How to Strengthen Your Intuition

Ask people whether they have intuition and almost everyone says yes. Ask them whether they act on it and the room goes quiet.

That gap is the whole subject. Amy Rachelle has spent twenty-five years working intuitively, first as a naturopath and medical medium and now teaching it, and her position on how to strengthen your intuition is more practical than the word usually invites. There is nothing to acquire. You already have the equipment. What you have is a relationship with it that has either been fed or starved.

Here is what that means in the body, and what it means on a Tuesday.

Your gut is doing most of the talking

Start with the ratio, because it reorders everything else.

Roughly eighty per cent of the information travelling between your gut and your brain is going upwards. The gut sends, the head receives. The enteric nervous system, which holds something like five hundred million neurons and is often called the second brain, is not a poetic flourish. It is a sensing organ, and it is sensing continuously, awake and asleep, whether or not you are paying any attention to it.

Which leaves the thinking mind, the part most of us treat as the whole show, doing about twenty per cent of the job.

Most of us have been running our lives on the minority report.

The prediction machine, and why a firefighter does not hesitate

The second piece is what the brain does with what arrives.

Everything you have ever lived through is stored as pattern. Amy calls it the prediction machine, and it is why an emergency doctor knows what to do before they have consciously worked it out, and why a firefighter goes into a building rather than standing on the pavement weighing it up. Their gut sends the situation up. The pattern is matched. The body moves.

They are not braver than you in that moment. They have simply trained the system and then trusted it.

Her point is that this is not reserved for people in uniform. Everything you have done, including a great deal you would never think was relevant, has been distilled into the same machine and is available to you. Not only for the dramatic decisions. For the ordinary ones, which are the ones that actually build a life.

What happened on Fifth Avenue

She tells one story against the idea that any of this is abstract.

She was nineteen, newly arrived in New York City from the deep South, temping in an office and deliberately keeping her head down after a fairly wild start. Work, the gym, home. No boyfriend, no nothing.

She was crossing Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street when she passed a man selling something on the street. Something happened in her body that she had no explanation for. She kept walking.

Then she heard it.

"And I kept walking down the street and I heard the voice inside and it said, turn around, go back. You never know when your life is going to change. So I stood there in the middle of the street with thousands of people going by with that same sort of feeling, like that knowing."

She turned around. He was selling his own book. She was married to him for the next fourteen years, and she counts those years as the ones that made her.

What she wants people to take from it is not the romance. It is the order of events. The signal arrived in the body first, before there was anything to think about, and she acted on it before she could argue herself out of it.

How to strengthen your intuition: the only instruction that matters

Everything else in her teaching hangs off one line.

"Act on it, it gets stronger. Doubt it, it gets weaker. That's how powerful you and I are."

This is not a faculty you either have or do not have. It is a relationship, and like every other relationship it responds to how it is treated.

Her way of putting the cost is hard to shake off. Nobody wants to be ignored, put down, neglected, pushed away or doubted. And that is precisely what we do to ourselves, every time we tell our own knowing no.

So the practice is unglamorous. Notice the signal. Act on something small. Watch what happens. Then do it again. Accuracy is not something you decide in advance, it is something the relationship earns over time, and it only gets the chance to earn it if you give it the job.

The thing that usually blocks this is not the sensing. People can nearly always sense. What stops them is the question underneath, which presents as can I trust this? and is really can I trust myself?

That is where the work is.

What it feels like when it goes quiet

The part of Amy's teaching that most people do not expect is her talking about losing it.

There was a stretch of about three years at ASHA when she was deep in the operational side of running a retreat centre, learning systems and spreadsheets and logistics, and her head filled up. By the end of it she was depressed and asking herself what she was doing with her life. She had not heard the voice in a long time.

Then one day, walking the dog, it came back the way it usually comes to her, which is in lyrics.

"It said: you've been away for so long, you can't hear a song. And if I can't hear my song, if I can't hear this voice, the GPS is disconnected. The coordinates are not talking to each other. And I'm just in that twenty per cent of my head. And it's like eating cardboard."

There is something reassuring in that, coming from her. The person teaching this is not someone with the signal permanently switched on. She is someone who has lost it, noticed, and knows the way back. Which is probably the only sort of teacher worth having.

The way back, in her experience, is space. Breath and meditation are not decoration here, they are how you get the head quiet enough to hear what the body has been saying the whole time. If your inner weather is loud, the signal is still arriving. You just cannot make it out. ASHA's piece on breath and regulation covers the mechanics of that side of it.

And her closing instruction, after all of the above, is three words long.

Trust your body.

---

Intuition is learned the way anything embodied is learned, which is slowly, in company, with people who will tell you the truth about what they see. Amy teaches a full week of it on the land in Tuscany: daily classes, breathwork, voice, movement and the long unhurried afternoons that let it settle. The next Intuition Retreat with Amy Rachelle runs 29 August to 4 September 2027, and places go to the waitlist first. If you would rather start closer to home, Alchemy of Breath runs free Breathwork Fundamentals to get the head quiet enough to hear.