What Your Gut Is Trying To Tell You — And Why You Can't Hear It

We've all felt it. That nudge. That tightness in the chest before we walk into a room. That feeling that says don't do this — right before we go ahead and do it anyway.

We call it a gut feeling. Then we override it. And weeks later, when the mess shows up, we say the same thing every time: I knew it.

So what is intuition, really? Where does it come from? And why is it so hard to trust?

In this episode, Brent sits down with Peggy Oberthier — a medical intuitive and energy channeler from Australia — who spent five years as a teacher in a juvenile detention center before a prison riot, a dark night of the soul, and a chance session with another intuitive completely changed the direction of her life.

Peggy unpacks the difference between intuition and fear, why most people block their own inner knowing without realizing it, and the one thing she says almost everyone gets wrong about hearing the signal: you can't think your way to it. You have to feel it in your body first.

We get into source energy, superconsciousness, shadow work, spiritual bypass, and what it actually looks like to get out of your own way long enough to hear what's already there.

If you've ever wondered whether that voice in your head is really yours — or whether something bigger is trying to reach you — this one's for you.

Connect with Peggy: https://www.peggyo.com.au/

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Music Credits

"Everlasting Flower" by Dani Ha Dani

"Blackbard" by Vakna Sal

"Untouched Valley" by Inon Zur

"Eternal Recluse" by Kyle Preston

"Budham Sharanam Gaccami" by Yotam Agam

"Burning Silence" by Roie Shipigler

"A Journey's Epilogue" by Yahezkel Raz

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

We've all felt it. Like we quietly know something we can't explain. We might identify it as a little voice in the back of our head. Or maybe a pit in our stomach right before we walk into a room. We all have a word for it, a gut feeling. And yet here's what's interesting about gut feelings. Most of us don't trust them. We get the feeling, and then we immediately go to work trying to talk ourselves out of it. We make a pros and a cons list, we ask our friends, we Google it, or now we just ask ChatGPT. We gather all the data and we run all the scenarios. We build all these mental spreadsheets, and then we try to override the feeling we had in the first three seconds. And then weeks later, or months later, or sometimes even years later, we look back at the mess we're cleaning up and we say the same thing every time. I knew it. We knew the person we hired was going to be a problem. We knew the relationship was done long before we admitted it. We knew we shouldn't have gotten in the car that night. We knew. But we didn't listen. Here's the thing. If that feeling keeps turning out to be right, then maybe it's not just a feeling. Maybe it's information. And maybe it's coming from somewhere we don't fully understand. And maybe the problem isn't that it's not loud enough. Maybe the problem is that we're too loud to hear it.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

I think we all have access to, you know, the quantum field, which is the unity consciousness, divine source energy, whatever you want to call it. They are, it's basically energy coming into our field that is pure source energy telling us what the truth is. That's what I believe intuition is.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

That's Peggy Oberthier. She's a medical intuitive and an energy channeler based in Australia. She spent years in one of the most high-stress jobs you can imagine before life forced her on to a completely different path. Through her story, we're going to talk about where gut feelings might really come from, why it's so hard to trust them, and what it takes to actually hear them. Welcome to Better Beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, your life, or what's possible? Thousands of people have faced that same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brett Kokel, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds. We're going to start Peggy's story with her in the middle of a prison riot, which is a weird place for a teacher. Unless, of course, you're a teacher at a juvenile detention center like she was in 2016. That's a hard job on a regular day. But the day when our story starts, that's not a regular day. A group of prisoners had broken out of a classroom next to the one Peggy was teaching in and started a riot that quickly overwhelmed the guards.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

It's really sad because the guards had basically lost control. They they smashed, they broke out of a classroom, they got in a fight, and uh I was in the adjacent classroom as a teacher. All the glass was opaque, so we were kind of just standing in the corner, we couldn't see anything happening around us, and then this big metal pole just smashed the window and it went all over me. They were just destroying everything. So luckily I didn't get injured. Um they really just destroyed the property. I but there was many other instances where they had um assaulted each other. So there was this big, you know, assault, but I just hid in a closet, but it's just the screaming in the the codes, you know, the code white where everybody has to be has to hide because the boys have brandished weapons.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Most people in a moment like that are thinking about one thing, themselves. But Peggy wasn't. She was thinking about the kids, the ones who wanted to do the work, the ones who were writing essays so she could write letters of recommendation to the courts. She was thinking about the kids who were trying to build a way out of the life that had put them in there in the first place. And as she's hiding in that closet, she knew. She knew the whole place was going to implode. And it did. Peggy and some other people working at the prison got out, but two days later, the boys who were rioting had broken all of the windows, tore down all the walls in the classrooms, basically destroyed the school that was inside the prison. But they also destroyed something else. Peggy's understanding of herself. Up until that day, her whole identity was tied to being the super teacher in the juvenile detention center. Everyone who heard what she did for a living said the same thing. That's amazing. And she built her self-worth around their reactions. After the riot, though, the program got moved an hour and a half away. She couldn't follow it because of where her family lived. The job was gone, but so was the identity she created for herself surrounding the job.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

