Gentle Wishing Meets Intuition
by Bruce Kasanoff
Intuition in its most powerful forms is what happens when you stop thinking so hard and start knowing.
It's not a framework or a methodology. It's certainly not just another decision-making tool for your quarterly planning deck.
It's recognizing that you're connected to an intelligence so vast that your brain is much better used as a receiver instead of as a competitor to a much greater source of answers.
For many people, "intuition" has been reduced to mean "that gut feeling you get when choosing between business decisions."
That’s like calling the ocean "that wet stuff you swim in at the beach."
The decision sciences people got hold of intuition and turned it into a cognitive shortcut. A mental hack. A way your brain saves time by pattern-matching.
That's not wrong. It's just... small.
True intuition is what's left when you admit that everything—literally everything, including you—is one intelligence expressing itself through many forms. The flock of birds. The swarm of bees. Your sudden knowing about who is in danger. The idea that arrives fully formed on a walk. The answer you couldn't possibly have reasoned your way to.
Why Intuition Is the Highest Form of Intelligence
Your brain is brilliant, but it’s designed for a specific job: screening out almost everything, so you can perform one task at a time.
Over the past two months, I’ve walked 6-10 miles a day through the streets of Manhattan, where sirens blare, the sideways are crowded, delivery people on e-bikes are everywhere, and a significant portion of pedestrians wear headphones.
Yet, while walking, I can still hold an intelligent phone conversation or simply spend the time thinking about an interesting subject. Why? This is because my brain is screening. out almost everything that happens around me. Only on a few occasions, such as when I must leave a sidewalk and step into the street, does my brain drop everything else and analyze the environment to understand when and how it is safe to cross the street.
To say this another way, we do not use our brains to tap into intelligence that literally surrounds us. It’s exactly the opposite! We use our brains to screen out all intelligence.
Intuition is different. It accesses the non-local… the pattern that hasn't fully formed yet… the connection between things that didn’t appear to be connected… the knowing that arrives before the evidence.
I've watched this unfold in my own life:
The opportunity I had to go for even though the odds of failure were immense
The book idea that showed up fully formed while I was meditating
The overwhelming sense of danger that saved my family and I from harm
Just last night, even though I’m in Manhattan, I had an intuitive moment.
I was sitting in my daughter’s apartment at the dining table, eating with my two young granddaughters. My body and mind were both relaxed, and I was in synch with a two and three-year-old.
At one point, my attention went to the white safety gate that was just to my right, the one that separates the kitchen/dining area from the living room, which is about 12 inches lower. The gate blocks the roughly three-foot opening, and when the door is open, the only thing that keeps the gate from falling down is a single white metal strip that goes across the floor frm one side to the other.
For the first time ever, after spending untold hours in that apartment, I had the thought: that strip doesn’t seem enough to keep the gate up.
Less than a minute later, the three-year-old got up, walked behind me, and leaned against the gate, looking into the living room, where her mother was sitting. The entire apparatus gave way and fell into the living room. My granddaughter slammed into the living room floor, caught up in the gate, which was now in two pieces.
Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt. But as soon as I knew she was okay, it was immediately obvious that I had experienced a premonition.
But there was a problem. Not used to premonitions, I didn’t pause to consider what it meant. Instead, I screened out its meaning and watched helplessly as my granddaughter fell.
Sitting here this morning, I am thankful for the lesson. It didn’t cause any real harm, but it taught me a valuable lesson: don’t let my brain screen out valuable information that comes from outside my brain.
The Playful Part
You can't access intuition by being serious and thinking hard.
You access it by being curious, playful, experimental, and sometimes even slightly irreverent. It’s the act of opening yourself to wisdom that exists outside your body. It’s also the act of expressing unconditional love for the entirety of the universe around you.
Gentle Wishing—the practice of making a wish and then letting it go—is a perfect complement to that playful way of being. It’s the opposite of being driven, goal-oriented, obsessive, and serious. It also is a wonderful way to set intentions that basically amount to inviting intuition to play (pun intended) a greater role in your life.