Roots of the Rise
Grounded wisdom for the journey inward and upward.
Roots of the Rise is a soul-centered podcast hosted by Sarah Hope—Ayurvedic health practitioner, spiritual mentor, meditation teacher, biodynamic craniosacral therapist, and energy healer. Drawing from thousands of hours of client work, group facilitation, and her own journey through childhood trauma, grief, and the profound rediscovery of love and joy, Sarah offers a grounded, heart-led space for inner transformation.
Short episodes (10–20 minutes) released on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, offer bite-sized insights, ideas, and practices for inner growth and self-development. Whether you're seasoned on the path or just beginning to explore, this podcast gives you digestible nuggets to stay inspired—without overwhelm. It’s perfect for those who want to stay engaged in the work, curious newcomers feeling overloaded by long-form content, or anyone wanting to understand a loved one's journey from a broader, more accessible perspective.
Sarah’s intention is to expose you to a wide range of spiritual concepts, therapeutic tools, philosophies, and practices—all in service of helping you become the healthiest, happiest, most authentic version of yourself. The journey can be hard. It can feel lonely. But you’re not alone. Come walk this path with her—learning, healing, and rising, one grounded step at a time.
This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Sarah is not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, she hopes it inspires you to grow, heal and seek the support you need to thrive.
Roots of the Rise
Episode 65 - Intuition Basics: What It Is, How It Manifests, and How to Develop It
Intuition is not a mystical gift for the chosen few but a natural skill available to all of us. We explore what intuition really is, how it manifests, and practical ways to reclaim this powerful inner resource.
• Intuition is unconscious pattern recognition—our subconscious picking up on information our conscious mind can't process
• Fundamentally passive, intuition responds to presence and receptivity, not force or willpower
• Meditation creates the settled mind necessary for intuitive awareness to emerge
• Doubt blocks intuition by activating the analytical mind and drowning out subtle knowing
• Common manifestations include nagging feelings, clarity, bodily sensations, and symbolic images
• Intuitive messages typically arrive as brief phrases or symbols rather than lengthy explanations
• Acting on intuition strengthens it, while ignoring it weakens the connection
• Start with non-emotionally charged questions about simple choices
• Ask "what serves my highest good?" rather than "what should I do?"
• Remember that intuition provides data points for decisions but doesn't control them
If this episode sparked your interest in developing your intuition or answered questions you've had, please share it with a friend. For questions or to share your intuition experiences, message me on Spotify or email rootsoftherise@gmail.com.
Related episodes:
Welcome back to Roots of the Rise with me, sarah Hope. Today we're talking about one of my favorite topics intuition. What is it? Is it something to be scared of? How do we go about rediscovering, reclaiming and enhancing this skill that, yes, we all have? Let me tell you what I've learned. So, before we get started, I just want to be clear that we're not doing a deep dive today, right? This is a primer, a starting point for a conversation I am certain we will revisit many times. Today is just about the basics.
Speaker 1:I used to think intuition was something only psychics had, which made me really skeptical and, honestly, a little afraid. But as I started to explore meditation and Ayurveda, I realized I had it all wrong. Intuition is not just some mystical gift that only a few select people have. It's actually a natural skill that's available to all of us. It's nothing to be afraid of. It's something that is intrinsic to every human being.
Speaker 1:The real issue is that most of us have been conditioned to distrust it. We're taught that our inner voice is unreliable, even dangerous. Maybe we've been taught that intuition is bad, that it's not our inner voice, but it's the voice of the devil or some other evil influence. We're taught to repress it or override it with logic and external validation. Okay, so what is intuition really? In many ways, it's just the unconscious recognition of patterns. It's our subconscious picking up on information that our conscious mind can't process. In the moment, we have a left brain that's highly logical and a right brain that's intuitive and creative. The intuitive side is always there, but most of us tend to favor the logical side. This doesn't mean that intuition is absent. It just means we're out of practice listening to it. It's like an inner pattern recognition system that works quickly and quietly. Beneath the surface. You might experience it as a gut feeling, a flash of clarity or a sense of just knowing, and that's your brain drawing from a deep well of unconscious knowledge.
