Tara Healey describes a kind of knowing that arrives through the body rather than through logic. The longer she listened to her gut, the more she noticed it carrying wisdom her linear brain couldn’t articulate — a felt sense that “something’s not right here,” which, when she slowed down and stayed with it, resolved into clarity about how she wanted to be, who she wanted to be with, or that she needed to leave a situation.
“There’s this gut impulse that has a lot of wisdom that my linear brain can’t tell you exactly what it is, but if I listen to that gut and I spend some time with it, it’s saying, something’s not right here.”
The body doesn’t only flag what’s wrong; it points toward what you want. Tara recounts feeling an unnamed energy wanting to move through her system — her hands wanting to push outward, a wish to be “bigger.” She didn’t yet know what it meant. Playing with the felt sense, it revealed itself: she wanted to lead larger groups rather than work one-on-one. The desire became known through the body first and the intellect second.
“It actually was through the body and that somatic awareness, that felt sense that it really hit me that there was something bigger… So, the body can guide us and actually point us towards something we want that we don’t even logically, intellectually know we want yet.”
This reframes intuition as something you can develop on purpose — not a mystical talent, but the fruit of deeply and patiently listening to the body.
Related Concepts
- Somatic awareness is a key to presence and to the wisdom of emotions
- The body holds emotions whether or not you put attention on them
- Body awareness is built in short enjoyable reps, like going to the gym
- Wisdom is when you don’t need to remember the insight
- Feeling nothing is itself somatic data worth exploring
- Balance time spent with grief one-to-one with self-care