Keeping In Touch With Your Intuition: Dr Carolyn Kurle Of The Guidance Groove On How To Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions
An Interview With Maria Angelova
Discover and move toward your fears that gave birth to and feed the false stories in your brain. When you are brave enough to unpack and deeply investigate the fears you carry that drive your adherence to the Unproductive Grooves and block your access to intuition, then you can start to let them go. If you ignore your fears, they will grow and take over more and more. Name your fears, write them down, go into their sources with love, compassion, curiosity, and empathy. Where did they come from? What purpose did they serve that is no longer necessary? Are they even true? Unless you’re being chased by a lion across the Serengeti, then it’s likely your fears are not true.
Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Where does intuition come from? Can it be trusted? How can someone tune in to their intuition? To address these questions, we are talking to business leaders, coaches, mental health experts, authors, and anyone who is an authority on “How to Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Carolyn Kurle.
Dr. Carolyn Kurle is a tenured Biology Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of multiple research articles and the book, The Guidance Groove: Escape Unproductive Habits, Trust Your Intuition, and Be True. As a scientist, she relies on logical thinking, but she also values quieting the mind and fully integrating our feeling, intuitive selves to navigate the flow of life from a place of wholeness. Her work with hundreds of outstanding students at UCSD, many of whom paradoxically struggle to find ease, motivated her to create The Guidance Groove, an accessible manual for connecting with your intuition to increase personal authenticity and contentment.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up in a suburb of Seattle with loving parents and an older and younger brother. I was a swimmer from a young age, liked school, had good friends, and a fun, loving, and boisterous extended family. I was raised Catholic in a progressive and wonderful church (I am no longer religious) and it was there I found clarity surrounding the idea of trusting something beyond just the thoughts in my head when my wonderful priest, Father Patrick Godley, taught us to “Let go and let God.” That was my invitation to live a life rooted in listening to and following guidance from a source that wasn’t always stemming from the logic and thoughts originating in my thinking brain. The concepts in my book all stem from this universal wisdom I was given at a very young age.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“The spiritual task we are given is a simple one: to attend to the inner spark of radiance, to hold vigil over it until we realize it to be ourself, and to dig up and cast off all arguments we have with its love.” -Adyashanti, Spiritual Teacher
We are all connected to every other living thing by our own personal “inner sparks of radiance.” There are many names for that spark, including intuition, inner light, authentic self, the Divine, spirit, truth, reality, and love. Regardless of what you call it, I picture that spark as your authenticity or your source of true guidance. When you create, build, and believe false stories in your brain, such as you are inadequate, obligated, or unworthy, then you block your access to your inner spark of authenticity and you allow yourself to believe the false nonsense stories instead of finding, nurturing, trusting, and listening to your own personal intuition.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment by Adyashanti. I started listening to the audio book version of this about 10 months ago and I return to the lessons contained within that book all the time. It’s taught me the very ordinary, simple, and grace-filled nature of being extraordinarily unattached to the thoughts that constantly try and derail us from our own personal authenticity. Adya’s descriptions of what it means to move through the world from a place of non-separation with all others is comprehensive, inspiring, illuminating, and so full of wisdom. There is truly nothing transcendent about being “awake” to non-duality and his clear presentation of many Zen Buddhist-type ideas makes it appear quite ordinary and simple.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s begin with a definition of terms so that each of us and our readers are on the same page. What exactly does intuition mean? Can you explain?
Intuition is the voice of your most authentic self and it speaks to you in ways that can guide your actions as you move through the normal and extraordinary decisions you encounter every day.
It’s hard to concretely define intuition but describing it may help. Remember a time when you got a full body yes or no confirmation on a choice you made. How did that feel in your body? That is an example of a strong intuitive response. Now, imagine if you can feel that same guidance for every single decision. For me, I feel uncomfortable if I’m resisting my own intuitive guidance. When that discomfort arises, I know it’s time to pause, check inward and feel my way forward. I imagine different scenarios and then I can choose the one that brings the most ease, contentment, and lack of discomfort.
You all have this intuitive ability, but you junk up and block your ability to access your deepest truth, your inner spark, your personal guidance with the stories your brain makes up that trick you into ignoring guidance and following your false mental stories. It’s not that your logical brain is “bad,” it is simply only one of the tools at your disposal for navigating the world. When you ignore your intuition in favor of only using your thinking self, you choose to cut yourself off from a huge source of valuable information that will naturally inform how you can most authentically connect to the flow of your life.
You already have access to your guidance or intuition and you use it regularly. You know this because the concept of following one’s intuition or guidance permeates popular culture and spiritual traditions, and our language contains many descriptions of this process.
For example, think of all the references to listening to guidance that exist across music, movies, TV shows, books, and spiritual philosophies:
When Anna thinks her sister Elsa is dead in Frozen II, she encourages herself to keep going by singing, “Then I’ll make the choice/To hear that voice/And do the next right thing”.
