Your Intuition Isn't What You Think It Is
⚡ Your intuition isn't a magical warning system. If you think it is, you're using it the wrong way.
Have you ever been paralyzed by indecision, waiting for a "clear sign" from your intuition?
Maybe you had two choices in front of you - a new job, a relationship, a big life decision - and deep down, you just needed your intuition to confirm the "right" choice.
But here's the thing: intuition doesn't work that way.
Many people believe intuition exists to protect them from mistakes - like a mystical alarm 🔔 designed to steer them away from bad decisions. When faced with uncertainty, they wait for a "sign" to confirm what's right or wrong. But what if that belief is actually keeping you stuck?
In reality, intuition isn't about predicting danger ⚠️ - it's about understanding yourself. It's a "tool for self-awareness", not an external force guiding you toward safety.
👉 Let's explore what intuition really is and how to use it correctly.
Why Most People Misunderstand Intuition
A few years ago, I found myself trapped in an endless loop of indecision.
I had spent eight years in mechanical engineering, but deep down, I felt called toward something else - software engineering.
Yet, every time I thought about making the leap, I froze.
"What if I regret this?"
"What if I fail?"
"What if that little voice is indeed my intuition warning me NOT to do this?"
In my case, I did hear the little voice, but they sometime contradicted each other. I kept waiting for a clear "yes" or "no" - for my intuition to "tell" me what to do.
And that's when I realized: I was using intuition the wrong way.
Most of us are taught that "intuition" is like a "divine whisper", a "mystical force" separated from ourselves that somehow randomly provides insights. But here's the problem:
⚠️ This "fear-based approach" limits intuition's true power and keeps us stuck, waiting for a "sign" to make decisions.
The truth is intuition is NOT a warning system designed to save us from something bad because this view reduces intuition to a fear-based mechanism, rather than recognizing it as a tool for "self-knowledge", clarity, and "conscious decision-making".
When we believe intuition is a "warning system", we:
❌ Wait for certainty instead of taking action
❌ Assume discomfort means "bad idea" instead of "growth"
❌ Confuse fear with intuition
In my case, I wasn't stuck because my intuition was warning me. I was stuck because I was afraid of uncertainty when listening to that little voice coming from my own fears.
The Shift: Intuition as a Tool for Self-Awareness
As mentioned above, most of us think of "intuition" as a decision making tool that is somehow supposed to steer us from the "bad" choice and help us make the "good" choice.
What if I tell you that "there is no such thing as the "right" or "wrong" choice"?
That sounds "wrong", I know, but hear me out. 😜
According to the Buddhist teaching, there is no such thing as "wrong" or "right"; there is only the "motivation" that you bring to the decisions that you made. This teaching reflects a fundamental perspective in Buddhism about ethics, intention, and karma.
Western thought often frames "morality" in terms of absolute "right" and "wrong", but Buddhism approaches "ethics" differently. Instead of labeling actions as inherently "good" or "bad", it emphasizes the "motivation" behind an action. This means that the same action could have different karmic consequences depending on the intent behind it.
For example, giving money to someone in need might seem "right", but if done with the intent of gaining praise or manipulating the recipient, it creates negative karma. Similarly, saying something harsh might seem "wrong", but if it is done out of compassion to wake someone up from self-destruction, it could be beneficial. Therefore, from the Buddhist's perspective, morality isn't about external rules but about "inner awareness" of one's motives.
So there is no such thing as "right" or "wrong" choices in a cosmic sense - instead, every choice we make leads to consequences. We are responsible for those consequences, whether they bring growth or challenges. However, "compassion" and "guidance" are always available to help us learn from these experiences. This is where "intuition" comes in. Let's break this down. 👇
"Compassion" and "guidance" are provided for us to help deal with the consequences of the choices we've made so that we make better choices next time. That's when prayers come in. They're dialogs between you and God or the Divine, whichever term you are more comfortable with:
Get me more clear! Help me sense what I'm doing here. Increase my sense of "self-awareness". Help me understand why I'm doing what I'm doing!
That awareness or clarity that you receive then becomes intuition. As a result, your intuitive skills then become about "the pursuit of self-knowledge" - the knowledge of yourself.
Life isn't about making the "perfect" decision every time. Instead, every decision leads to "effects" - some helpful, some painful, but they all are opportunities for us to learn. The universe doesn't "punish" or "reward" us for our choices - it simply responds to the choices we make. For example, if you invest all your money into a risky business and lose it all, it's not "wrong". It's just a "result" of that decision. If you learn from that mistake and make better financial choices, then the experience helped you grow. 🪴
Even if we make painful choices, we are not left alone to suffer. "Guidance" - whether from intuition, mentors, spiritual insights, or life itself - helps us navigate consequences and make better choices next time. For example, if you enter a toxic relationship and later realize it was unhealthy, your pain teaches you to set better boundaries. Your inner voice (intuition) might have given you warning signals before, but you ignored them. So next time, you'll recognize the red flags earlier.
