What is intuition, really? It’s not what most people think
I believe intuition is one of the most underestimated capacities we have as human beings. Most people have a vague idea of what it is, a gut feeling, a hunch, a “sixth sense”, but because we can’t see it, measure it, or explain it logically, we tend to dismiss it, override it, or assume it only belongs to a certain type of person.
As a highly sensitive person (HSP), the chances are you’ve been receiving intuitive information your entire life. You just may not have had a name for it, or the confidence to trust it.
So let’s explore what intuition actually is. Here are six things I believe are true about intuition.
1. Intuition is not just a feeling, it’s information
One of the biggest misconceptions about intuition is that it’s an emotion. It isn’t. It’s information, information arriving through the body, not through conscious thought.
Everything around us is made of energy vibrating at different frequencies. We are constantly receiving this vibrational data, even when we’re completely unaware of it. Our nervous system picks up on the emotional tone in a room, the intentions of the person we’ve just met, the quality of an opportunity, the safety of a situation, all before our conscious mind has had a chance to catch up.
That sensation in your gut before a difficult conversation. The shadow across your heart when something seems perfect on paper but doesn’t feel right. The quiet knowing that a decision, however logical, isn’t going to lead to a positive outcome. That is intuitive intelligence communicating with you.
It’s not random. It’s not irrational. It’s a sophisticated system, and it’s been operating within you all along.
It’s also worth saying: intuitive intelligence isn’t limited to the present moment. It can sense into what’s coming, a quality of a future situation, the likely outcome of a decision, and it can reach back, picking up on patterns, unresolved energies, or the emotional tone of the past. It moves across time in ways our logical mind simply cannot.
2. It doesn’t shout, it whispers
One of the reasons so many of us miss our intuitive signals is that they’re rarely loud. They’re subtle. A slight tightening in the gut. A quiet sense that something is off. A word or image that drops into your mind uninvited.
I think about the playdate I organised for my daughter. I had this feeling it wouldn’t go well, a subtle shadow in my gut. Nothing dramatic. So I ignored it. We went, we had a lovely time. The next day, the child developed chickenpox. We were three weeks away from our wedding. I kicked myself for not listening. It wasn’t screaming at me. It was barely a whisper. But it was there.
The challenge isn’t that our intuition isn’t communicating. It’s that we’ve been trained to prioritise logic, to require a reason, to look for evidence. When there’s no obvious explanation, we override the feeling. And then, more often than not, we learn why we should have listened.
The practice of developing your intuition is largely the practice of learning to notice, validate and act on the whisper.
3. It speaks differently to everyone
There’s no single way intuition arrives, and that’s one of the reasons people can doubt they have it. They’re waiting for a dramatic vision, download or a booming voice, and are missing what’s actually showing up for them.
Traditionally and in my experience, both personally and working with clients, intuitive information can come in many different forms:
• A sudden knowing, with no traceable logic — claircógnisance
• Images, symbols, or scenes arising spontaneously — clairvoyance
• Words, phrases, or even music coming to mind — clairaudience
• A felt sense in the body, the gut, the chest, the throat, picking up on the emotions or physical sensations of others — clairsentience
• Scent that appears with no physical source — clairalience. A smell associated with someone who has passed, or a fragrance that arrives as a signal. Rarer, but real.
I had a client who kept getting flooded with thoughts that didn’t feel like her own whenever she was in conflict with her partner. Once we began to explore it, it became clear she was picking up on his thought patterns, not making things up, not being irrational. Once she could distinguish what was hers and what was his, everything shifted.
Your intuition has a language. Learning to recognise it is a skill and one well worth developing.
4. It is not the same as anxiety or fear
This is one of the questions I’m asked most often, and it’s an important one:
“How do I know if it’s intuition or anxiety?”
