Beyond Gut Feelings: How to Use Your Energy Centers to Tell the Difference Between Intuition and Fear - ep. 229

Intuition is not a gift. It is not a special power reserved for the chosen few who seem to have a direct line to the universe, usually while journaling in linen pants near a window.

It is a skill. And the fact that it has been packaged and sold as something mystical and exclusive, something that only certain people have a real connection to, or those who happen to have a large Instagram following and a talent for speaking in circles, is one of the more expensive myths floating around the personal development space right now.

In this episode, we go deep into how your inner guidance system works through your energy centers and how to tell the difference from fear in your body.

What we cover:

• Why intuition is a skill, not a gift, and why the "special intuitive" myth is costing you your self-trust
• The Human Design energy centers that carry intuitive intelligence
• Why "trust your sacral" doesn't apply to everyone, and what to do if you've been trying to access a response that isn't how you're wired
• What fear actually feels like in the body versus genuine intuition, and how to tell the difference
• How subconscious and energetic work clears the way for your intuition to actually come through

Take the next step:

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• Join me on Substack → SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE OR UPGRADE
• Download the free → Daily Energy Management Audio Practice
• Let's get social → INSTAGRAM

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to the Limitless Life Podcast, and welcome if you're new here, I'm your host, Brenda Johnson, and today we are getting into something that comes up a lot with people wanting to tap into it or know more about it or even just understand how they work. I'm talking about intuition, our inner guidance, our gut feelings. And what I'm going to start with is that somewhere along the way, intuition, at least this is my perception of it, and maybe you agree. And if you do agree, I want you to message me on Instagram. I like having these conversations. And to be honest, I get a lot of the inspiration for these episodes from conversations I'm having with you all. It whether it's conversations with clients or people on Instagram or whatever. You all are the people who inspire these conversations. So I kind of went on a tangent there. So bringing this back. In my opinion, I feel like somewhere along the line, somewhere along the way, intuition got turned into some sort of personality type. It's like something you either have or you don't. It's this gift for the spiritually gifted and a vague disappointment for everybody else, or a thing that arrives dramatically in the right lighting for the right people, usually while they're journaling in linen pants near a window filming themselves. And you know, I have thoughts about that. I have quite a few thoughts about that, actually. And we are going to be getting into all of that today. Because here's what I truly believe. I believe that intuition is not actually a gift. It is not a special power bestowed upon a chosen few of us or those who happen to have a large Instagram following and a talent for speaking in circles. It is a skill. It is a learnable, practicable skill that every single one of us has access to. And the fact that it has been packaged and sold as something mystical and exclusive, something that only certain people have a real connection to, that is a very expensive myth that is floating around this personal development space. And I want to dismantle that today. We are going to go into the body, into the energy centers, into the actual mechanics of how your inner GPS works and why so many brilliant self-aware people are still overriding this on a daily basis. And listen, I was one of those people for many years. So buckle up and let's go. Alright. So I kind of already said this, but I'm going to say it again. Because I know somebody listening to this really needs to hear it. You are not less intuitive than the person on your screen, on social media, or wherever who seems to have this direct line to the universe. You are not less intuitive than the psychic readers out there, the intuitive coaches, the spiritual coaches. You are not less intuitive than anybody. You have not been skipped over by some cosmic gift-giving process, okay? Sometimes, and this is, I mean, I used to think this was gonna happen when I was younger. Intuition doesn't arrive in the form of this dramatic download or light language while you're using magical moon water and crystals in a salt bath. What you have, what all of us have, is a body, and we are all made of energy. But I'm starting with the body, because that body has been sending you information your entire life, and the question is not whether you have access to intuition, the question is whether you've been taught to trust what you're actually receiving. And I bet I know the answer to that. Probably not, because most of us never were. We've been trained by school systems, by logic-obsessed cultures, by well-meaning people who wanted us to be realistic, and I'm using air quotes there. We have been trained to override our body's signals with the logic of the mind. We've been trained to treat physical sensations as weird things instead of like information or just to ignore it. We've been trained to hand our authority over to external sources, experts, gurus, systems, frameworks, and I'm talking about like our inner authority. Because, you know, they must know better than whatever is happening inside of us. They must be right, we must be wrong. And honestly, I get it. I really do. Because when I was a kid, I wanted so badly to be magic, like magical, capital