⏸️ I need to hit the pause button and clarify a few things here as it may cause some confusion. When I said, "Your intuition might have given you warning signals before, but you ignore them", I didn't mean that intuition was trying to stop you from making mistakes as that would be conflicting with what we have been discussing up to this point.
Instead, what it means is that intuition was simply "giving you information" about the situation. It was reading "subtle energy cues" - your discomfort, the way the person spoke to you, the inconsistencies in their behavior. These are simply data from the field. However, whether you listen to it or not depends on your level of "self-awareness".
Think of intuition like a dashboard on your car: the fuel gauge shows you're low on gas🪫(just like how intuition gives you insight), but it doesn't force you to pull over. It's still your choice to act on it - "free will". In other words, intuition provides awareness, NOT a command:
✅ Intuition is awareness of information
❌ Intuition is NOT a "don't do this" message
Many people think of intuition as a mystical force that exists to prevent suffering as if it whispers, "Don't do this, it will be a mistake!". This is a misunderstanding of how intuition works. It is NOT a warning system ⚠️ designed to protect you from every bad experience.
If intuition worked that way, we would never make any mistake. But mistakes are part of learning and conscious evolution.
Life is about experiencing, learning, and growing - not avoiding hardship. Trying to use intuition to "dodge" challenges is an "ego-driven" approach, not a spiritually mature one. If we only engage with intuition when we are afraid, we distort its real purpose. True "intuitive awareness" requires "detachment" - the ability to receive intuitive insights without letting personal fears or agendas cloud them. That's why we often receive our clearest intuitive hits when we are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
Going back to our toxic relationship example earlier, your intuition might sense something off early on (small red flags), but if your self-awareness is low, you may rationalize those feelings away by telling yourself that you were just overthinking the situation and that everything was probably fine.
Another misconception as mentioned in the previous section is:
❌ Intuition is something separated from ourselves, something apart from any of our other senses.
Intuition is a part of our "organic intelligence", just like sight or hearing. We need to stop treating intuition as an "external force" that steps in only when something bad is about to happen. The truth is:
Intuition is ALWAYS working, constantly providing information - not just in moments of crisis.
Our ability to pick up on the "information" provided by intuition depends on our level of "self-awareness".
The more aware we are of why we make the choices we did, the clearer our intuition becomes. The more we observe our own patterns, the more intuition becomes clear and useful. The more we understand our motivations, fears, and emotional patterns, the more we can trust our intuitive insights.
So where does the "information" that intuition picks up come from?
These are patterns of energy - insights - exist outside of our immediate conscious mind. Intuition is a "perceptual system" that interacts not only with the data you pick up from your own experience in this reality but also energetic data from reality beyond our logical thinking ability. The data is always there in the field, but having a clear intuition would then allow us to pick up those energetic patterns easier. Therefore, the more we understand our own motives, fears, desires, and biases, the more accurately we can interpret these intuitive insights and differentiate between our own projections and genuine intuitive insights.
Intuition is the tool, NOT the data itself. "Intuitive insight" itself is NOT "intuition". It simply is energetic patterns (data) in the field.
But how does "self-awareness" help increase the clarity of our "intuitive insights" exactly? Let's dive into that next. 👇
How Are Intuition & Self-Awareness Connected?
Before we dive into the relationship between "intuition" and "self-awareness", we need to first understand what "self-awareness" mean.
Self-Awareness - The Pursuit of Inner Knowledge to Know Thyself
One of the misuses of intuition is using it to read others for the purpose of control and manipulation. This is an ego-driven approach.
Intuition is NOT about reading other people; instead, it's about knowing about you, your motives, your dark side, your light side. YOU are the subject of your study, NOT everybody else. The truth is that you can't help anyone unless you understand yourself by doing your own "inner-work", by taking yourself apart and trying to understand it.
The journey of inner-development is that you have to know:
How you talk to yourself
How your intelligence talks to you
What your fears are
How you control others
What your own shadow side is
The object of this journey of inner-development is NOT perfection. The truth is that there is no end to this journey. Our inner-growth is something we ALWAYS have to work at. Instead, the object is to "catch yourself faster":
Catch it faster when you're about to snap at someone
Catch it faster when you make yourself more inclined to go up and say to someone that you're sorry, that they matter to you
Catch it faster when you know you just said something that is untrue and ask yourself, "What did I do that for?"