For highly sensitive people especially, this distinction matters, because we feel both so strongly so how do we know when it’s an intuitive no or fear stopping you. Here is what I’ve noticed, both in my own experience and in my work:
Anxiety tends to spiral. It loops, catastrophises, and asks “but what if” repeatedly. It escalates when you feed it attention. It often has a familiar, learned quality, the same fears arising again.
Intuition is different. It’s quieter. It doesn’t argue with you. It doesn’t need to justify itself. It arrives, makes itself known, says no and then waits. When you ignore it, it tends to come back. When you act on it, there’s often a sense of release or rightness, even if the situation itself is difficult.
There’s one more distinction I find really useful: intuition has a quality of loving intelligence. It’s always oriented towards your highest good and often the highest good of those around you too. Even when it delivers uncomfortable information, there’s something fundamentally kind about it. Anxiety, by contrast, is fear-based. It’s trying to protect you from danger, real or imagined. Once you begin to feel the difference in quality between the two, it becomes easier to tell them apart.
That said, they can overlap, especially when you have unresolved trauma or when your nervous system is under stress. This is one of the reasons I believe working with your body and your history is so central to developing your intuitive skills so you can become a clearer channel for information. You can’t fully separate the two until you’ve done some of that deeper work.
5. It’s a skill, not a special gift for a chosen few
Intuitive intelligence is an inherent human capacity. We are all born with it, even if it has never been consciously developed. It is not reserved for psychics, healers, or people with a particular gift.
I often think if only, just like Harry Potter receiving his letter from Hogwarts, we as HSPs received a letter at birth saying: ‘Your sensitivity is a form of intuitive intelligence. Here is how to train it.’ So much confusion, shame, and overwhelm could be avoided.
The good news is that intuition can be developed at any stage of life. Through practice, through learning to listen to the body, through working with what comes — slowly, the signal gets clearer. I didn’t trust my intuition in my twenties. I learned to, over time, through making mistakes when I didn’t listen, through training in Shiatsu, learning EFT and then through my own channeling and healing work, through simply practising.
The more you work with it, the more fluent you become in its language.
How you name the source of this intuitive intelligence is entirely your own. Some people call it their higher self or inner wise crone. Others call it God, the universe, spirit guides, or simply their inner knowing. There is no correct language. What matters is that you develop a working relationship with that deeper intelligence, whatever name feels right to you.
6. For HSPs, it’s amplified and that comes with a challenge
If you are highly sensitive, your intuitive receiving is turned up. Your nervous system is like a highly sensitive antenna. You pick up more data, more subtlety, more of the energetic landscape around you, whether you want to or not.
This can be an extraordinary gift when you know how to work with it. It’s the foundation of how I work in my Intuitive Healing practice, my ability to sense the emotions, memories, and energetic patterns of the people I work with is a direct result of my highly sensitive nature, trained and developed over time.
But without that training, without learning to filter and ground the information coming in, the same capacity can leave you exhausted, overwhelmed, and flooded. You may not even realise that much of what you’re carrying isn’t yours.
This is why I believe that for HSPs, developing your intuitive intelligence isn’t optional, it’s essential. Not so you can become a healer or a channel (though that might be your path). But so you can manage your sensitivity, trust yourself, and stop second-guessing every signal your body sends you.
Start listening
Do you feel as though you have been dismissing your intuitive signals as anxiety, overthinking, or imagination? Perhaps you were waiting for a clearer sign while ignoring the quiet one that’s already there?
You may have been receiving intuitive information your entire life. You just may not have known that’s what it was.
If you’d like somewhere to start, try this: the next time you have a decision in front of you, bring it into your body rather than your mind. Notice whether the response feels light and open, or heavy and contracted. That lightness — that sense of expansion — is what a “yes” tends to feel like. The heaviness or darkness is a “no.” It’s simple, but it’s a genuine doorway into your own intuitive intelligence and it might just be the first step in changing your life.
Next step
If you’re curious about developing this skill further, especially as a highly sensitive person, you can learn about my Intuitive Development Training.
