Over my 38 years of life, I have lived through various situations, good, bad and ugly. I know the feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I know when someone’s vague words are an actual ploy to get into my pants and yet I continue forward with a “maybe it’s not really like that” mentally rather than a “you can protect yourself” mentality. Throughout this time I’ve heard “when are you going to listen to your gut” more times than I’d like to count from my mother and she’s not wrong but why is it so hard? 

This is hardly a ground breaking topic in 2026. As women, we know we have all been conditioned to be obedient, not make a scene, make everyone else feel comfortable. I always felt I was the outlier, coming from a single parent household of a badass hippie mom. Despite the fact that my mom will speak her mind in most opportunities, I didn’t get that character trait. If it isn’t the house I grew up, is it because I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? Or am I just much more susceptible to societal influences than I’m aware? These are the questions I was left with after a business dinner. I knew the outcome as I left the house but because I didn’t want to be rude or ruin my reputation, I proceeded anyway.

Even if we know better, even if we were raised to be empowered. Why is it still so damn hard to trust our intuition? 

Wedding Day Jitters or A Sign to Run Away Bride 

I vividly remember about a week before my wedding as I washed my face and got ready for bed, a little voice in my head said “if you go through with this, it’s going to end badly.”  Of course I brushed this off as if it were just pre-wedding jitters, you know the kind our parents and grandparents talk about the night or week before their impending nuptials. Now, I often wonder how many of our mothers and grandmothers would’ve avoided marriage all together had they listened to those nerves. 

As women in a world predominately run by men, for centuries we have been told we are overreacting or being too emotional about everything, from something as small as being dismissed for a legitimate emotional reaction to something as serious as women’s health complaints not being taken seriously. That risk compounds for Black and brown women, whose pain and anger are read through an even harsher lens. The esteemed author Lovette Jallow has a great essay, The “Angry Black Woman” Trope is Lazy on her Substack that is a must read.  

Whether we are conscious of it or not these ideas creep in. And if your trauma response is to fawn, your intuition is cast aside at best or becomes untrustworthy at worst. 

Would You Have Been Burned at the Stake? 

Probably. If you’re reading this you are most likely a “problematic”, “ill-behaved” woman (welcome you have found your people). Someone who trusted a read of a person or situation that turned out to be right. Three hundred years ago, that same instinct, that self-knowledge, that true knowing of who you are and what you’ve done would’ve gotten you burned at the stake. A woman’s self-knowing and own account of herself has always been the first thing disbelieved. Whether the narrative was a girl’s claim of spectral torment in 1692 or “you’re overreacting” in a modern workspace. 

Those roots run deep and go back much further than the witch hunts, thus despite having a sincere depth of understanding, a deep and unrelenting knowledge, whether a scientist wants to call it pattern recognition or I want to call it my magic, ignoring and questioning it are the default. 

Women are the Default Not The Mutation

Intuition is historically associated with women and both praised and weaponized depending on the group you listen to. Whether you believe, like artist Hassan Jalal, that women hold the entire universe inside themselves, or you’re more pragmatic and prefer that women are simply more conditioned to read social cues, the fact remains: it’s a superpower, not a party trick. 

Something most of us were never taught in school is that every human embryo starts out on the female pathway. It’s only when the SRY gene, carried on the Y chromosome, switches on and that development gets redirected toward male anatomy. Without that signal the body continues on its original course. Scientists refer to this as the “default pathway”. I prefer to think of it as what we’ve always known in our bones, women aren’t the exception. We are the baseline. 

This isn’t a claim that women’s genes are somehow “better”, or that biology hands us some superiority complex to wear like a crown. It’s simultaneously simpler and more radical. Femaleness isn’t the exception that the world keeps treating it as. It’s the starting point. 

So if intuition is associated with womanhood, whether you want to call it inherited instinct, socialized skill, magic or all of the above, it’s time to stop treating it like an unreliable extra and start treating it like what it is. Our default setting. 

Let’s Be Gym Buddies

After all this, what is the solution to exercising our intuitive muscles? Well, there are a few methods out there for helping identify and flex your intuition powers. Researcher Gary Klein has found that pattern recognition shows up in the body before it shows up in the mind. Thus, identifying those signs, tightening of the chest, hairs standing up on your arms, the stomach dropping into your butt, moments is crucial to being able to override those socially programmed default settings in the brain to “be polite”. 

Keeping a “gut feeling” log can help you learn to better trust your intuition, rather than ignore it. This is one I plan to implement personally. Even just a quick, “X felt off and Y happened” will help you to build the trust between your intuition and the outcomes. If, like me last week, you find yourself in a situation where you have ignored your intuition allow yourself a quick out. This is as simple as, oh I have another meeting, or I have [insert thing here] waiting for me and I need to head out. And when all else fails, phone a friend. Or rather, have a friend phone you. 

These things may seem simple, hard or even really silly but something as simple as a “gut feeling” log can help in training the muscle in order to override centuries of programming. Like any good workout regime, you need repetition, muscle fatigue and a great support system around you. 

Call it a workout, call it witchcraft, call it whatever you like that actually gets you to do the work. My mother’s been asking me for years when I’m going to listen to my gut. The answer is: starting now, one rep, one spell, one intentional move forward at a time. I know I am not doing it alone. Welcome to the gym witches, I am glad you’re here.