You walked into the room and something was wrong. You could not have said what. The furniture was in its usual place. People were smiling. Someone offered you a drink. And still, at the back of your neck, a cool little warning.
Later, sometimes much later, the reason arrived. A conversation that had happened before you came in. A decision already made without you. A friendship quietly turning.
You had known. You simply had not known why.
Most women I know have a story like this. Many of us also have the other kind of story, the one where we felt the warning and talked ourselves out of it. You're being dramatic. You're tired. Don't make a scene. And then the thing happened anyway, and we were left with the peculiar grief of having been right and having ignored ourselves.
There is a famous experiment that I think about when I think about this kind of knowing. Bechara and colleagues (1997) asked people to play a card game with four decks. Two decks gave larger rewards but led to bigger losses over time. Two were steadier and more profitable. Before participants could explain which decks were bad, many of them began to show physical stress responses, measured through changes in skin conductance, as they reached towards the risky decks. Their bodies seemed to register the danger before their minds could put it into words. The interpretation of this study has been debated for years, and it was never a test of intuition about people. But it offers a striking image: the body leaning away before the reasons arrive. Bechara et al. (1997)
Later research has asked whether some people make better use of these signals than others. Dunn and colleagues (2010) found that people who were more accurate at detecting their own heartbeat showed a closer link between their bodily responses and their intuitive decisions in a similar card game. When the body's signals pointed in a helpful direction, those who could perceive them well tended to choose better. When the signals pointed the wrong way, the same sensitivity could lead them astray. That last part matters. Bodily knowing is real information, not infallible truth. Dunn et al. (2010)
So this is not an argument for always trusting your gut. It is an argument for listening to it.
And listening has not always been encouraged, especially for women. We have been called oversensitive, hysterical, emotional, irrational. For a long stretch of history, a woman who knew things she could not explain, who healed with plants, who noticed what others missed, who said no when she was supposed to say yes, could be given a much darker word.
It is not hard to see why the warning at the back of the neck became something we learned to talk over. Talking over it was safer.
This is the season of the thin veil. In many old traditions, the end of October was understood as a time when the boundary between worlds grew faint. I do not need to believe that literally to feel what it points at. At this time of year, as the light goes and the nights draw in, things that have been hidden become easier to sense. The quiet knowing that lives under the reasonable voice comes closer to the surface.
What would it be like to let it speak, just this week, without immediately arguing with it?
Not to obey it blindly. Not to make a scene. Only to notice the cool little warning, or the warm little yes, and to say inside yourself: I hear you. I do not know why yet. I will keep listening.
That is how trust is rebuilt. Not in one leap of faith, but in many small moments of taking yourself seriously.
Ritual Invitation
This week, keep a small piece of paper in your pocket. Each time you feel an unexplained signal in your body, a tightening, a pull, a sinking, a lift, write one word and the place it happened. Do not try to interpret it. At the end of the week, read the list by candlelight and notice which ones turned out to know something.
Your Turn
When did you know something before you could explain it?
What signal have you been talking over the longest?
Keep the Thread
For Halloween week, The Naming Ritual is free: seven days to take back one word you were trained to fear. Begin the Naming Ritual
Return to Yourself, the first Witch in Progress book, is a quiet companion for coming back to your own knowing. Read Return to Yourself
References
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275(5304), 1293–1295. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.275.5304.1293
Dunn, B. D., Galton, H. C., Morgan, R., Evans, D., Oliver, C., Meyer, M., Cusack, R., Lawrence, A. D., & Dalgleish, T. (2010). Listening to your heart: How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision making. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1835–1844. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610389191
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