M magic. The kind where things move and signs appear, and I could levitate, and you just know things in a way that makes other people slightly uncomfortable at parties. When I found a Ouija board at a garage sale, and yes, I absolutely brought that thing home because I was that kid. When I found that thing for 75 cents, by the way, I thought I had finally found my magical portal, my special thing. I used that board with my mom, who she used it with her friends. And I remember one day watching that little planchette thing, the thing you put your fingers on that you hovered above. That's the it's the little pointer thing. Um, for those of you who have probably made better life decisions than I have and not brought a 75 cent Ouija board home, I watched that thing fly off the board. Okay? It flew off the board. And in that moment, I felt like I had magical fucking powers. Like I finally accessed something real. Now, looking back, knowing what I know now, I was probably just enthusiastically inviting low-level entities into my house, which in hindsight was probably not my most grounded decision. But give me a break. I was eight or nine. But the feeling underneath it, that desperate wanting to be connected to something greater than I am, to have access to something beyond the ordinary, that feeling was so real. It was always real. The problem was never that I wasn't magic. The problem was that I had been taught to look for it everywhere except the place that actually lived, which was inside of me, which is where it has always been. I spent years doing this. Not because I'm not intuitive, because I'm very intuitive. I spent years overriding my own internal GPS because I'd been conditioned to believe that real intuition had to look a certain way. It had to come through a certain channel, it had to belong to certain people. And every time mine showed up as a body sensation, this like persistent little nudge or this random song playing over and over again in my head, that my logic couldn't justify, I talked myself out of thinking that was my intuition, and it made it make sense logically instead. Here's what Carolyn missed, who I love by the way. Her work in The Anatomy of Spirit is genuinely foundational for understanding this. Here's what she gets at so beautifully. She says, Our biography becomes our biology. The way we've been taught to relate to our own inner knowing, the stories we've absorbed about whether we can trust ourselves, the times we were told we were too sensitive or overthinking it or being irrational, all of that lives in our body. And all of that shapes how clearly we can receive the information our energy system is constantly sending us. I have studied Caroline's work throughout the years. It was actually a part of my nutritional therapy curriculum. So that should tell you something right there. Nutritional therapy, and we were studying this type of work. But that paragraph that I read to you brings me back to energy centers, or it brings me to energy centers. Because this is where it gets really interesting. Energy is information. Okay? It just is. And before we get into specifics, I'm going to be talking about the energy centers that we can see in our human design. And before I do that, I want to lay a foundation because understanding why energy centers matter makes everything else land completely differently. Carolyn Miss maps the body's energy centers into the chakra systems and shows us that each center holds a specific kind of intelligence. And each one is connected to different aspects of our lives: our sense of safety, relationships, power, our heart, our voice, our perception, our connection to something greater than ourselves. And when each one is operating clearly, it sends us a specific kind of information. This is not woo for the sake of woo. This is your body's actual communication system. And when you learn to read it, when you learn which center is lighting up and what it's trying to tell you, you literally stop needing to outsource your decisions to everybody else. Now, human design layers onto this very nicely. And I want to get into this, but I want to do it in a way that actually serves you rather than creates another system for you to get lost in. It was designed, pun intended, to return you to your own authority. Human design was designed to return you to your own authority, to help you understand how you specifically are wired to make decisions and what your potential is. It is not here to limit you or tell you who you are, but somewhere along the way, it got turned into another hierarchy, another way of deciding who has the right kind of intuition and who doesn't. And on top of that, and I say this as somebody who works with this system, it has so many layers that most people either get completely lost in it or they convince themselves that they need a three-hour reading before they're even allowed to apply any of it to their actual life. And when they do get a reading, they still have no idea how to apply it to their life. Or, and this one really, really, really annoys me: people get reduced down to their type. They have somebody who maybe understands the surface level things, tell them, oh, you're a projector and you're this. And now they believe that they can't market themselves because they have to wait to be invited, because that's a thing with projectors. Or maybe they find out they're a manifesting generator and they decide that that means they're not allowed to focus on one project at a time. And suddenly a system that was designed to liberate them has now become a brand new cage. That is not human design working, that is human design being used as an excuse, usually an unconscious one, but it is an excuse, nonetheless, that allows you to stay exactly where you are. You do not need to understand