Catch it faster when you're about to blame someone and indulge yourself in self-pity
We have to know where our intuition stops and the ego starts. That's the object of this. We have to work that clearly with ourselves because before we can be clear with anybody else, we have to be clear with ourselves first.
For example, when I am self-aware enough to catch myself before I enter full self-pity mode, I can stop it and not let myself drown in self-pity. Once I have the courage to own that to myself by acknowledging that I've been choosing to feel sorry for myself, but I'm going to own this now, and I'm doing this by choice, then I have the clarity to spot my wounded child and decide whether I'm going to use the usual rationale that I've been telling myself to allow my wounded child to go to town with it, OR I'm going to stand up to it.
This is exactly how we would use your "intuitive self" by saying that "I know exactly what's going on here" and not letting the subconscious program take over.
Now that we understand what "self-awareness" means, let's dive into the relationship between "intuition" and "self-awareness". What do they have to do with each other?
Intuition & Self-Awareness
Intuition is often misunderstood as an "external force" that "just happens" - like a divine whisper, a sudden flash of insight coming from nowhere. But in reality, intuition is deeply connected to self-knowledge. The clearer you understand yourself - your patterns, emotions, and motivations - the clearer and more reliable your intuition becomes. In other words, intuition is a function of self-knowledge. Here's why: 👇
The subconscious mind constantly processes information, emotions, and experiences, even when we're not consciously aware of it. Intuition is not "random" although it may appear to be so. In fact, it's the result of deeply ingrained knowledge and pattern recognition. Let's break this down 👇.
Our brain absorbs vast amounts of data throughout our entire life - our experiences, emotions, social interactions, and observations. Even when we're not consciously aware, our mind is always processing, sorting, and recognizing patterns in the data it receives. That's why when you meet someone new, you may instantly feel trust or discomfort, even though you can't explain why. This feeling isn't magic - it's your brain detecting subtle body language, tone of voice, or facial expressions that remind you of past experiences (whether good or bad). Therefore, we can say that intuition isn't guessing - it's drawing on years of stored experience and observations.
Your subconscious mind can detect "trends and patterns" faster than your conscious mind can process them. When a situation feels "off", your intuition may be picking up on familiar warning signs ⚠️ based on past experiences. For example, a seasoned firefighter might sense that a building is about to collapse even before seeing clear evidence of it. His "intuition" comes from years of experience recognizing subtle environmental cues - like temperature, smoke patterns, or cracking sounds. Therefore, intuition is not random - it's a result of fast, subconscious pattern recognition.
If intuition is based on stored knowledge, then a person with faulty beliefs, unchecked fears, or limited experience may interpret intuitive signals. For example, a person who has been cheated on multiple times might always "feel" like their new partner is unfaithful - even if there's no real evidence. Their "intuition" in this case is actually "pattern recognition gone wrong" - they're projecting past experiences onto a new situation. That's when "self-awareness" would come in - to help us differentiate between "real intuition" and "emotional bias".
⏸️ I need to hit the pause button again and clarify a few things here. We said earlier that intuition isn't guessing - it's drawing on years of stored experience and observations. But now we're suggesting from the above example that the intuition the person got in this case is somehow "faulty" and that we must try to overcome it with "self-awareness".
If the nature of intuition is to draw patterns from past experience's data, is it even feasible to try to overcome this in the case of bad experiences?
In order to answer this question, we need to get to the heart of why intuition is only as good as the "data" it's trained on. Since intuition draws on past experiences to recognize patterns, how can we ensure that we don't just keep repeating the same mistakes or misinterpreting situations based on our past pain?
Think of intuition as a "machine-learning" system - it recognizes patterns based on what it has previously learned. If the past data is incomplete, biased, or based on trauma, intuition will make faulty predictions in new situations. The good news is that just like a machine-learning model, we can update the data it's using. In the example above, the intuition that that person got is not necessarily wrong - intuition was doing its job by recognizing past patterns. But if the person consciously reflect and ask, "Is there actual evidence of dishonesty, or am I reacting to old wounds?", they can then "override the faulty pattern" and adjust their intuitive response.
We are not the prisoner of our past patterns. We can retrain our intuition by consciously re-evaluating the "data" it relies on.