Speaker 1:One important thing to understand is that intuition is fundamentally passive. You can't force it. It doesn't respond to pressure or to willpower. It responds to presence, receptivity and openness. It requires surrender, and that's one reason why so many of us feel disconnected from it.
Speaker 1:We live in a culture that prizes logic over inner knowing. From a young age, we are taught to dismiss or devalue our intuitive sense. I mean we've talked about that extensively over the past few weeks all the ways in which we've been taught to dismiss our inner truth, what we're sensing, what we're feeling. So we ignore our hunches, or we talk ourselves out of what we feel because we've been told we can't possibly know things without logical proof, or we talk ourselves out of what we feel because we've been told we can't possibly know things without logical proof, or we've been told that what we are perceiving is wrong. But here's the good news Intuition is a skill we can redevelop through practices like meditation, stillness and conscious surrender. We can learn to listen again, and that's worth doing, because when we reconnect with our intuition, we become more present, more aligned, more productive.
Speaker 1:So what's necessary for us to do this? To reconnect to our intuition? One thing is we have to have a settled mind so that there is an opening, a clear channel from which to receive information. Again, this is not something that you can reach through and grab. It's not like you can do a Google search in your brain to connect with the intuition that lives in the cloud. It's passive receptivity. You may throw out a prompt, a question, but you have to wait for the answer to come to you, not the other way around. It's more like fishing you can bait the hook, but you can't force the fish to bite right. The problem with this particular requirement for intuition is that having a settled mind isn't really the norm these days. I mean, just pause it for a moment and ask yourself when is the last time your mind wasn't racing, that you didn't feel stressed or anxious or thinking about the next thing you have to do? Was it the last time you were on vacation, or did you have trouble settling even then? This is why meditation is so important to developing intuition, because meditation gives us the pathway, gives us a process for calming the nervous system and letting that left hemisphere of the brain go offline for a little while. It helps us connect to the quiet place that's always accessible to us. It's just typically hidden behind a dysregulated nervous system. For that matter, any modality that's going to help regulate your central nervous system is helpful Craniosacral therapy for one, getting good sleep for another.
Speaker 1:Here's a second important aspect of intuition Doubt is the root of most people not being able to access it. Doubt is the dry rot of the universe, as my mentor is so fond of saying. Doubt puts you solidly in the mind, which places you in the left brain, which is not where we access intuition. This shows up in different ways of thinking, like somebody saying I don't have intuition, and the desire to test what comes through, wondering if what you received truly was intuition. That's doubt. What's needed here is, first of all, reinsurance that intuition is, in fact, a skill that all of us can develop. When you first started riding a bike, were you confident that you wouldn't fall? Nope, but hopefully someone held your hand and helped support you while you learned the skill. Intuition is no different. It's very helpful to have someone like a spiritual mentor to guide you and help reassure you as you go through the process of beginning to trust your inner voice.
Speaker 1:Barring that, a good place to start is to simply recall a time that you experienced intuition about yourself, like knowing the right way to handle a situation, or maybe it was knowing something was going to happen or not happen. Just take a moment right now and think about it. Can you recall a time that you experienced intuition, a gut feeling, an inner knowing? Got it Okay. So now think about the difference in the feel of that moment of intuition versus a random thought. How does it feel different to you? Because, remember, this isn't going to be about thinking differently, because that lives in your left brain, that's your mind trying to control things. This is going to be a sense, a feeling, which is why it can be so tricky, because intuition is subtle. Very rarely is it like a blinking neon sign that says go this way, which is why we have to learn the difference between a wave of emotion, the pressure of thinking or receiving a download, which is a common way people describe getting an intuitive hit.
