The Intuition Experiment

By Sophie Jacobs

In The Intuition Experiment, author Sophie Jacobs takes readers on her post-graduate exploration of what it means to live out a deeper truth; one decision, experience, and journal entry at a time. This insight

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885044820

Book preview

The Intuition Experiment

The Intuition Experiment

Sophie Jacobs

NEW DEGREE PRESS

Copyright © 2022 sophie jacobs

All rights reserved.

The Intuition Experiment

Cover design includes original photograph by Dania Trejo

ISBN

979-8-88504-458-5 Paperback

979-8-88504-482-0 Ebook

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the parts of you That ache for your safety Terrified of what would happen If you trusted the brilliance Of your heart

Unable to Describe It

Understanding, in humans, is translated into concepts, thoughts, and words. Understanding is not an aggregate of bits of knowledge. It is a direct and immediate penetration. In the realm of sentiment, it is a feeling. In the realm of intellect, it is perception. It is an intuition rather than the culmination of reasoning. Every now and again it is fully present in us, and we find we cannot express it in words, thoughts or concepts. ‘Unable to describe it,’ that is our situation at such moments. Insights like this are spoken of in Buddhism as ‘impossible to reason about, to discuss, or to incorporate into doctrines or systems of thought.’

—Thich Nhất Hanh, The Sun, My Heart

Introduction

Flames lick the perimeter of the street as the fire nation marches toward a neighboring earth village. This is how the latest episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender ends—on a cliffhanger. Avatar has been recommended to me throughout the years and has recently turned into my nightly ritual. I relish escaping the mid-August heat and remote job into the epic, mystic quest of a young boy mastering the four elements and restoring order in the world.

Something about the Avatar episode feels all too real tonight. While there’s no immediate danger as I’m lying on my bed, there have been multiple accounts of fires starting from dry lightning strikes in the neighboring counties in Northern California. It’s the perfect storm of drought, heat, and wind.

My attention drifts to Facebook Messenger, where a notification pops up from my stepbrother’s girlfriend, Hilary:

Just letting you know again that if you want to come to sleep here you can! We can leave a key outside the front door if you want!

I feel a sense of relief. All day I’ve been experiencing inner symptoms of disquiet like nausea and the twitching of my muscles. Outer signs of discord find their way to me as well. Just hours earlier, a dead bird appeared on my doorstep, asphyxiated.

I start to ask myself questions like:

Am I feeling this way because it’s the first time I’m home alone since COVID-19? No, I usually don’t get scared of being alone. How long have I been feeling this way? The whole day. Is it because of the fires that started in the neighboring county? I think so, but I know I’ve been told if I need to evacuate, I’ll be notified by a neighbor or the fire department, and they haven’t given any warning.

As I sit on my bed that night, an inner sense of urgency brings me to my feet. A feeling of emptiness is in the house, which makes it feel like life is being drained out of it. Perhaps that’s why I decide on a whim to pack my overnight bag and gather the dogs’ food and leashes. By 9:45 p.m., I close the door and head out to the car with the dogs into the thick charcoal air.

By midnight, my entire home, including the fireproof safe, is decimated. Neighbors on my street flee from the flames without their shoes or phones. Some don’t make it out alive. If I had left just three hours later, I might have been one of them.

My life was spared, but it was also about to massively change. I would soon quit a promising start-up job to develop my inner awareness at a monastery. My new job was to live out the following questions:

1. Can inner space be known?

2. How can I trust this inner knowing?

Unlike the research questions that guided academic pursuits in college, these questions were craving to be lived, fully embodied. In this unknown exploration, I placed my commitment and trust not on any belief in the outcome, but in the process itself. My experiment was to spend a year ruthlessly committed to my inner knowing, meeting people, learning things, and connecting the dots.

Like a lot of Westerners, I grew up believing I could only understand the world through logic. In school, I learned that rational knowledge set us apart from less intelligent species, whereas intuition was a pseudo-science at best and a psychic hoax at worst. If we follow this belief back long enough, many of our notions around knowledge bring us to the Enlightenment Age. Theories of rationalism, skepticism, and empiricism were defining aspects of what it meant to validate truth at the time, which is a complete turnaround from the implicit expectation that truth was found in one’s devotion to God. Tsoukas (2005a) points out that to this day, Westerners favor well-defined, standardized, and empirical truths over intuitive knowledge acquired through personal means. However, certain researchers have suggested deliberative, conscious reasoning is not the only way of arriving at trustworthy knowledge (Hodginkson et al. 2009a).