The role of "self-awareness" is to separate intuition from emotional triggers. Raw intuition is often mixed with emotional triggers from past experiences. Self-awareness allows us to pause and analyze whether our intuition is accurate of if we are projecting old fears. For example, if you always felt ignored as a child, you might feel that your friends don't value you - even when no one is actually ignoring you. Your intuition might be clouded and distorted by emotional wounds, but through self-awareness, you can learn to distinguish past emotions from present reality. Intuition and emotional triggers feel similar, but they are not the same thing. That's why most of us mistake anxiety, wishful thinking, or fear for intuition. When lack of self-awareness, it's hard for us to tell whether an intuitive feeling is a "true insight" - our subconscious reading the energy in the field, or a "projection" - our fears, insecurities, or past traumas influencing our perception. So the better we know ourselves, the easier it is to separate real intuitive insights from emotional noise.
To recap:
✅ Intuition is an inner intelligence that reflects the clarity of one's self-awareness.
✅ Intuition is a natural function of human consciousness that operates organically, like sight or hearing.
✅ Cultivating self-awareness does NOT "create" intuition; rather, it refines our ability to receive and interpret it accurately.
How to Best Use Intuition
Once I stopped seeing intuition as a mystical guide and started using it as a tool for self-awareness, everything changed. By making my inner-development the focus, my intuition became clearer as I noticed that I get better at observing my reaction to a situation and am able to catch myself quicker. As a result, my intuition became more reliable and less clouded by personal fears.
Here's how you can do the same:
1️⃣ Use Intuition for Self-Awareness, Not Predictions
❌ Stop thinking of intuition as your magic 8 ball.
✅ Instead, use it to recognize emotional patterns and unconscious motivators.
A scientist doesn't predict outcomes randomly - they observe patterns from the data. Intuition works the same way.
2️⃣ Stop Using Intuition to Read Others - Use It to Read Yourself
❌ Many people use intuition to figure out what others are thinking, but real intuition is about self-knowledge.
✅ Before assuming anything, ask, "Am I sensing this energy, or am I projecting my own insecurities?"
For example, if you "feel" someone dislikes you, is it intuition - or fear or rejection?
3️⃣ Pay Attention to Power Dynamics
✅ Intuition is an "energy compass" - it helps you sense where power is flowing in your life.
✅ If someone makes you feel drained or small, intuition is flagging a "power imbalance".
Think of intuition as a "battery indicator"🪫- when your energy drains, something's off.
I will dive into "power dynamics" in more detail in future blog posts. If you're interested in this topic, stay tuned! 🔔
4️⃣ Differentiate Between Fear and Intuition
Fear and intuition feel different:
✅ Intuition feels neutral, clear, expansive.
❌ Fear feels anxious, heavy, and constricting.
So before reacting, ask yourself, "Am I resisting because this is bad for me, or because it's unfamiliar?"
5️⃣ Trust the Subtle Signals
✅ Intuition isn't always "loud" or "dramatic" - it often shows up as a quiet nudge.
❌ Many people override it with logic or wait for a big "sign" instead of trusting smaller signals.
Think of intuition like a "radio station" 📻 - it's always broadcasting, but you have to tune into the right frequency.
🔖 First-Principles Recap
Intuition
📖 WHAT? Intuition is inner intelligence that reflects the clarity of your self-awareness. It is a perceptual system that operates organically - like sight or hearing. It interacts with internal data from your own experience AND external energetic data from reality beyond our logical thinking ability.
⚙️ HOW? Intuition constantly provides information, not just in moments of crisis. It works by picking up subtle energy cues - discomfort, tone of voice, or inconsistencies in behavior. It draws on years of stored experiences and observations, detecting trends and patterns faster than the conscious mind.
❓WHY? Intuition serves as a tool for self-awareness, clarity, and conscious decision making, helping us understand ourselves, our emotional patterns, and unconscious motivators. It provides awareness and information, but does NOT dictate actions.
Self-Awareness
Emotional Triggers
Pattern Recognition
Power Dynamics
Subconscious Mind
Intuitive Insight
Organic Intelligence
Detachment
Projection
Machine Learning
🔗 First-Principles Synthesis
Intuition & Self-Awareness
The clarity of our intuition reflects the level of our self-awareness. Self-awareness involves understanding our motives, fears, and emotional patterns, which helps us interpret intuitive insights more accurately.
Intuition serves as a tool for self-awareness, helping us recognize emotional patterns and unconscious motivators.
Intuition & Emotional Triggers
Intuition & Pattern Recognition
Intuition & Subconscious Mind
Intuitive Insight & Intuition
Organic Intelligence & Intuition
Detachment & Intuition
Projection & Intuition
Machine Learning & Intuition
Power Dynamics & Intuition
Does this help you understand "intuition" better? How do you currently use your intuition? Are you relying on it only when you're afraid, or using it as a daily tool to cultivate self-awareness?
Let's discuss in the comments!
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