Where does intuition actually come from? And what does it feel like when you just know something?
After more than 25 years working with people, psychologist Maria Di Pietro says she sometimes knows something without being able to explain exactly how.
She calls it intuition. But there’s an important qualification: it’s intuition backed by experience.
In this short extract from On Experience, I ask Maria where she feels intuition, how she recognises it and what it means to trust something she can’t fully explain.
Edited Transcript
Geoff: Where does the intuition sit for you? Where do you get the feeling?
Maria: I get the feeling in my body, not my head. And if you kinda know
about energy centers in the body, in the solar plexus is where you probably feel it. Sometimes now because I’ve been working that way for such a long time, I don’t even think about where it sits necessarily, because it’s a feeling.
It’s just a… You just know. It’s like a knowing. You know, like… How can I explain it? Like, sometimes you just know, and if you had to try and explain how you know, you can’t explain it. I’m trying to think of an example, but I’m sure that’s happened to you, Geoff, where you just know something.
Just a knowing. You just know. Like, you know, you just know these conversations are good. Like, you just know that it’s gonna work. I mean, you come into this conversation going, “Oh, God, I hope Maria speaks okay.” We know each other of course, but you just kind of know that it’s gonna go okay.
Like you said, you don’t necessarily have a structured script, but you just trust that it’s gonna go in the direction that it needs to go. That’s a knowing. So if I said to you, “How do you know that?” And you go, “I don’t know, I just do.” You know?
Geoff: Yeah, I laugh because it’s kind of like at times I feel like, “Oh, wow, isn’t this going great?” And at times it’s like, “Oh my God, we’re going off course somewhere.”
Well, it actually does come back to the knowing. It’s like, how do I know this is on course or off course? Well, I don’t. I just have a sense of it. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds interesting. Let’s go over there and explore that.”
And the intuition one is a curious one because often we’ll put words around things and think that’s knowing. But intuition may be knowing without the words, which is different.
Maria: I think we all have intuition. Some of us have just developed
it more than others. So, you hear people saying, “Oh, wish I could be more intuitive…” And you say, well, you… There’s things you have to do in order to be more intuitive and one is you gotta start trusting yourself.
Like, you get a thought, you trust that thought. Or if you have any doubt, like sometimes people can go, “Oh, I think I should do that. Yeah, I should do it. Well, I think.” And you go, “That’s not intuition.” ‘Cause when it’s true intuition, there’s no I think. You just know.
More from On Experience and Maria Di Pietro
If you’d like to explore On Experience and Maria Di Pietro’s insights, then you might like to read these posts next:
