d say it’s probably 50/50?

Like all animals, we are born with the inherent means to protect ourselves, to survive and even thrive and that ‘means’ is our intuition. It is a primal instinct but it takes training and molding, like any talent, to be able to interpret our body’s signals. With the human species, females are historically taught or trained to rely on the male for protection and depend on them for survival unquestionably. We are conditioned to ignore our own feelings and follow the male’s lead. So when we don’t use our intuition or we ignore it, silence it, like any muscle, it can atrophy, go dormant and leave us without the ability to protect ourselves, even from members of our own species. We’ve all seen Dateline or 20/20 or watched SVU or Criminal Minds, even the nightly news, or read books and magazines and newspapers where a young woman is brutalized because she dismissed or ignored her intuition, or her family’s or friend’s intuition and instead chose to believe the presentation of her male or female partner, or neighbour or friend and vice versa. See when we turn off that instinct or rather, we’re never taught or trained how to use it, we’re left unprepared and vulnerable because of that conditioning that taught us to rely on or to believe the ‘tangible’, the ‘provable’, the ‘visual’.

I was in a recent group chat with a couple of mind and body professionals and one of them said that the ‘gut’ is our body’s second brain. And though I’ve heard / read that before, this time that phrase simply connected for me! I suppose it is because I was writing this episode and exploring intuition but I believe it was because I was finally able to make that link and see beyond the science and just what that means.

For the past few years, much of the scientific community has turned their attention to the gut, its biodome, how it functions and how its dysfunction can impact so many of our body’s systems. As an aside, there is a writer on Substack that really breaks down all things gut related into neat little parcels that are easily consumed (see what I did there). His name is Kosi and I will link his publication Healthy Living Digest in our newsletter. If you’re listening, hey Kosi! Ok so back to the gut and intuition… If you think about how you were raised and how you raise your kids, how often were you taught to listen to your intuition as opposed to using your “brain” or using your “eyes”? How many of you heard or used the words “use your head”, “think” or “get your head out of the clouds”? We are taught and trained to only use and respect our primary ‘brain’ and to abandon our secondary one. Did you ever hear or say, “what does your gut say”, “what does that little voice tell you”? How many of us are guilty of questioning our instincts and how many of us have been talked out of listening to our gut in favour of our brain, or evidence to the contrary? How many times have we disregarded our intuition because it didn’t align with our partners or bosses or parents or society or because it was illogical, irrational? See with intuition, nothing is streamlined or clear cut, it’s fluid, it’s airy, it’s messy… And you know from last season’s discourse on feminism and this season’s discussion on raising girls, we teach our girls to be neat and tidy and anything but…

Musical Interlude: Messy by Lola Young

I imagine that in the very early years of our society, intuition in our gender was maybe met with awe, wonder. There were seers and intuitive women being consulted before major decisions. In fact, that’s been illustrated by Shakespeare, and documented about the early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Native Americans, Mayans and Igbo to name a few. Then as society became more advanced and patriarchal, that awe and wonder and deference turned to fear and so our intuition was villainized. Those seers became witches that got inside information from consorting with the devil if we questioned man’s follie and were proven right. Moving on from that decades maybe centuries later, scientists sought to harness, control and exploit that intuition through ESP studies and psychedelics which led the way to our intuition becoming something to be ridiculed and made the butt of jokes. We seem now to have arrived at the beginning of another cycle where simple acknowledgment of intuition is on the rise, as around the world people are starting to recognize that intuition is a powerful tool that can be instrumental to our decision making. So now, Intuition is trending along with our gut, but be careful as the pendulum swings…

Remember when I said I’d circle back to the term ‘gut feeling’, well, I’ve noticed in my lifetime that ‘intuition’ as a term seems to be gender-biased. Let me explain, intuition is almost exclusively used in conversation or reference to women, whereas ‘gut feeling’ is often used to indicate the same in men. Think about it, oftentimes a man will say he has a ‘gut feeling’ about something and society widely accepts it. We see that time and time again in crime series where the detective will say he has a gut feeling or a hunch which of course then plays out as he thought, but the female detective’s ‘gut feeling’ doesn’t carry the same weight. Want an example, watch ANY episode of SVU or Chicago Fire or more recently Day of the Jackal?

Musical Interlude: Gut Feeling by Ella Mai

My point is that intuition is not solely a ‘female’ characteristic, but our society has determined that by its use of the term. Intuition and gut feeling has become gendered language. I can already see the eye rolls and hear the hrumphs from those that believe that race and gender and ‘woke-ness’ has no place in these conversations. But I disagree, this is a discourse on identifying and talking aloud about stigmas and intuition has been a stigmatized term. Gender and race are pertinent to these conversations and including them in our critical thinking will lead to evolution because intersectionality must be addressed and included. Now, if we’re being honest, we can all admit to laughing at or doubting the psychics and those that had premonitions while applauding or admiring the men in authority who used their ‘gut’ to solve a problem. As a society through the generations we’ve silenced the intuitive voice in our girls while we’ve allowed and even encouraged our boys to lean into it. Think about it… do you use the term intuitive when you describe a guy or a gal? Through our society and its configuration, intuition became another stigma that women carry but men are absolved from despite the fact that it is a HUMAN and genderless characteristic.

Now learning to tap into that instinct and listen to that voice or that gut feeling is a lot easier said than done. When historically and contemporarily, many women have acted to silence that inner voice, it can be a challenge to hear it. Think about it like someone that has been kept in a room without light, food or water or any interaction, when a door is finally opened, that initial shock will be met with timidity, fear and then confusion until that person learns to trust that it is safe to use their voice. So it is with our intuition, when we don’t use it or trust it, it can be confusing and then when we misinterpret the signals it can lead to more distrust and silence. But, our intuition is simply another tenor of our voice and we shouldn’t stifle it or silence it to make others comfortable or ourselves smaller.

Musical interlude: Cruel Summer by Bananarama

I think that this is a good start to our discourse so I’m gonna stick a pin in it for now. Next episode we will continue the discourse and maybe even come to a place of pause. Just some light housekeeping, there will be no newsletter this week. I’m just going to do one at the end of this discourse on Intuition so I’ll keep you updated on that. Also, I’m going to open up the book club next week with the first of this season’s shortlist. If you’re like me and enjoy reading in the summer then I should have something for you to add to your tbr list and maybe even bring to your own book club wherever you are. If you are enjoying these discourses please share and like and comment, you never know who may benefit from your insights. If you’re on a road trip or simply can’t get to Substack, remember you can also listen on Spotify where you can find all past episodes. I want to thank you again for tuning in and taking a chance on De-Stigma Dialogues. Until next time, I’m Tamara, be good to yourself, listen to your inner voice and continue to talk out LOUD!

Musical Outro: Shout by Tears for Fears