Speaker 1:Intuition often speaks through feeling, through sensation, especially subtle sensation. The body and heart can pick up on signals faster than the mind. So somatic cues like feeling tense or open often precede a cognitive sense of knowing. So just get curious about how intuition shows up for you. If you've ever had intuition, recall that time and notice how did that message or thought or sense differ from your normal thinking? So let me list some of the ways that maybe it can manifest for you.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it comes as like a nagging, like it just keeps on coming. It's a feeling or a sense that you can't shake. Usually there's a clarity to it. There's nothing muddled, there's nothing confusing, it's just very clear. Sometimes there's a sense of knowing or truth that it's not coming from the mind. Maybe you feel it in your gut or you feel it in your heart. Sometimes it's a whole body sensation a shudder, a shiver, a tingle. Usually there is no emotion to the message. So the message comes through but you don't feel excited or upset. There's no kind of emotional attach. Maybe once you start processing it you start feeling emotions. But the hit itself, the intuition itself, carries no emotion.
Speaker 1:If you're visual, the vision might come from a different area in the head than usual. Or if you're auditory, the voice might have a different quality. Or one of my clients she only got intuitive hits on the right side. She would hear it from the right. That was one of her cues.
Speaker 1:Symbols are a big one. The subconscious works really well with symbols and they're also everywhere. There are certain symbols that are kind of universally understood to carry a certain meaning. Snakes, for instance, are pretty much universally understood to symbolize transformation. There might be some nuances in different cultures, but generally it's agreed Snake transformation. And this points to one last thing too Rarely does your intuition have whole sentence conversations with you.
Speaker 1:It comes in a symbol, a phrase, a sensation, a word, not a dissertation. That's one of the red flags to know that this isn't your intuition. If you're getting whole paragraphs. What's more likely is that you're thinking it through. So typically what you get is a single word, an image or a short sentence, and then maybe you're able to process through and extrapolate the greater meaning out from that little flash. So how do we develop it? As I've said, meditation isn't necessary, but man is. It going to make things go faster for you and it's going to make things so much more clear too. So I highly recommend you meditate, do some energetic clearing work like yoga or craniosacral therapy or Reiki, and get good sleep. All of that will help with clarity.
Speaker 1:Secondly, you have to act on the intuition. If you get a hit and you don't act on it, you're basically ignoring your inner voice. And what happens when something gets ignored for long enough? It stops trying, it gives up. This is one sure way to dim down your connection to your intuition. Know that in the beginning you have to ask for it. You know, once you've severed the connection, it's very rarely going to just restart itself. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. This does happen for some people where all of a sudden things just kind of turn back on. But for most you're going to have to make some effort you're going to have to try to reconnect to this higher part of yourself, and you need to do this often.
Speaker 1:It's best to ask for guidance after meditation and it's also best to start with non-emotionally laden things Simple, yes, no questions. So you don't want to start with the? Do I stay in this marriage or leave? You want to start with what would be in my best interest an apple or a banana, you know. And that it's important not to use shoulds, oughts you heard me catch myself right A have tos, you know. Remember that should questions confuse the higher self, because the divine knows the universe doesn't work this way. There are no shoulds, so not should I, but more. Would it be best for me to or is it in my highest good? I can almost hear some of you thinking what do you mean? There are no shoulds. We'll do it some other time, not today, but just know that you want to phrase things in the sense of would it be best for me or is it in my highest good?
Speaker 1:Some people have a deep fear of knowing something is going to happen. It's important to remember you won't be given information randomly. There's a reason for this. If something comes through that's unsettling, it's there to either prepare us or to help us be able to make a different choice. Ultimately, nothing is fated and nothing is going to be given to you that is beyond your capability, and there is always a choice. You may get an intuitive hit, but getting it does not mean you have to follow it. In making a decision, you have the mental, the emotional and the intuitive mind, all of which provide data we put together to make our choice. Intuition is simply another data point. It's not a have to. We take that right brain info and combine it with our logical left brain and then we decide. If you're worried about following the intuition, you can always ask is there any harm in following this guidance and only follow through if the answer you get is no?