I am not here to ditch rationality and reason. However, when we box ourselves into one form of understanding, we limit our capacity to connect. I am compelled to break away from the notion that human thought is the highest form of intelligence—the saving grace of our species. Although logic is a powerful tool to organize reality, logic alone will not heal us or this planet.

Bhante Gunaratana, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, describes the Western relationship to knowledge with a warning:

We like to think that our society is exploiting every area of human knowledge in order to achieve peace and happiness. We are just realizing that we have overdeveloped the material aspect of existence at the expense of the deeper emotional and spiritual aspect, and we are paying the price for that error. (Gunaratana, 2011)

I believe the price is steep. Disconnecting from our inner knowing has the potential to sever our connection to ourselves and each other. Even worse, it can cost us our own life and, at a collective scale, the life of this planet.

My definition of knowing has everything to do with connection. When the energy of our awareness joins with the object of the observed, we form a connection. This connection opens a channel between the observer and the observed. The deeper the connection, the clearer the channel of information.

The more I come back to this connective awareness, the more I notice the elemental nature of intelligence. The energy and subsequent information that wind, fire, earth, and water carry bring us closer to ourselves, each other, and the planet. It is not abstract knowledge from detached analysis. It is a deeply embodied and experiential one.

I have also found this information carries a power that not only keeps us alive but brings more moments of aliveness, which is rooted in our connection to all things. This connection has the potential to bring forth the knowledge that liberates. If we take action that aligns with this truth, we align toward the flow of life. The unfolding of this flow state is where our true purpose and freedom lie.

If you keep reading, you’ll learn how to establish an open channel to your inner knowing through the elements. We’ll dive into experiences and tips that support inner and outer awareness, connection, and flow state. These stories and practices aim to create an environment of safety and play so you can freely experiment. As always, take what resonates and leave the rest.

I write for the part of you that sits at a crossroads terrified of the next step, or the part of you that chronically outsources your truth to please others. I write for the part of you that feels rubbed raw from the world and unable to trust in your sensitivity. Above all, I write for the part of you who wonders what to trust and how to show up fully for life.

The Greek Stoic Philosopher Epictetus famously said: Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it. On the one hand, I’m going against Epictetus’ advice by sharing the stories that have become the tapestry of my life philosophy. Yet, the explanation within each story I share is not separate from the embodiment I had to journey through. Hopefully, these words show rather than command, taking on their own life within you rather than dogma over you. This is the way of intuition. Let it speak through you.

This book will have intuition tips sprinkled into each chapter, but I encourage experimentation with embodied awareness before anything else. If that is too abstract a concept, consider setting an intention to notice the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that come up as you read. I hope this experiment will bring forth your unique constellation of elemental wisdom, however subtle it may be.

If a step into the remembrance of a deeper knowing and a dive into the mystery calls to you, join me. I’d like to think there is no such happy accident you’re here.

Wind I

Whispers

The first way we experience the world is through sensing our whole body. It’s the most primal form of inner communication that directs all thought, feeling, and action.

—The Embody Lab

June 9, 2021

I’m in Minneapolis tearing off bits of injera, a fermented bread, with my dad. He begins to tell me the real story of how he met my mom. Up until our dinner at the Ethiopian café, I believed a mutual friend set them up on a blind date at the St. Louis Art Museum. It would take twenty-two years for me to find out that my dad found my mom serendipitously through a personal ad in the paper.

Before your mom, I was in a serious long-term relationship with someone else. I really cared for her and enjoyed being around her, but something was off. I guess I just wasn’t in love with her. She was ready to have a family, a house, children, everything. Once that conversation became more serious, I realized I couldn’t continue staying comfortable. My heart just wasn’t in it.

As we kept breaking off injera to dip into flavorful stews such as Kik Wat and Firfir, I was struck by his what could have been life trajectory with another woman.

I had to break up with her. It was really hard to do because she was a nice person and we had a comfortable life together. I just couldn’t continue feeling like something was off. Several weeks later, I saw your mom’s personal ad in the paper. And without even looking at her face or hearing her voice—just through her writing—I had this feeling that I needed to meet her. On our first date at the St. Louis Art Museum, I just knew she was the woman I wanted to marry.

I looked down at the injera platter in silence, not quite knowing what to say. Throughout my life, my dad has always talked about how the idea of me was born in that art museum with wonder in his eyes. I was now old enough to hear the behind-the-scenes story of how it all happened.

Something just felt right about meeting your mom at the time. There was this synchronicity to the whole unfolding of our connection, from the intuition I had to contact her, the resonance I felt during our first date to my favorite book of all time on her bookshelf.

I thought about all the invisible string of connections between my dad’s thoughts and choices in 1996 to the moment before us at the Ethiopian café in June 2021. I paused.

Dad, I think your intuition is the reason I exist.

At the time, I was sure intuition was important, but what I couldn’t understand was its ability to connect life to more life. We both shared in this awe.

My conversation with my dad that night reminded me of another dinner I had last summer with my mother.

April 12, 2020

It’s the start of COVID-19, and I just moved back home. We’re clearing the plates after dinner as my mom and I reminisce about family trips to Italy. My great-grandparents made film strips in Italy for a couple of months out of the year, which led them to buy a twelfth-century stone cottage in a small town in Tuscany. My mom inherited their house. In 1997, she took a trip to Italy with my dad—her boyfriend at the time—and my two sisters. This trip was a test to see if my dad was dad material. As she starts to tell the story, my mom pauses. She looks directly at me and says, You know, Sophie, another kid was not in the plan. But during that trip to Italy, I just had this deep inner sense, without taking a pregnancy test, that you were going to come into this world.

This revelation was more of a shock than a sting. I surprised myself and everyone else by just being here.

Intuition Tip: Reflect on your origin story in a journal entry or in conversation with a loved one. Possible prompts are: What’s the meaning of the name you were given? What symbols did you connect to growing up? Pay particular attention to themes that keep popping up, as this can signal inklings of your deeper nature.

Soon enough, I was born on March 1 in a third-floor walk-up condo. The condo was a fifteen-minute walk from the St. Louis Art Museum—the place where my parents had first met. I didn’t let my mom finish up her bath late that night. I guess I needed to enter the world first.

Apparently, my entry into the world needed to be surrounded by water. Astrologically, I was born into Pisces season, meaning my elemental sign is water. I often think about the symbolism of this. My first experience of life—the arrival of light—was in contact with water. These same elements make up a rainbow. The earth—bathtub—and the stars—astrology—all point to the rainbow as the symbol for my origin story. These were the first whispers of what was to come.

Being a chronic new kid only reinforced these behaviors. No, I was not a military kid. I just happened to be born right as my mom was in medical school. We went along with her meandering career: residency training in California, private practice in Oregon, public health care in Missouri, and administrative roles back in California. Because of this chronic movement, my social situations were about being accepted or not feeling accepted. Being new garners attention—good and bad—from everyone. I could not stand such a bright light. My solution was to mirror other people, behave, make a good first impression, and make other people feel good, fast. Do what you have to do to garner approval even at the expense of your own heart. Essentially, play a role and become invisible for your safety.

Part of my social identity was white and upper-middle class, so I had the privilege of being coded as innocent and virtuous. My obedience to authority not only granted me safety but also a privilege. Performing obedience, innocence, and respectability was my safety.

This strategy for safety through approval started to affect my physical body. I may have been adept at hiding my true urges from everyone around me, but I couldn’t completely hide them from myself. I started to feel the whispers of the consequences of people-pleasing behaviors. This, I would later realize, falls into the trauma response known as fawning. Pete Walker, the therapist who coined the concept of fawning as the fourth F after fight, flight, and freeze explains that fawn types: Act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries. (Walker n.d)

In kindergarten, I could not ask the simple question, May I use the restroom? I knew this was a regular human process. Yet, I would stop listening to the whole lesson altogether and obsess over the timing of raising my hand. May I came to represent an action that you needed permission