Why You Stopped Trusting Your Intuition and How to Reconnect With It
Courtney Lochner is a leading expert in psychedelic medicine for treatment-resistant anxiety, depression, and trauma. An Eric Hoffer Award-winning author and founder of the Intuition Rehab Lab (IRL), she teaches her signature holistic healing method to students, healers and retreat participants around the world.
You call it a gut feeling. Science calls it somatic intelligence. The ancients called it divine. What if they were all pointing at the same thing, and what if we've been trained to ignore it? You are standing in a grocery store aisle. You have been standing here for four minutes. You cannot remember why you walked in. Your phone buzzes. An ad. Another ad. You leave with things you didn't plan for and a low-grade hum of dissatisfaction you can't quite name.
This is not a bad day. This is a severe signal. There is a kind of knowing you were born with. Ancient. Exquisitely calibrated. Connected not just to your personal history, but to something far vaster. The Greeks had a word for it. Plato built a philosophy around its suppression. A 2026 peer-reviewed study in Scientific Reports suggests that the women who protected access to it for thousands of years were doing so with one of the most sophisticated biochemical tools ever devised. Then the church came. Then the market came, and the signal went quiet.
What intuition actually means
Intuition comes from the Latin intueri, "to look into." Its earliest English meaning was spiritual perception. Direct cognition that bypasses rational thought. Not a personality quirk. An act of seeing into something luminous.
Carl Jung described it as "perception via the unconscious." Aristotle called it the highest faculty of the human mind. Every tradition pointed toward the same territory, knowing without being told. The Western mind made it small. We turned a cosmic antenna into a self-help concept. But what if intuition is not about you at all?
The science
In the 1990s, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered that patients who lost access to body-based signals made catastrophically bad decisions, despite being otherwise intelligent. He called these signals somatic markers, feeling-toned guides arising from the body before the conscious mind catches up. Healthy participants in his studies showed stress responses in their skin before they could explain why. Their bodies knew first.
This is not mysticism. This is published neuroscience. The enteric nervous system, 500 million neurons lining the gut, processes information independently of the brain. Scientists call it the second brain. The gut speaks. The head eventually listens.
Triggers are not intuition
Your stomach drops in a meeting. You call it intuition. But actually, this person reminds you of someone who hurt you. Or you didn't sleep. Or your nervous system has been running on cortisol so long that it sees threat in everything.
Triggers are fast, loud, and contracting. They masquerade as certainty. True intuition expands. It is inconvenient. It contradicts the logical case. It does not need you to act in the next sixty seconds. When you follow it, there is no drama. Only the quiet recognition of something you somehow already knew.
The confusion between the two is not a character flaw. It is the consequence of a nervous system shaped by conditional love, by the demand to perform rather than perceive, by a culture that profits from your disconnection.
The secret behind what you thought was Greek wine
For over a thousand years, in Eleusis, Greece, initiates from across the ancient world gathered for a ceremony that changed them permanently. Politicians, poets, and philosophers all reported the dissolution of the fear of death. At the heart of it was a ritual drink called kykeon.
Ancient texts list water, barley, and mint. But mint water does not produce what those initiates described.
A 2026 study in Scientific Reports confirmed what researchers had long suspected: Greek priestesses were processing ergot fungus, a barley mold containing alkaloids chemically related to LSD, using a method that neutralized its toxicity while preserving its consciousness-expanding properties. These women were not brewers. They were maintaining the infrastructure of human consciousness. That’s right, baby. Psychedelic therapy before you thought it was a thing.
But then came the Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches," published in 1486, and centuries of persecution followed. Between 35,000 and 50,000 people, mostly women, were executed across Europe. Many were healers. Their knowledge passed through female, oral, generational channels. A healer outside male control was a healer the church couldn't tax, the physician couldn't replace, the state couldn't manage.
The knowledge went underground, and with it went the collective understanding that reconnecting to something larger than the self was not madness. It was the most practical thing a human being could do.
The perfect consumer is a disconnected one, is that you?
Consider what you're worth to the attention economy when you're fully connected to your intuition. You already know what you need. You don't scroll for stimulation because the quiet doesn't frighten you. You don't buy things to manage emotions you haven't processed. You are, from a commercial perspective, a nightmare.
The most profitable human is an anxious one. Reaching for products, content, approval, anything to quiet the noise that is, in truth, just the signal of their own disconnection.
The church did it with doctrine. The medical establishment did it with the destruction of the healers. The attention economy does it with the feed. The result is that every time a person walks into a grocery store, they cannot remember why.
How do you reconnect your intuition?
I call the program the Intuition Rehab Lab, the IRL. Because this work happens in real life, in real bodies, in the middle of actual existence.
It is not about adding something. It is about removing what was placed over the signal. The conditional love that taught you your feelings were inconvenient. The programming that said logic was the only valid intelligence. The trauma that wired your nervous system to hear danger in silence.
When those layers come off, through somatic practice, through plant medicine held in the right container, through learning to be still enough to receive, what remains is not emptiness. It is the antenna, cleaned.
You have always known. You were taught not to trust it. This year, I am bringing the IRL to keynote stages in New Jersey and Johannesburg, and into a full immersive week in the Amazon of Peru, where the oldest libraries of plant intelligence hold their curriculum in every leaf.
This is not a retreat. This is a return. Book a discovery call today at no cost to you. Let’s get you reconnected to your inner light. The cave is well-lit. The shadows are high-definition. The merchandise is excellent.
But there is a signal you were born to receive. It has been waiting, quietly, with the confidence of something that knows it does not need to shout. Turn down the noise. The signal is still there. It was never gone.
Read more from Courtney Lochner
Courtney Lochner, Holistic Health Coach & Psychedelic Practitioner
Courtney Lochner is one of the foremost voices in psychedelic medicine for treatment-resistant anxiety, depression, and trauma. An Eric-Hoffer Award-winning author, board-certified health coach, and founder of the Intuition Rehab Lab (IRL), she has built a global reputation for turning the most complex healing modalities into accessible, life-changing practice. Certified in nutrition design from Harvard Medical School and medicinal plants from Cornell, and shaped by a career that has taken her across continents as a professional dancer and healer studying under various tribes in the Amazon, Lochner teaches her method to students and retreat participants around the world.