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell you a quick story about a client of mine and listening to her intuition. So she was driving home. This was what she came up with when I asked her to think of you know a time that she either got the intuition and followed it or didn't. So she was driving home and on her path home she has two options for getting to her house. She can go like one way and then she has the other way. That is like the way that she kind of prefers to go. Most of us have that. And so she was driving and she got this intuitive hit oh I should go the way I don't usually go. And she talked herself at it. She was like, oh, come on, I don't want to go that way, that's not my favorite way, I want to go the way I normally go. And so she ignored the hit and she went the way she normally went and she got a speeding ticket. And I always tell this story because if she had gone the other way, if she had followed the intuitive hit, she would never have known that she missed out on getting a speeding ticket.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we follow our intuition and we never really know the why. We never find out why it was better to go one way as opposed to the other, why it was better to do the errands in this order as opposed to that order. You know, part of intuition is learning how to trust the natural inclination. At the beginning of working with intuition is to judge and measure and strive to do it quote, unquote right the mental gymnastics of which it gets in the way of the relaxed state in which intuition naturally flows. So remember, don't test it, do follow it. The more we are in relationship with intuition, the stronger it becomes. If we don't engage with it, we're not going to get the richness of meaning and we're not going to be integrating, using our intuition, into our lives in a fully useful way. So, within reason, we follow what our intuition tells us and see what the results are. This is what will allow it to become active and integrated, not just something we're half-heartedly attempting. Another is what will allow it to become active and integrated, not just something we're half-heartedly attempting. Another thing you can do is to write out whatever intuition you receive. It will help with putting awareness and attention on the intuition, even if you don't decide to follow it.
Speaker 1:So what about when intuition is, quote-unquote, wrong? Your channel might not be clear. What I mean by that is the hits we get. Our intuition gets filtered through our subconscious and we can have what, in Ayurveda, is called ama. Present within this, ama is the toxins, the junk, the illusions that are created by anything we have not fully digested, be it food or experience. You may get a hit that says your significant other is cheating on you, but it's not true intuition. Maybe the actual intuition is that your partner is pulling away from you, true, but you perceive it as infidelity because of your own fears of infidelity due to watching your dad cheat on your mom while you were growing up. So if you're unclear, it's not about downing or testing. It's more about reframing, to ask for further clarity. This is different from asking the same question over and over again or testing. Here we are asking different questions in order to help gain full clarity. This might not be where you want to start if you're a beginner, but as you gain comfort and trust in your discernment, you can progress to this. And also, it's not always about the question. Sometimes you just need more time in meditation, more time in stillness. One last thing Sometimes we get intuitive hits that turn out to be wrong in the long run.
Speaker 1:For instance, I've had two different highly intuitive people tell me I was going to have two children. I've gotten that same hit myself personally multiple times that I would definitely have two. And here I am facing the reality that I'm only going to have one. Now I mean, things can change, but at this point it would take pretty much a miracle to have a second in any way. So what happened Were those bad intuitives. Is my intuition not as good as I think it is? No, things change.
Speaker 1:There are so many variables in this world. Very rarely are you the only deciding factor in how your life turns out. Other people are involved. We have these sliding door moments, these pivot points. I'm sure you can think of one in your life, a moment where you had to make a decision. And if you had decided differently, you would now be in a completely different world. Your life would be totally different. It looked nothing like it looks now. Maybe it was, you know, taking that job or not doing the semester abroad, staying with the spouse moving across the country. You know we make these big life decisions all the time and they have lasting ripple effects. So recognize that you may get an intuitive hit at one point that was perfectly accurate for that version of you, but then later on down the line you made a decision and things changed.
Speaker 1:So maybe sometime this weekend play with remembering a time you've experienced intuition. Notice when you've had a deep knowing about something in the past and try to figure out what was different about that, versus just thinking about something. If you can't think of an intuitive moment, it's okay. Start paying attention now to when you get that inner nudge about working on this project versus that one eating an apple instead of a banana. You know, this is just one way to start working with your intuition. There are many. Just be open, be receptive, be playful.
Speaker 1:Intuition does not come to those who try harder. It comes to those who surrender and receive. All right. That is it for today. Thank you for joining me. If this episode gets you excited about playing with your intuition or answered something you've wondered about, awesome, feel free to share it with a friend. Or if you have questions or want to share your experience with intuition, feel free to click the message me button if you're listening on Spotify, or email me at rootsoftherise at gmailcom. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and remember, know who you are, love who you've been and be willing to do the work to become who you want to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal and seek the support you need to thrive.