That really put me in a spiral as well. I had to change my identity. I had to change who I was. I had to stop seeking external validation of self-worth. I had to sit and going, what do I actually want out of life? What, you know, how do I want to provide for my family and be a good mom without being completely stressed? And when you've just been stressed for your, you know, I guess since I'd gone back to work when they were little.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

What she just described has a name. It's called the Dark Night of the Soul. That phrase comes from a 16th-century Spanish mystic named St. John of the Cross. He used it to describe a process of spiritual stripping, where everything your soul had been leaning on, beliefs you'd held, identities you'd created for yourself, those get taken away. These days we use that term more broadly to describe a moment or revelation that really challenges everything you thought you knew about yourself. Which I know sounds scary and uncomfortable, and it is. I went through my own dark night of the soul in an ayahuasca ceremony a couple of years ago. I'll talk more about that experience in another episode, but for now, I want to let Peggy describe what a dark night of the soul feels like.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

It's usually this feeling that there is so much pain in your body and so much sadness, so much fear, so much anxiety, and nothing is fixing it really easily. Like you just have to sit with the discomfort. We will we're really good at distracting ourselves, right? On some of those like smaller things, like we'll scroll, we get, we get, you know, we get upset, whatever. Um we distract ourselves from most feelings, but when you are hit with a crisis, it's sometimes it's a death in the family, a really bad illness, you are forced to sit with this huge range of emotions of and the intensity of a fume. And it's usually that's what creates the change in people.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

A few years after the riot, Peggy was still looking for answers. She'd been dealing with knee pain for six years, ever since an ACL surgery in 2011. She'd tried everything Western medicine had to offer, but nothing worked for her. So she went down the podcast rabbit hole and found a guy who called himself a medical intuitive. And she booked a two-hour session out of desperation. At the end of it, he said something that she wasn't expecting.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

At the end of the two-hour session, he said to me, Peggy, you're a medical intuitive as well. I said, What are you talking about? He said, You have all the gifts that I have. And the the fact of the matter was that I'd never really tuned into a body, but he also had cleared a bunch of blocks that had prevented me from accessing my intuitive gifts. Past life fears, um, persecution fears, all these different, you know, blockages, energy um implants, entities, you name it, it was cleared out of my system.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Within a couple of days, he started sending her clients, and she discovered she could tune into a body she'd never touched and know things that she had no way of knowing. She says she could sense physical, emotional, and even spiritual blockages in other people. And she said she could also sense how those blockages manifested into some physical problem. For example, somebody with a chronically sore hip could be the physical manifestation of a heartbreak earlier in life that was never fully processed. Now, I know some of you are thinking this because I thought it too. That's a lot to swallow. But let's stay open for just a minute, because the question this episode is trying to answer isn't really about whether Peggy can do what she says she can do, it's about what we all have access to and why most of us don't use it. So let's talk about intuition for a second. The word comes from the Latin root intuary, which means to look inside, not to look ahead, not to look at the data, to look inside. Presumably, that means to look inside ourselves for the answer. And there's actual mainstream science indicating that answers really do come from intuition. In researching this episode, I found a study out of the University of Iowa that was published in 1994, and it showed the body produces gut signals that show up as things like sweat. Those signals flag bad choices before our minds even figure out the pattern. What the research suggests is that intuition isn't necessarily some mystic force. It could be the body processing information faster than our conscious minds can. It picks up on patterns, expressions, tones, context, and delivers a verdict before your brain even has finished asking the question. That's the scientific explanation. But Peggy says that's really only part of the story.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

