How to Access Your Inner Wisdom When Making Any Decision (Your Body Already Knows) | by Maggie Evans

When facing an important decision, what do you typically do first?

I recently asked this question of a large group of healers and carers—people who spend their professional lives helping others reconnect with themselves. And the majority chose “research and gather more information”. While not one person chose “check in with my body or gut feeling”.

I wasn’t surprised, but it made me excited to share the following practice with them, just as I am equally excited to share it with you.

Your Body is Not Just a Place where Stress Lives

Your body is a sensing system that’s been gathering information about your life, your choices, your relationships, faster than your thinking mind ever could.

But most of us were never taught to listen to that, let alone trust it.

Through cultural messaging and familial conditioning, by being told “to be rational”, “stop being so sensitive”, “don’t let emotions cloud your judgment”, we learned to override these signals instead of listen to them.

And if you’re a healer, coach or carer, that override often runs even deeper—sometimes we get so skilled at reading everyone else’s signals that we lose the thread back to our own.

This lack of connection to our bodies isn’t a personal failing—nor is it a lifetime condition. Instead it’s a learned response to an environment that consistently told you your internal signals were less reliable than external information. And for many people, especially those who grew up in unpredictable or demanding environments, disconnecting from body signals was protective and intelligent.

A Slow Return to Trust

The path back to your body wisdom isn’t about forcing yourself to feel everything at once; in fact, that can be counterproductive. It’s about rebuilding trust, gradually, with a system that has been waiting for your attention.

Anxiety ‘v’ Intuition

One question that often arises is about the difference between anxiety and intuition and how they feel in the body. Both produce sensation, but they’re not the same thing.

How to Tell the Difference Between Anxiety and Intuition

• Anxiety tends to feel like a general buzz, like spiraling everywhere at once, hard to pin down, future-focused, and gets louder the more you engage with it.
• Intuition tends to be quieter and more specifically located in one clear place in the body, one clear signal, present-focused, and consistent when you return to it.

Another practical way to tell anxiety and intuition apart is to wait and come back. Anxiety typically shifts or dissolves over twenty-four hours, whereas intuition tends to remain quiet and unchanged when you return to it.

The practice is learning to distinguish them so you can make informed choices rather than reactive ones.

Writing as Translation

Sensation on its own can be hard to use. A tight chest doesn’t come with an instruction manual.

And that’s where writing comes in. Not journaling for its own sake, but writing as translation—taking what’s wordless in the body and letting it become language so we can understand what our body is saying.

The body knows before the mind catches up, and writing is how we can close that gap.

You don’t need to be “a writer” for this. You just need to be willing to put words to what’s there, imperfectly, without editing. The body doesn’t grade your grammar or your punctuation.

Why This Makes You Better At Your Work

If you’re a healer, coach or carer, you might wonder whether attending to your own body signals pulls your focus away from the people you serve.

The opposite is true.

Your capacity to be present with another person’s experience depends entirely on your ability to stay connected to your own. A practitioner who’s learned to override their signals doesn’t stop receiving the information; they just stop being able to use it.

And the somatic data that comes through in a session, the felt sense of what’s happening in the room, the subtle signal that something important is being avoided—all of that requires you to be in contact with your own body to access it.

Where to Start

So the next time you’re facing a decision—any decision—try Step 2: Get Into Your Body before you do anything else.

That means just 3 breaths, your feet on the ground, one hand on your heart. And notice what’s already there—what you already know—before you think.

Contributing author: Maggie Evans, LMHC, ATR, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Certified Art Therapist based in Spokane, Washington. She specializes in neurodivergent women navigating midlife—late ADHD and autism diagnoses, perimenopause, identity, and the creative life that got shelved somewhere along the way. She received her own ADHD diagnosis at 44 and brings both clinical expertise and lived experience to her work. She runs Therapy for Bohemians, a private telehealth practice serving women across Washington and Idaho states, offers private mentoring, and hosts The Writing Cocoon, a weekly online writing group for women in midlife.

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