all of your channels, your circuitry, your variables, your arrows. You don't need to understand what it means that your conceptualization center is open and your heart is defined. That is a rabbit hole. It is a fascinating rabbit hole if you're into it, and some of you are, and I love that for you, but it is still a rabbit hole. What I am saying is when you understand even just one of the deeper layers, like the energy centers, which is what we're talking about today, it can genuinely change how you make decisions. Not because you're following a system, but because you finally have this map for what your body has been trying to tell you all along. That's it. That's the whole point. So when I work with clients on this, we don't get into all of it. We get into the relevant pieces, the parts that explain why they've been overriding themselves, the parts that make them go, oh, I get it now. That makes sense. I'm not just a sacral being and nobody told me. And it's really frustrating because human design has been in my life for well over 10 years. And I never really talked about it until now because nothing makes me more tired than watching a tool for self-trust become another airy fairy reason to doubt yourself. Let's talk about energy, shall we? I want to talk about how the energy centers are and how they communicate. Because listen, if you've been hanging out in my world for long enough, you know that I love energy. It's the foundation of the work I do. And recently, my good friend Samantha Parker, I call her the Samantha Parker, said something to me and I loved it. She said, you know what you are? You're like the fractional CEO that people hire to help them. You're the chief energy officer. And seriously, I was like, ooh, that's good. I need to use that for something. Anyways, in human design, there are nine energy centers in the body. And each one corresponds to a specific type of intelligence and a specific way of knowing. And this is important because not everyone's intuition comes through the same center. So when most people talk about trusting your gut, they are almost always talking about the sacral center. If that center is consistently active in your design, means you have a defined sacral, that's what it's called, then yes, your gut response is a primary source of guidance for you. That full body uh-huh or na-uh. But here is what the trust your sacral crowd forgets to mention. Roughly half the population does not have a defined sacral center. Half the population. Which means for a significant portion of people listening to this right now, the gut response idea of intuition is not how you're wired. And so if you've spent years trying to access this sacral response that isn't even how you're wired or isn't consistently there for you, you probably have been feeling like you're doing it wrong, or like everybody else got the intuition memo and somehow you missed it. Listen, stop it. Stop it right now. Let me walk you through the centers that actually carry intuitive intelligence. Because there's a few of them, and each one speaks a different language. So the sacral center, that's the gut response. It's located in your lower abdomen. For those with a defined sacral, this is a very primal, immediate, almost instinctual, animal. What's the word I'm looking for? Like animal instinctive knowing? I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but hopefully you know what I'm trying to say. It does not explain itself and it doesn't need to. It you this is like a full body yes or a full body no that arrives before your mind has even had time to weigh in. If this is defined for you, your work here is learning to catch the response before your logic talks you out of it. It moves very fast. And so if you slow down to think about it, you're already being left behind. Then we have the spleenic center, the survival instinct center. This one is very subtle. This center is the oldest intuitive intelligence in the body, and it's connected to survival, to instinct, to in-the-moment awareness. And when it speaks, it speaks once. And it doesn't speak very loudly, it doesn't repeat itself, it does not get louder if you ignore it, it says what it needs to and it moves on. Which is why so many people with a defined spleenick as their intuitive guidance system spend their entire lives in retrospect. Oh, I knew, I knew in the moment that I walked in, but I just didn't listen. Oh, I knew I shouldn't have gone down there, but I just didn't listen. If this is how you're wired, if this is your center for intuition, your practice here is learning to catch the whisper before your mind drives, like drowns it out. So the moment you have that, like, oh, something doesn't feel right, listen to that. And that brings us to the solar plexus, the emotional authority and the wave. Now, this one, this is where a lot of confusion lives. The solar plexus center is the emotional center. That's where our emotions are. And in human design, it is considered the most powerful inner authority when it's defined, which it is for the majority of people. And here's the most important thing I can tell you about the emotional authority. Clarity is not instant. If you have an emotional authority, you are designed to ride the emotional wave. You are designed to sit with a decision across the full arc of your emotional cycle: the high, the neutral, the low, and then make your choice from the clarity that emerges on the other side of that emotional wave. This is not you being indecisive. This is not you being fearful. This is how you're designed. The problem is that we live in a culture that rewards instant knowing and immediate gratification and immediate response. So people with an emotional authority either will force premature decisions so that they seem decisive, or they mistake