To ensure the destruction of the Death Star in the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is told by the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi to “feel the Force Luke”.
In the movie Finding Nemo, Mr. Stingray describes to Nemo the process of moving naturally through migration as “Instinct, something deep inside you that feels so familiar that you have to listen to it.”
Joseph Campbell, renowned author, comparative mythology expert, and professor said, “But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.”
In his song Intuition, from his 1983 album Mind Games, John Lennon sings, “Intuition takes me there/Intuition takes me everywhere.”
In his poem, Moving Water, Rumi says, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy/When actions come from another section, the feeling disappears.”
Many teachings from the works of Eckhart Tolle, philosopher, speaker, author, and spiritual teacher, support this notion that something exists in each of us that transcends our thinking and thought patterns, that is our true self from which guidance flows. For example, “Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” (from A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose) and “What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. ‘Who am I, then?’ The one who sees that.”
Language also supports this idea that we all know of, feel, tap into, and use our guidance at times. We have gut instincts, a Spidey-sense, an inner voice, intuition, or a sixth-sense. Intuition may be related to animal instincts, such as bird migration, which are behaviors done without being taught. Science has yet to discover how the neural circuitry may govern intuitive guidance, but you can all access it for approaching decisions from a place of integrated wholeness.
How would you define common sense? Are intuition and common sense related?
Common sense overlaps with intuition in that it is an act of following internal and bodily sensations to inform decisions. Common sense tends to rely more heavily on lessons we’ve learned throughout our lives that point to reliable outcomes if we follow it.
How are they different from each other?
Common sense and intuition are different in that intuition frequently provides us with strong guidance to do something that may make no logical sense, but simply feels strongly better than the alternatives. For example, your parents or your logical self may expect you to attend a prestigious university and major in something that will guarantee you a high-paying job upon graduation. Common sense would dictate that this is true — attending a great school and earning a practical degree generally leads to jobs with higher pay.
But what does your truest, most unvarnished internal guidance tell you? Maybe it says you won’t be happy with that job or degree. Maybe it whispers that your fulfillment as a human relies upon you pursuing something less “practical.” If you trust that voice and follow your guidance, you may make less money, but you’ll reap other benefits such as job satisfaction for life and a purpose that fills you up with joy and satisfaction, rather than depletes you and pulls you further from your authentic self.
What are the positive aspects of being in touch with your intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
Research from the field of psychology clearly demonstrates that living an authentic life is positively associated with many measures of personal well-being. And to live authentically means trusting your inner instincts and operating in harmony with those feelings. When you learn to find, cultivate, listen to, and trust that inner voice, then you are automatically living more in alignment with your personal authenticity which then invites more ease, contentment, and joy.
Your intuition can frequently push you to make seemingly illogical decisions, but when you learn to trust your intuitive guidance, you start to see the positive ways in which your life flows more naturally with outcomes that are more in alignment with your truest self. You can write these outcomes down and learn from them. You can also note where you ignored your guidance and followed other data such as your strict logic or the false stories your brain has made up. Those stories make up the untrue voices in your head that whisper, “I’m not good enough for that job or intimate partnership,” “I have to stay in this unhappy relationship because I’m obligated to see it through,” or “I have to live in this town because resources are scarce and I could never have enough that allows me to live where I want.” When you listen to your false voices, you miss the positive experiences that arise from finding, listening to, and trusting your true guidance that comes from a place that is different than the stories in your brain.
I have many many stories with these types of positive outcomes. I collect them all and use those data to help increase my absolute trust in my intuitive guidance. For example, when I was in my 20’s, I had my dream job. I was a biologist for the Marine Mammal Lab in my home city of Seattle. I had a great personal life, was close to my family, and loved my job. But, at some point, it became increasingly clear that I had to quit that job and go back to school for a PhD. My intuition felt like I would need that freedom of an academic position to fulfill the aspirations of my future self — including having children, teaching, and conducting research that reflected my own passions. Despite the seeming illogical choice of quitting a good job and leaving behind my life to go back to school and embark on a difficult journey, my true guidance called to me and I followed it. All of what my intuition told me regarding this decision came true. It took a long time to see the fruition of this choice, but I did have a child and needed the freedom of an academic position to be most present in his upbringing. My research and other interests blossomed in directions that never would have been possible if I stayed. And moving to a new place brought me in contact with people and places that were extraordinarily life changing.
Are there negative aspects to being guided by intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
There are always consequences to every single choice you make, including choosing to follow the guidance that arises from your personal intuition. However, I don’t think of those consequences as “good” or “bad.” When you navigate the choices in your life from a place of wholeness, meaning you integrate your feeling intuitive self with your logic self, then you may make choices that seem illogical, and others may criticize your decisions or you may feel fear that you’re moving in a direction that seems “wrong.”