The thoughts are like the interpretations of the knowings. The knowings to come in kind of as facts. And I think that I don't know if that makes sense for me. So, for example, when I first started working in the counseling space, and I wasn't aware that I was really tapped into this intuition, I would with, I'd be working with a client and I would just get this thought that came in my head that their mother was like this, right? And then I would ask the question. And I thought to myself, this is a pattern that I've seen in a book that I've read. I understand child development, I understand the types of presentations that come in. If a person is presenting with these issues, it's most likely that the mother has been like this, etc., etc. Right? You see patterns. I'm pretty good at pattern recognition. But what I've come to realize through the work that I've been doing as a medical intuitive is that those thoughts that are coming in, they are that's information from that person's higher self to my higher self.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

What's worth noting here is that when Peggy describes intuition, she doesn't describe it as a feeling. She describes it as a receiving, like an email coming into an inbox you didn't know you had.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

You see people that tap in beautifully into their intuition when perhaps when they're being creative. They just tap into pure source energy, they just create, they create poetry, they create songs, they create um artwork. That is just pure creation energy coming through them. So, I mean, I know my clear cognizant is completely spun on because I can when I meet you, I can I can get information about you that's coming in my head that I haven't read anywhere. Where else would that come from? It's literally coming from this cloud, and I like to say I get an email.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

You've probably experienced at least some form of what she's describing. If you've ever written something and thought, where'd that come from? That's it. If you've ever been in the shower and had the answer to a problem you've been chewing on for weeks and it just drops into your head, or you met someone for the first time and instantly knew something was a little off, that's it too. All the spiritual books point to this. The Bhavagad Gita calls it the inner witness, the Tauda Ching calls it the way, the Bible calls it the Holy Spirit. The ancient texts don't all agree on the label, but they all agree on one thing. It's already inside of you.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Now, if I am worried about, let's say, for example, if I'm trying to impress you, or I've I'm very worried about the attachment to the outcome of how you're going to perceive me, then all of a sudden my intuition is wonky. I'm not purely connected, because then I'm thinking about how I am going to be perceived. And your alignment is off when that happens.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

According to Peggy, the signal's always there. What changes is whether we can hear it. And the number one thing that blocks us from hearing it is attachment to the outcome. In other words, if you've already decided what you want the answer to be, the answer you get won't be from your intuition. It'll be from your ego. And your ego is really good at giving you short-term results that aren't always best for you in the long run. The second thing that blocks us from our intuition is our own core wounds. Peggy describes these as subconscious programming that gets laid down from zero to seven years old. Things that build these stories in our minds, like I'm not lovable, or I have to earn respect, or people don't listen to me. And the third thing that blocks our intuition is actually pretty fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

It's shadow work. It it is. You have to clear out the bottom of the pond. Your third eye, which is the seat of your intuition, your wisdom, your connection, it's directly connected to your sacral chakra, which is sort of the second chakra, the seat of where your feelings are. People have, they're stuck in their ego and their fear-based programs, their resentment, their anger. And when you're when you're sitting in that vibration, you are clouding your access to your wisdom and your intuition. You have fear, right? You're saying, well, you know, tell me what I'm supposed to do. You know, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Tell me what I'm supposed to do. You ain't never gonna get any intuition on that level of asking for intuition.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

I want to pause for a second here and have you noticed what language she just used. Tell me what I'm supposed to do. That's not a question, it's a plea. And pleas come from fear. And when we're operating from fear, the channel to our intuition is closed. And there's a concept in the spiritual community Peggy introduced me to that I'd never heard of before. It's called a spiritual bypass.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Spiritual bypass is is like the concept that um it's kind of like when you stick with your affirmations without dealing with the shit underneath. So I say like people put a piece of sourdough on a piece of shit, like you can't do that. So let's say I'm like, I'm love, I'm light, I don't have fear. I'm those are the those are you're doing affirmations before you actually sit with what you're really feeling and release it. So if, for example, I'm like, I I feel abundant, I'm gonna make lots of money, this is great, but deep inside I have all this contraction, I have this fear, I have this worry. It doesn't matter how many affirmations you say, it's not gonna override what's truly in my body.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

Here's why that matters. We live in an era where positive thinking is marketed as a cure-all. You've probably heard things like just manifest it or mind over matter, or maybe good vibes only. And there's nothing wrong with any of that until we use it to skip the work we know we need to do. Because affirmations, they don't override what's in the body. The body remembers everything. The fear, the grief, the resentment. It all gets stored until we deal with it. And as long as it's in there, it's gonna keep drowning the signal. Which leaves us with maybe the hardest question. How do we get out of our own way?

