Intuition – Where Did We Go Wrong?

A historic look at the systems that severed our connection with ourselves.

The tightness you feel in the pit of your stomach.

The sudden flash of clarity, or the sense that something is off or wrong.

Intuition is a feeling that comes from deep within us. It’s a source of inner guidance that bypasses filters of logic and reason - giving the mind a subtle signal to pause, shift, or simply tune in. When we tune in, we find that our bodies are constantly communicating with us, delivering important messages that help us discover our truth.

My intuition speaks to me in so many different ways. It’s an expansion of my energy when it’s a yes and the feeling of being “blocked” when I try to pursue a path that’s not for me. It’s seeing green lights and feeling like I’m co-creating with the universe when I’m on the right path. It’s the reappearance of symbols in nature, or an unexplained connection with animal guides.

But while I feel a strong connection with my intuition, anytime I start to tell the stories of how my intuition has guided me, I’ve found myself prefacing the stories with “I know this might sound crazy, but…” or I’ve stopped myself from telling the stories completely, knowing that intuition is so often dismissed as “woo” or taboo in western culture.

Today’s War on Intuition

Our societal distrust of intuition has been on public display with the recent nomination of Casey Means to Surgeon General. Let’s put political affiliations aside for the moment and talk about the collective implosion happening on both sides of the aisle.

Casey Means is a Stanford-trained physician, metabolic health advocate, and co-founder of a wellness tech startup who’s been nominated for Surgeon General — and she's unapologetically vocal about integrating intuition, ancestral wisdom, and holistic practices into her understanding of health. While Republicans mock her spiritual practices and target her for praying to her ancestors on her quest to find love (more on the contradictions of the Casey Means nomination here in my article Burning the Modern Witch), Democrats are largely appalled that she uses intuition in her approach, deviating from a purely evidence-based approach to medicine.

Perhaps the only thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on right now is that they all hate Casey Means - a passion that deeply underscores the profound level of intuitive distrust woven throughout western culture.

And so the war on intuition continues to play out in the media, on social media platforms, and around the dinner table. It sounds like:

“She’s crazy” or “She’s a total crack pot.”

Calling her approach spiritual woo or new-agey and lacking in scientific rigor.

Blaming her unconventional energy-speak for tearing apart movements.

It’s giving Salem Witch Hunt and I wanted to figure out why.

A Historic Look: Disconnecting the Self from the Self

Intuition is biologically part of each and every one of us. It’s our body’s ability to quickly synthesize patterns, experiences, and subtle cues - often just below our conscious awareness. It’s not mystical or witchy - it’s a survival skill that involves a deep level of connection with the self and cultivation of self trust.

So if intuition is a natural, biological part of being human, how did we get to this place where we view trusting our inner guidance as a form of witchcraft?

To understand the disconnection of the self from the self, we have to journey back to prehistoric times. But before we go there, it’s important to note that spiritual traditions have long taught us that each of us carries within a balance of both masculine and feminine energy. Where masculine energy is rooted in action, logic, and structure, feminine energy is rooted in intuition, emotion, and creative flow. And while I don’t believe that gender is binary, I’ll talk about this shift in terms of “men and women” as was the gender norm at the time.

10,000 to 3,000 BCE - Prehistoric and Intuitive

During this time, societies were largely egalitarian, power was communal, and resources were shared. People lived in close connection with the land, and intuition was revered. Wisdom was largely held in the hands of intuitive practitioners like herbalists, healers, midwives, and seers - many of them women.

3,000 to 1,200 BCE - Agricultural Shift + Battle for Land

With the expansion of agriculture, land and wealth became synonymous. Scarcity created fear, and tribes began protecting their land, their food, and their people. The ability to defend land became a symbol of power, and in turn we saw the rise of the warrior class – most often men due to physical strength. Those who held land became rulers, power began to centralize, and the masculine energy of conquering, building, fortifying, and expanding came to dominate.

1,200 BC to 400 CE - Order, Control, and Suppression of Patriarchal Empires

With land and power now concentrated among men within emerging empires, the earth became something to conquer and extract from instead of something to live in harmony with.

To rule is to maintain order, and having trust in our inner knowing became a direct threat to maintaining order. The intuitive practices of herbalism, midwifery, and healing were called dangerous, irrational, and subversive and ultimately banned, while laws were codified that legally subordinated women to men.

400 CE to 1750 CE - The Severance of Feminine Wisdom from Modern Culture

During this era, a potent mix of expanding empires, institutionalized religion, and rising state control severed feminine wisdom from public life. Religious institutions framed feminine spiritual authority, body-based wisdom, and intuitive practices as dangerous or heretical. What followed was the mass execution of women who maintained intuitive practices or held generational wisdom.

Between 1450 and 1750 CE, Europe and colonial America systemically erased up to 100,000 people - the vast majority of them women. Labeled as “witches” these women weren’t casting spells or hexes – many of them were attending births, care giving, utilizing generational plant knowledge, interpreting dreams, or practicing ancestral traditions.

A Rupture to the Collective Nervous System

Today, we’re still living in the echo of this severance. Intuition is often dismissed as unreliable, while science and logic are upheld as the only valid paths to truth. Women remain vastly underrepresented in positions of power — in government, business, religious institutions, and beyond. And many of those who have risen to the top have done so by mastering the masculine energies within — often at the cost of suppressing their intuitive, creative, and relational feminine energies. (No wonder so many are burning out. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

This period left a deep imprint on our collective nervous system — one that still lingers. Generations were taught to fear their own inner knowing, to trade instinct for obedience, and to silence the whispers of the body in favor of external approval. Today, that legacy lives on in our chronic people-pleasing, our fear of being "too much," and our discomfort with being fully seen.

Self-doubt runs so deep, we often can’t tell the difference between discernment and disconnection. Our nervous systems are so dysregulated, we’ve normalized the numbness — and we can’t even name it. So we project. We lash out at the Casey Means of the world — women who trust themselves out loud — not realizing that what we truly need is not more certainty, but more connection.

In order to heal the collective rupture, we have to remember that power was never meant to be domination - it was meant to be alignment and collaboration. That protection was never meant to become control. And that intuition is not the opposite of logic - it’s its necessary counterpart. The yin to its yang. The quiet truth beneath the noise.

I help clients reconnect with intuition, follow their path to purpose, and realign their lives and their businesses with their own energetic rhythms. For more info, visit: https://www.jesscallahan.com/energy-intensive