But how does your body feel with your decisions? What sensations do you feel when you visualize yourself pursuing the different outcomes? Your being KNOWS which direction to choose that will bring you the most ease and calm. That may mean you don’t please your parents or others who have expectations for you. That could be viewed as a negative consequence. But, if you are more interested in remaining true to your most authentic self, and you trust that maintaining that authenticity no matter what is more important than pleasing others or following the false mental stories you and others have tried to pin on you, then there are no negative outcomes. You are on your path and you know the consequences of maintaining your authenticity, while potentially and momentarily uncomfortable, are nothing compared to the extreme and potentially life-long discomfort you’ll experience if you don’t follow your intuitive guidance.
The beauty of living always within your Guidance Groove, or following your own personal intuition, is that there is no expectation of perfection. You make choices that feel more or less in alignment with your most authentic self. If the outcome of a decision feels less in alignment with your guidance, you simply make note of that experience, then quiet your mind, tap into your guidance, and make another choice. You may miss the mark many times, but you can always redirect yourself, refine your connection to your guidance, and try again. The more you practice living within your Guidance Groove, the more automatic the process becomes.
Can you give some guidance about when one should make a decision based on their intuition and when one should use other methods to come to a decision?
You should always tap into your intuitive guidance for all of your decisions. It should always be an equal partner with logical thinking for consultation in navigating the flow of your life.
That said, I love logical thinking! I use it all the time to conduct my scientific research as a biology professor, plan the course I teach at UCSD, analyze data, decide what needs to go on my grocery list, solve Wordle, and do all the things that require logic. We are thinking humans with these gorgeous powerful brains that are amazing tools that have allowed us to do so many things on this planet.
But the thinking realm is also a huge liar. It constructs false stories that whisper or shout at us all day long. When we listen only to the voices in our heads, we miss all the other data coming from our intuitive selves.
When you rely only on the thoughts in your mind to guide you, you ignore all of the other sensations that exist throughout the rest of your body. You move through life as a truncated person. It may seem as if you are in charge of your life — you are in control. You strive to constantly force the circumstances of life to conform with the stories you have created and believe. And when life doesn’t conform with those false stories, then you are unhappy. That is because living according to those false stories is the very definition of inauthenticity which breeds discontent. You don’t really flow with life and you miss the experience of being authentic.
By learning to integrate your intuitive guidance, which frequently manifests as feeling sensations that are different than the stories your thoughts create, you approach life from a state of flow that arises naturally. When you listen to your true self, your intuitive guidance, with all of your being, at all times, then you can navigate your decisions from wholeness.
From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that hold someone back from trusting their intuition?
You ignore your intuition because you have convinced yourself that your logical, thinking self is the only guide worth listening to when you are faced with choices. You believe the stories your thought patterns incessantly whisper to you, even when you can objectively determine those thoughts are untrue. You let your desires and wants for what logically “should” be override the signals from your guidance telling you what really is.
For example, I tell a story in my book about my friend Chris who is a former SEAL Team 6 member who went through a harrowing day of life or death in a firefight in Iraq. He describes closely following his instincts coupled with his hard-wired training to navigate a true fight, flight, or freeze situation. Then, years later, when faced with a decision on whether or not to pursue an intimate love interest, he ignored his intuition when it told him this woman would never learn to trust him, so the relationship would eventually fail. Instead, he used logical data to guide him — she was beautiful, smart, interested in similar hobbies as him, and comfortable financially. His ego appreciated her attention, and her interest assuaged his fears of being vulnerable to rejection. They tried for several years, and he eventually left. Why? Because she never learned to trust him.
Was it a mistake for them to be partners? No. But the experience provides valuable data. All of us have these experiences by which we can learn to recognize, listen to, and trust our intuitive guidance. By collecting these data as we live our lives, one hopes that the lessons learned from ignoring our intuition can be applied to finding, cultivating, and trusting that intuition in similar, future decisions. Every time we listen to or ignore the guidance stemming from our intuition, we can note the consequences and learn for the future.
The common barriers to following intuition come to this: You ignore your intuition because you are afraid to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be without control — you can’t control the rejection, scorn, judgments, and actions from others. To be vulnerable is to be at the mercy of others. When you are vulnerable, you give up control and dive into the unknown and that can be terrifying. So, you create stories that give you the illusion of control so you can avoid being vulnerable.
To listen to your own guidance, your constant source of awareness that is always moving through you, is to release all control. It is to become wholly vulnerable. Fear of vulnerability, and the thought and behavior patterns you develop to avoid vulnerability, will always prevent you from authenticity.
Here is the central question of our discussion. What are five methods that someone can use to become more in touch with their intuition?