the high of the wave for the clarity and they commit to things before they've actually processed things, and neither serves them. And I know this from personal experience because this is how my intuition works my inner guidance. So if you have an emotional authority, sitting there and going, Oh, I need to sit with this, that is not you being indecisive. That is your inner GPS working correctly. Then we move to the conceptualization center, the head centers, um, mental pressure. This is not intuition, okay? And this is a very crucial distinction that I wish somebody had told me a long, long time ago. The mind, the head, the conceptualization centers in human design, they are not intuitive authorities. They are processors, they generate questions, pressure, concepts, they analyze things. It is extraordinary at what it does. Those centers are very good at what they do, but it is not where your decisions should come from. And that is very hard because as humans, we are not taught to get out of our heads. So the mental chatter that keeps you up at night, that spiral of, but what if, and should I, and what does it mean that I feel this way? That is not your intuition speaking. That is your mind doing its job, which is to process, not to decide. So when you mistake mental pressure for intuitive guidance, you will end up overthinking every single time. You will overthink your way into decisions that don't actually belong to your body at all. And then lastly, I want to talk about your identity center. It's called the G Center in human design. It is located in the heart of the chest, it carries a kind of quiet knowing, and it is connected to identity, to love, to the direction your life wants to move in. So when something feels deeply true, not exciting, not scary, just true, that is very often your identity center speaking to you. It's a sense of alignment rather than like a gut feeling or rather than an emotional wave. It's you just feel aligned. It's like a recognition, right? Not an actual response. That's how I would explain it. I want to talk about what fear actually feels like in the body. Because now that we know how intuition actually speaks through our body, through different centers and different languages at different speeds, let's talk about what fear feels like in comparison. Because this is where a lot of real discernment work happens. Fear tends to feel very Very urgent, very forced, while intuition tends to feel softer and quieter. Here's what it actually looks like in your body. So fear lives in contraction, it pulls inward, it feels very tight, it closes things. You're gonna feel it in your chest as a kind of squeezing, or maybe in your throat as like a constriction. You might feel it in your stomach as a clenching that is distinctively different from the full-body response of a sacral yes. Fear also tends to be very loud and very repetitive. It will say the same thing over and over and over again, and it will get more insistent the more you try to ignore it. And it often comes with a story, a narrative about what's gonna go wrong, why you shouldn't do it. It's literally, it's like a catastrophe that it's trying to prevent. Intuition, on the other hand, tends to be very brief, very specific, and strangely calm, even when it's telling you something significant. It's not gonna cause you to spiral, it doesn't catastrophize, it just knows. And then it waits for you to catch up. The other thing about fear, and this is the piece that trips a lot of people up, is that it is very good at disguising itself as wisdom. It's very good at disguising itself as practicality and responsibility. Fear will show up in the language of logic and present itself as the reasonable adult's response to a situation. I'm not scared, I'm just being realistic. Yeah, sure. We've all met that one before. The question to ask yourself, and this is the practice, is not does this feel scary? The question to ask, the better question is where is this feeling living in my body and what is its actual quality? Does it feel contracted or expansive? Does it feel repetitive or singular? Loud and insistent, or is it like quiet and settled? Does it come with a story, or did it just arrive as a knowing? Let's talk about building this skill because I said it at the beginning of this episode and I meant it. Intuition is a skill, and like any skill, it is built through practice, through repetition, through the willingness to get it wrong sometimes and learn from that. So here's what the practice actually looks like. Start noticing before you start trusting. You don't have to trust your intuition before you've built a relationship with it. Do you trust strangers before you've built a relationship with them? No? Well, I hope not. So just start by noticing things. When you have a physical response to something, because remember, energy PS, always physical response. If you're having a meeting or making a decision or you're meeting somebody new or you have to go someplace, just notice where you feel it in your body. Notice the quality of it. Write it down if it helps, because you're building an information set here. And over time, you're going to start to see patterns and you're going to start to recognize your own signals much, much easier. So just slow down the space between when you have the feeling and the response. Because most of us override our inner guidance, and it's not because we don't receive it, it's because we're moving too fast. The signal comes in, and before we've even registered it, the mind has already stepped in with its logicking. The other challenge is most of us for many years haven't even lived in our bodies. Like, we don't feel these signals because we're not in our bodies. And that's why being grounded and connected to ourselves helps recognize these