“Wait, intuition is IN THE BODY?”

Oct 29, 2025

Mentor: “…and what does your body say about that?”
Me: “Wait, intuition can be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have intuitions in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I was bottlenecked on feeling sensations in my body. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I didn’t notice things like “expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, so I was living at 360p. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Intuitions in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this:1

Illustrated: Where I DIDN’T feel in my body. (Maps of subjective feelings)

This information flows freely, unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance to intuition, updates fail to permeate the entire system.2 And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

a human body with a graph network inside, network in the head is stronger than network in the body because it's cut off

To be clear, this bottleneck appeared to be locally optimal; it helped mitigate body pain and social risks. So, direct access to intuition made my life worse, locally.

And while it was locally optimal, it wasn’t globally optimal:

I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood instead of the pain.
Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.
I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what she was soaking in.
Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.
I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”
I didn’t really experience deep pleasure.
I was more prone to addictions, distractions, ‘time-waste’.

At the same time, this bottlenecked numbed awareness of itself. I went like this for years until people I trusted pointed it out.

Eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and (a lot of) time, what made accessing intuition risky got safely unlearned.

After I regained the ability to feel in high resolution, I journaled:

Wow.
There’s so much intricacy to the emotional ripples in my stomach alone. I found strange happinesses in the tip of my fingers (???). And self-loathing there, too! Love in the “cave of the heart” on the right side of my chest…

Soon I realized that these feelings are better described as tuples (sensation, location) rather than, say, emotion words:

Image Not ‘anxious’ but (tension, lower chest) Not ‘happy’ but (pleasure, arm skin) Not ‘confident’ but (expansiveness, chest and shoulders)

My progress continued: Decision-making became so easy it feels like there isn’t even a “me” making the choice. I became more empathetic and see others’ emotions easily. I notice fears without avoiding, allowing me to integrate them. Life is more colorful and I’m more intuitive. I see and hear more. 4k awareness enables 4k behavior.