1. Identify and stop believing the false stories that make up the bulk of your thoughts. Living within your authenticity means you must stop believing the nonsense sell-talk messages and stories that have plagued you perhaps for your entire life. Those stories aren’t true and when you believe them, they trick you into ignoring your authentic internal compass or intuitive guidance. In my book, I call the false stories Unproductive Grooves and those grooves form patterns of inadequacy, obligation, scarcity, and unworthiness that you enact across many areas of your life. Once you identify your Unproductive Grooves and how they manifest across your life and relationships, you can start to disentangle from their grip.
2. Discover and move toward your fears that gave birth to and feed the false stories in your brain. When you are brave enough to unpack and deeply investigate the fears you carry that drive your adherence to the Unproductive Grooves and block your access to intuition, then you can start to let them go. If you ignore your fears, they will grow and take over more and more. Name your fears, write them down, go into their sources with love, compassion, curiosity, and empathy. Where did they come from? What purpose did they serve that is no longer necessary? Are they even true? Unless you’re being chased by a lion across the Serengeti, then it’s likely your fears are not true.
3. Value your intuitive guidance. Following your intuitive self requires feeling into your body to discover and experience what your intuition is telling you. It requires checking in with your entire self, not remaining stuck only in the mental realm. We tend to place greater value on characteristics arising from the mental realm — such as cleverness, will, logic, hard work, action, and material outcomes. We place less value on the more descriptive aspects of our humanity, such as feelings, emotions, and all the processes by which we access our intuition.
When your intuition tells you one thing (this relationship won’t work out), but your mental realm tells you another story that seems to make sense (like, they are interesting/smart/beautiful/compelling in some way, so of course this relationship is worth pursuing!) then it’s easy to ignore guidance. Instead of ignoring your guidance when decisions arise, pay attention, notice and assess the balance between thoughts form your mental realm and sensations from your feeling and emotional aspects. When you assign a high value to your guidance, and integrate it into your decision-making processes, then you will increasingly recognize how adherence to your truths leads to greater authenticity and ease.
4. Create opportunities to connect with your own intuitive guidance. Do the activities that help you access your intuition. Once you assign value to your guidance, then you can establish regular occasions and activities that will enable you to best access your intuition. Discover where and how you most easily connect o your intuition and cultivate the time to create situations to support whatever enhances that connection. Movement such as hiking, walking, bicycling, or rowing are great meditative movement practices that tune me in to my own intuition. Others could be more traditional meditation practices, yoga, doing something you love like cooking or baking that requires little thought, or listening to music.
5. If you miss the mark, try again. The principles for following your intuition that are detailed in my book, The Guidance Groove, are not meant to be a self-improvement program with a goal of making you a more perfect human who is happy in all situations. It is about helping you recognize, make peace with, and shed your adherence to the false stories running in loops in your thoughts. Once you can let these go, then you can act from a place of intuitive clarity, wholeness, and authenticity no matter what arises within your life. The beauty of living always within your Guidance Groove is that there is no need for perfection. You make choices that feel more or less in alignment with your most authentic self. If the outcome of a decision feels less in alignment with your guidance, you simply make note of that experience, then quiet your mind, tap into your guidance, and make another choice. You may miss the mark many times, but you can always forgive yourself, refine your connection to your guidance and try again. The more you practice living within your Guidance Groove, the more automatic the process becomes.
You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
The movement that will cause a lot of good is for you to find, trust, and live by your own personal Guidance Groove. When you discover the fears driving your Unproductive Grooves, investigate them with love, and let them go so you can more readily follow your deepest, truest, and most authentic intuition and root your choices in outcomes for the best and highest good, then everyone around you will have permission to do the same. This will create a ripple effect of ease, contentment, and authenticity. Once you have your own house in order, you can then come from a place of wholeness as you move toward solving the bigger problems in the world.
You will never banish your thoughts or your opinions. You will never undue your innate, lovely, and unique personality. However, when you decrease the time it takes for you to recognize that your thoughts, opinions, and stories are no more or less true than anyone else’s and you make your choices rooted in your connection with your authentic intuition, then you are opening the door for everyone else to do the same and to be the truest and most authentic expression of their own unique personality.
That alone could change the world.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
The concepts I express in my book are not new but are ancient wisdoms told through the unique lens that is Carolyn Kurle. When you start to listen and notice, you see that there are so many people teaching similar concepts and I’d love to connect with any of those gorgeous people. Brené Brown, Glennon Doyle, Becky Kennedy, Sonya Renee Taylor, Galit Atlas, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Cole Arthur Riley, to name a few.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
GuidanceGroove.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolyn-kurle-6b343821b/
CarolynKurle.com
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
Keeping In Touch With Your Intuition: Dr Carolyn Kurle Of The Guidance Groove On How To Get In Touc was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.