Reclaiming Intuition

My reflections on Chapter 3 of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

There are truths that live in the body long before the mind is ready to understand them. They move quietly, like birds before a storm, like dreams that leave a trace on the skin. One of those truths came to me while I was pregnant with my eldest daughter. In the dream, I felt her umbilical cord slip from my body like a silver thread. I knew, without explanation, that she couldn’t breathe. I told my doctor. And when she was born, the cord was there, wrapped around her neck, just as I’d seen. But he was ready. And so she breathed.

That dream felt older than me. Like something passed down through bone and blood, older than story itself. It reminded me of Vasilisa, the girl sent into the forest with nothing but a doll in her pocket and her mother’s blessing. The doll didn’t speak. It stirred. It nudged. It knew. Just like the body does, when we let it.

I think we each carry something like that, a thread. A quiet knowing stitched into our bones. A compass buried just beneath the skin. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t demand. It leans. It flickers. It says, not this… that. But it’s easy to forget. I still do. I still override that knowing with logic, with fear, with the pressure to perform or please.

For a long time, I couldn’t tell the difference between my thoughts and my intuition. Thoughts came loud and fast: You’re not good enough. You’re too much. It’s not safe. It won’t work. They wore the mask of reason, but underneath was static. Intuition feels different, quieter, slower, more precise. A shift in the wind. A breath caught in the chest. A pause that whispered, wait. And when I began to listen, really listen, something in me softened. The compass clicked back into place.

My thread, the one I’ve followed through the dark, has always been integrity. Even when everything around me felt unstable, that inner doll stood her ground. She kept me in school when no one made me go. Kept me from disappearing into drugs, or chaos, or silence. Told me to raise my children with the love I didn’t know how to give myself. She never coddled, but she never left. And when I chose to listen, really listen, I changed. Not all at once. But steadily. From survival to self-respect. From hiding to healing. From fragments to form.

But there was a time I walked straight into the dark forest. No map. No torch. Just an urge I couldn’t explain; the pull to study, to go to university, to rewrite a story I’d always believed was already finished. I almost didn’t go. So many voices, loud ones, told me, You won’t make it. It’s a waste of time and money. You have three babies to look after. The critic within heard them and agreed: You barely passed high school. You have no time, no money, no one to help you.

But the pull didn’t go away. It got louder. My body knew before my mind could catch up. And then there was Tracy Murchie, my one bright light, my mentor, my true friend, whispering, Do it. You’ll be great at it. That whisper lit the thread. And I followed it. I got it done.

I’ve met many other bright lights along the way, people who’ve shown me what was possible, who believed in me before I fully did. The ones who held the lantern when I couldn’t see the path. The ones who helped me trust that I can.

Still, I over-accommodate. I shape-shift. I try to dress how I’m supposed to. I try to say what’s expected. I try to be the good teacher, the decent mother, the reliable woman. I’ve spent most of my life trying to fit into spaces that were never made for me, and only recently have I begun to understand just how much of myself I’ve been editing out.

There’s a pull in me now. A quiet ache. Maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s both. But I’m starting to question whether I can keep showing up in systems that reward performance over presence. I love the children. There are the ones who thrive, the ones who write with joy, who solve tricky math problems with excitement, who make friends without effort, and who are celebrated for who they are.

But it’s the others who keep me awake at night. The ones who struggle to read and believe it’s their fault. The ones who try so hard but can’t decode the numbers. The ones who are called weird, too much, or not enough. The ones who drift to the margins, quietly absorbing the lie that they are broken.

Maybe I’m drawn to them because I know what it is to not quite fit. Maybe my heart recognises something in them, something I’ve spent a lifetime trying to disguise. I wish they knew the truth: that they are not the problem. That their pace, their brilliance, their quiet defiance of the mould is part of something ancient and holy. That there’s nothing wrong with them at all.

I don’t know yet what this other way looks like. Only that the longer I stay in places that ask me to shrink, the more I feel the cost of staying. Of staying silent. Of staying small. And maybe that’s why I need not just a thread, but a flame.

Because some truths don’t whisper. They burn.

Baba Yaga lives in me. She’s not the soft voice of reassurance, she’s the fire at the edge of the forest, the one who says, Feel it, but don’t feed it. Stop wallowing. Get up. She’s not gentle. But she is honest. And in her flame I see clearly: what’s real, what’s mine, what I can no longer carry.

These days, I nurture my intuition by making space for it to speak. I move my body through yoga. I walk my dogs through bushland and along the beach, and let the rhythm of my feet quiet the noise in my mind. I sit in stillness. I pay attention to what lights me up, and I follow that thread. I surround myself with people who are honest, authentic, and full of integrity, because being around truth helps me hear my own. This is how I strengthen the compass. This is how I remember the way.

So I’m following the compass. Holding the thread. Letting the fire burn away what’s false.

Not running away, but walking home.