Intuition is knowing something without being able to say how we know it: a hunch, a gut feeling, a sense of rightness. Therapeutic Shamanism sees it as part of the right brain’s way of perceiving the world, which never switched off but which our culture taught us to ignore. It can be trusted more than we have been told, but not blindly, because our own wishes and fantasies can dress themselves up as inner knowing, and learning to tell the two apart is a skill that grows with practice.
What is intuition? #
It is the kind of knowing that arrives whole, before we have worked anything out. We sense that a person is not quite what they seem, or that a decision is right, or that something is wrong in a room, and only afterwards, if at all, can we explain why. In everyday speech we call it a hunch, a gut feeling or a sixth sense.
There is nothing exotic about it. The cognitive scientist Guy Claxton shows that intelligence is not something that sits in the head and is merely served by the body. In his words: “we do not have bodies; we are bodies.”1 Much of what we know, we know in the body first.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand intuition? #
As one of the two ways the human brain approaches the world. Left brain and right brain are shorthand for these two ways of being, and intuition sits firmly on the right: “It deals with feelings; with intuitions, hunches, and impressions.”2 The right hemisphere communicates through feeling, resonance and intuition.
Both halves of the brain are always active: “Both are equally active, but we are by no means equally conscious of both.”3 In other words, our intuition has not gone anywhere. What has changed is what we pay attention to. The FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer “was not the process of the right-brain shutting down, but the process of us shifting our attention and focus towards the left-brain”, and so learning shamanism “is about learning to value and to pay attention to something that is actually going on in you already, and which always has been there.”4 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Why have so many of us learnt not to trust it? #
Because our culture has told us, for a very long time, that our inner nature is not to be trusted: “The message our Fallen culture gives us about our inner nature is that it cannot be trusted; that we must not trust our instincts”.5 Instead, we are taught to look outside ourselves for authority.
It was not always like this. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors “had no notion of not being able to trust their inner nature”; “they no more distrusted their inner nature, their Soul, than wolves distrust their ability to be wolves”.6 There is also what happened when Carl Rogers began treating people as trustworthy. In person-centred therapy, “the client learns to go inwards and trust their own feelings, intuition and inner knowing, and discover their own solutions”, and far from becoming selfish, as critics feared, people became kinder.7 See What does domestication do to us?
How does intuition show up in shamanic work? #
Very often as simply knowing. Many people expect journeys to be like watching a film, but it helps to ask “what can I smell, or hear, or taste, sense or intuit?” “It is important to learn to pay attention to the non-visual.”8 Recognising a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is intuitive too: “You just know. You know it in your heart. It is a recognition, a rightness, like something clicking into place”.9 See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
It grows with relationship. One practitioner who had worked with her GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this for a long time, in a difficult journey, followed their lead without needing to think about it, “as she trusted them absolutely and because the bond between them had become instinctual.”10
Is intuition the same as getting messages from spirit? #
No. A lot of popular spirituality treats every strong feeling as a message, and Therapeutic Shamanism is wary of this. Shamanic healing, unlike readings or mediumship, “is categorically not about getting messages, advice or guidance, or predictions about the future.” And how real a journey is “depends entirely upon how much we can temporarily get out of our left-brain, and allow our right-brain to take over.”11
So intuition is not a hotline to the spirits. It is an ordinary human way of perceiving, and it is the same faculty that shamanic practice trains and deepens. See What are the “spirit senses”: clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience? and How do I distinguish guidance from projection and middle-world bleed-through?
Can we trust it? #
More than our culture says, and less than some spiritual teachers claim. The body is a good place to start: “Our head is constantly making things up, telling stories, rationalising, explaining, and justifying. The body, however, is incapable of making up stories.” The trouble is that our own wishes can also feel like knowing. When Guides seem to agree to something harmful, either they are not really Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Guides, “or you are not really listening to them but are deluding yourself with your own wishful thinking and fantasies”.12
Writers outside the tradition say much the same. Claxton, who makes a strong case for the intelligence of the body, also says that “gut feelings and intuitions have some important validity, but they are no more immune from interrogation than are the pronouncements of a prophet.”13 And the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose work on how we make judgements won him a Nobel Prize, found that expert intuition is most reliable where the world is “sufficiently regular to be predictable” and where we have had “an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice”.14
There is also an old shamanic saying that applies to the whole of Therapeutic Shamanism, ‘Does it grow corn?’, meaning, basically, “In the end, the important thing is, does it work? If it works, then fine”.15 The same practical spirit applies here. An intuition that keeps leading somewhere good earns our trust. One that keeps leading us into trouble does not, however strongly it is felt.
Carl Rogers put the balance well: “My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways.”16
How can intuition be developed? #
By paying attention to it, and by getting ourselves out of the way. The first is mostly a matter of noticing the non-visual senses, and valuing what was always there. The second is what Therapeutic Shamanism calls hollowing-outHollowing-out. The core, lifelong discipline of setting aside the middle-world self, its stories, agendas and preconceptions, so the Guides can work through us. The image: the shaman as hollow bone. Read the full answer, setting the everyday self aside so that we perceive more clearly: “The more a shamanic practitioner can let go of their middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer identity, and instead journey as their aware self, the less they will get in the way of their guides”.17 See What is hollowing-out?
Intuition also works best alongside thinking, not instead of it. “Central to shamanic practice is bringing both hemispheres of the brain into balance, so that neither has dominance.”18 Research and reflection have their place, and so does the right brain’s quieter way of knowing. Each checks and enriches the other. See What are Focusing and the felt sense, and how can they support shamanic work?