feelings, helps bring us back into our bodies. Actually, something that can help you with that is my four and a half minute energy management practice, daily energy management. I will link that up in the show notes. It's free. Go download it. Um, but yeah, we just have to like practice creating this pause. And it's not because we have to think about things more, it's so that we can learn to feel things first. Like right now. Let's play a little game here. Right now, as you're listening to me, what is happening in your body right now? What does your left toe feel like? What does your right hand feel like? Before your brain starts explaining it, just notice what different parts of you feel like. That's how easy this practice can be, this skill. And do you need to know your human design? No. You can still do this work. Your body's signals do not require a chart to be valid. You do not require a reading to be valid, okay? Stop outsourcing your authorities. Stop outsourcing your power. This one is the big one. Every time you bypass your own signal to go ask somebody else what they think, or every time you look outside of yourself for confirmation before you're going to trust what you already know, you are training yourself out of your own intuition. Not because sometimes external perspective is bad, it can be very valuable. But because there is a big difference between seeking input and seeking permission. One expands your thinking, and the other one erodes your self-trust. You are allowed to know things, you are allowed to trust what your body is telling you. You do not need a certification in it, okay? This episode has really been about trusting and understanding your inner guidance. We're not talking about the intuition that drops in. I want to leave you with this. Your intuition, and I'm saying intuition as the whole system here, has been speaking to you your entire life. It was speaking to you before you had language for it, before you knew what chakras were, or what your human design chart said, or who Carolyn Miss was. It was there in the moments you knew before you knew, in those decisions that felt right before they made sense, and in those times that you overrode it and felt somewhere deep down that you already knew what was going to happen. The work is not in finding your intuition. The work is in clearing away everything that's been placed between you and it. The conditioning that said that things had to look a certain way, that your intuition had to work a certain way or sound a certain way, the systems that accidentally made you feel like you had the wrong kind of intuition or you weren't connected to it. The people who made it seem like they were special and they were magical and you just weren't. And I want to be very clear about what that work actually looks like. The clearing away stuff. Because it's not another course to take or another framework or a layer that you have to add in on top of everything you already know. It's the subconscious and energetic work, it's the kind that gets underneath all of the noise and into your body and into the stories that have been running the show. That's exactly what I do with my clients. And without fail, every single one of them at some point in our work together says some version of the same thing that they are finally hearing themselves again, that guidance is coming through more clearly, that they're catching their own signals before their brain steps in and talks them out of it. And it's not because I gave them some gift of intuition or gave them some magical activation. It's because we cleared away what was blocking them from hearing and trusting what was already there. That is available to you too. It's available to all of us. You've always had these gifts. You just maybe were never taught how to read them or listen to them or communicate with them. And one last thing before I go, something I didn't get into today, but I want to leave it with you. Because once you start clearing the noise and trusting your signals, something very interesting begins to happen. You start to notice things. A song that keeps playing, a phrase that shows up three times in a row, a feeling in your body before you even consciously register what's happening. Sometimes it's a knowing that arrives fully formed, and you have no idea where it came from. That is your intuition expanding. And there are five ways we can receive intuitive information. So, like I said earlier, or a few minutes ago, this episode was mostly about our inner guidance, that physical feeling. But there are five ways we receive those intuitive downloads, we'll call them. Through sight, sound, feeling, knowing, even smell or taste. You don't need to label yourself or figure out which one you have or you are. I just want you to start noticing things. Stay curious about how information is coming through for you, rather than immediately dismissing it as a coincidence or overthinking or trying to analyze things to death so you can give yourself another fucking label. That noticing, that self-awareness, that's the practice. That's how you build the skill. And it's enough to start. So if this episode opens something up for you, if you're sitting there thinking, oh, I know something in me is ready and I keep getting in my own way, come talk to me. I have the free 30-minute subconscious strategy sessions, and that's exactly the kind of conversation we can have. I'm gonna link the link to book those in the show notes. The other thing is come join me over on Substack. I'll also put that link in the show notes because I'm getting deeper into a lot of this stuff over there. Thank you so much for being here with me today. And if this resonated with you, share it with somebody else who could use it. And until next time, here's to creating your limitless life.