For a long time, I thought good decisions came from thinking harder.
Gather more information. Analyze the situation. Consider every angle. Wait for certainty.
Looking back, I noticed something unsettling.
My body often knew long before I was willing to admit it.
A tightening jaw, a held breath, an unease I couldn’t explain, a quiet no.
For years, I had a simple explanation for these reactions.
Anxiety.
That explanation was convenient because it kept the focus on me. If the feeling was anxiety, then the problem was my interpretation, my fear, my sensitivity, my wounds.
I didn’t have to ask whether the feeling might be responding to something real.
What I rarely considered was that my body might be witnessing something my conscious mind was not yet ready to admit.
Again and again, I treated these signals as obstacles to overcome rather than information to consider.
I trusted explanations more than sensations, stories more than signals, and hope more than reality.
I assumed the signal was a cue to gather more data. To wait, investigate further, withhold judgment until more evidence arrived.
Sometimes that is wise.
But looking back, I can see that I often misunderstood the nature of the signal itself. The signal was not pointing toward the data. The signal was the data.
The tightening fist. The shifting in my balance. The sense of alarm. The difficult no.
These were not distractions from reality. They were reality arriving through a different channel.
Not conclusions, nor certainty. But rather, information. And information I repeatedly ignored.
Part of the work of Secret Places became learning to stop arguing with those signals.
Not because the body is God, not because every feeling is true, and not because intuition is infallible.
But because my body had been recording reality long before I had language for what it was witnessing.
The body was not the authority. But it was a witness.
And often it arrived first.
Many of the things I eventually admitted intellectually had already been registered physically.
My body knew before I did.
Listening wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was obeying.
What truth might your body already know?
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