SPEAKER_01 16:46

For me, you know, I get messages for myself around the questions that I have only when I'm in stillness, and it has to be this really incredible stillness for 20 minutes of meditation. I have to get into this particular point where I'm I'm just out of my analytical brain. I have a very overactive analytical brain. And so in that quiet stillness, and I can feel this um this drop in my energy. I don't know if I'm just going from beta to theta or whatever, and then I go, oh, okay, now I can ask questions and I will get an answer. Yes and no questions are a lot easier. Um but you can feel this, you feel in your body what a yes feels like, and then you feel within a no what your body feels like, and you can just start with that to start to really tune in to what your what your intuition is telling you.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

When we've got a problem, most of us try to figure out what to do by asking better questions or reading more books or maybe trying to get a better answer out of Chat GPT. That's an active approach. What Peggy's describing here is a passive one. Passive as in receiving instead of hunting. And it lines up with something from the Tao Ta Qing that I've come back to a lot over the last few years. Lao Zhu, who wrote that book, said muddy water becomes clear when it's left undisturbed. In other words, you can't clear your own head by thinking harder. You have to stop trying to figure things out. And when you do, the answer that was there the whole time finally rises to the top.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

I think there are so many signs and nudges along the way, and we ignore them, and then we get hit by a mech truck. And when you look back, you go, right. So I was getting I was getting a lot of injuries. I was getting sick, I was, I had all of these issues, and they were all telling me, pause, Peggy. Take your you need to rest, right? Your body is your this job is not working for you. We need to push you in another direction. I literally had these injuries that were crazy, and I was like, You're going back to the doctor? I'm like, yes, I'd take more time off and more time off. It was it was subtle. And this what ha this is what happens, like you will get these nudges constantly, and most people ignore them. And it's only when we go through the dark night of the soul that we are ready for radical change.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

So the universe is sending us information all day long, through our thoughts, through our bodies, even through what we keep getting pulled towards and what we keep getting pushed away from. And when we ignore the nudges long enough, that's when the volume gets turned up. Which is a metaphor for the moment your life forces you to pay attention because you wouldn't do it on your own. That might show up in a layoff or a divorce or diagnosis or a prison riot you hid from in a closet. That's not the universe punishing you. That's the universe finally being loud enough for you to hear what it's been saying all along. I started this episode with a question. Where does that gut feeling actually come from? And I don't think I have a definitive answer to that for you. Maybe what we call intuition isn't really our own. Maybe it's coming from something bigger, like a superconsciousness, a quantum field, a source energy, the Tao. The label matters less than the idea. And the idea is that you're not alone in your own head. Something is trying to reach you. And if you get quiet enough, still enough, honest enough about what's underneath the surface, you'll hear it. And when you do, you get to decide what to do with it. Because hearing it and following it are two different things. So here's what I want to leave you with. The next time you get a feeling you can't quite explain, before you go build a spreadsheet, pull your friends, and before you open a new chat window, just pause for a second. Check in with your body. Notice if there's warmth or tightness. Notice if you feel expansion or contraction. And consider the answer you're looking for might already be in there, waiting for you to stop just long enough to listen. Thank you so much for investing your time in listening to today's episode. If this made you think or made you shift your perspective a little bit on where intuition comes from, it would mean the world to me if you would take just a couple of quick actions that will take you no more than 20 seconds. First is rate the show on whatever platform you're listening it on. It certainly helps the algorithm get the show to more people. We're starting to gain traction. So thank you to those of you that have listened to a lot of episodes and have already done that. If you haven't, please consider rating the show five stars on whatever platform you're listening to it on. The second thing is please share this episode with somebody you think needs to hear what I talked about today. Maybe they're struggling to make decisions, maybe they're doubting themselves. This would be a great episode to do it. Every platform. Has a simple way to share it through a text message. So please share it with somebody you know in your real life. That would mean the world to me because my effort in this is just to get this message out to more people. That's all I'm looking to do. Well, and maybe to open people up to some new possibilities. That's it for this episode. I'll see you guys on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It is written, edited, produced by me, Brent Kokel. Yes, I do all the things. Original cover art for Better Beliefs is by Jenny H. Designs, and the original music you hear in the theme for every Better Beliefs episode is by The Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes.