You Know More Than You Think
You've been there. You walk into a room and something shifts inside you — before anyone speaks, before anything has been said. A tightening in the chest. A sudden urge to leave. A quiet sense of something's off.
Or you're about to send an email and your hand hovers over the trackpad. You don't know why. You send it anyway. And later — of course — it turns out you were right to hesitate.
We usually brush these moments off. We call them coincidences. Or anxiety. Or — if we're in certain circles — intuition, which we then immediately feel pressure to justify with logic. But what if these weren't fuzzy, unreliable instincts at all? What if they were data?
Your body is not a vessel. It is a processor.
Your nervous system is constantly taking in far more information than your conscious mind can hold. The microexpression that flickered across a face. The slight edge in someone's voice. The way a room smells, sounds, hums — or doesn't. Your body is cataloguing all of it, integrating it, and offering you a readout before language even has a chance to form.
This is not mystical. It's biological. Moshe Feldenkrais spent decades articulating something that embodied wisdom traditions have always known: the body is not a vehicle for the mind. The body is intelligence. Sensation, movement, and felt sense aren't lower functions waiting for the brain to organize them. They are the first layer of knowing — and often the most accurate one.
“The body is not a vehicle for the mind. The body is intelligence itself.”
The problem isn't that we don't know. The problem is that we've been trained not to trust what we sense.
How we learned to override ourselves
From a very early age, most of us got the message — sometimes subtly, sometimes not at all subtly — that our felt sense wasn't reliable enough. That we were overreacting. Too sensitive. Too much. We learned to double-check our perceptions against what others thought. We learned to wait for permission before trusting what we already felt.
And so we built habits. We analyze. We seek approval. We perform certainty we don't feel, or we silence certainty we do. We override the signal — not because the signal is wrong, but because somewhere along the way, we stopped believing we were allowed to trust it.
For many of the people I work with — women, queer folx, people who were told in a thousand ways to be smaller, quieter, less — this override isn't a quirk. It's a survival strategy that made a lot of sense once. The question is whether it still serves you now.
What if you treated your first sense as data?
Not as truth you have to defend. Not as a feeling you need to explain away. Just as the first layer of information — something worth noticing before you decide what to do with it.
This is the shift I see again and again in voice work and in the deeper work of learning to inhabit yourself more fully. When someone stops fighting what they already sense, and starts getting curious about it instead, something opens. The voice changes. Presence changes. The relationship to their own knowing changes.
You don't have to learn something new. You have to remember something true.
Your body has been paying attention this whole time. The work is learning to listen.
Reply and tell me — where have you been overriding yourself lately?
That's my question for you this week. And I mean it literally — hit reply. I read every message, and I'd love to know what's stirring.
(If you're not already on the list and want that free self-trust practice — the link to subscribe is right here.)