Trust Your Inner Yes: Women’s Intuition, Prayer, Meditation & the Wisdom of the Body - 4

Ever had that gut feeling you just couldn’t explain—but later realized it was spot-on? That’s your intuition speaking. In this episode, we’re diving deep into the power of women’s intuition and how science, spirituality, and the wisdom of the body all come together to help us make better decisions.

We’ll explore:

• What intuition really is (hint: not magic, but science-backed pattern recognition).
• Why women often score higher in social intuition and emotional sensitivity.
• How prayer and meditation quiet the mind to access deeper levels of consciousness.
• The role of the body—your heart, gut, and breath—as a compass for decision-making.
• A simple Pause–Pray–Pattern–Proceed toolkit for everyday choices.

Plus, I’ll guide you through short practices you can use right away to start listening to your intuition more deeply.

Takeaway: Intuition isn’t about being perfect—it’s about being aligned. This week, let your quiet yes lead you.

Resources Mentioned:

• Research on meditation and consciousness (Default Mode Network & gamma synchrony)
• Studies on interoception and body awareness in decision-making
• Social intuition research on women’s emotional sensitivity

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Welcome to Lady(ish)—the podcast where real talk meets whole-self transformation. Hosted by coach, healer, and wellness guide Autumn Noble O’Hanlon, this unfiltered space is for women who want more out of life—but on their own terms.

Each week, we dive into the messy, beautiful, and often contradictory layers of wellness, covering everything from career shifts and body image to energy healing, intuitive living, fitness, burnout recovery, and creating change that actually sticks.

Whether you're chasing a new chapter, healing old wounds, or just trying to reconnect with yourself in a loud, overwhelming world—Lady(ish) is here to support your evolution. Expect honest conversations, coaching wisdom, holistic tools, spiritual insights, and permission to be a little bit of everything (and nothing you're not).

Because wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all—and neither are you.

AutumnNoble.com

Autumn@theuncomfortabledream.com

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Transcript

Autumn Noble (00:00)

Welcome back my friends to Lady-ish where wellness gets unfiltered. Today in episode three, we are digging into intuition. And it's a tool that I use with all of my coaching clients and even my personal training and fitness clients. And that is simply learning to listen to our bodies and listen to those little voices and those little nudges inside of ourselves that often know the right answer before logically we get.

It's that quiet voice that inner yes, the nudge that doesn't always make sense on paper, but somehow knows more than we do.

For many of us, we've had those moments where we've made a decision that just felt right in the moment, in our guts, even though logically we couldn't really back it up, explain it or defend it. But later on, we can see just how clear and spot on our instincts were.

That's our intuition at work. And while we talk about it often as this sort of mysterious or spiritual thing, there is a lot of science behind us that shows us there's a lot happening beneath the surface when we're making decisions. Your brain, your body, your consciousness all work together. Today we're going to explore women's intuition.

and how prayer and meditation can help us access deeper levels of consciousness and how to listen to the wisdom that already lives in your body. I hope today's episode will help you if you're struggling with any kind of a difficult decision or gaining clarity in your life. I'm going to offer you some useful tools that you can use in any situation at any time.

to help you access that inner knowing and gain clarity on how to move forward.

So let's start by talking about what exactly is intuition. Let's be very clear here. It's not magic. It's not a random whisper. Psychologists actually describe intuition as rapid decision-making based on patterns that your brain has already learned.

Research on firefighters, nurses, and even military leaders shows us that experts in their fields often make decisions in seconds, not because they guess, but because their experience has built mental templates that simply execute.

Psychologist Gary Klein calls this recognition primed decision making. They look at a situation and without consciously analyzing, they recognize what's going on. But here's the thing, intuition shines when you have experience and feedback.

It's strongest when your mind and body have seen enough repetitions to know what works, but it's less reliable when you're new to something or when bias creeps in. So intuition can be very powerful if we know how to use it wisely.

So let's talk a little bit about women and our intuition. Studies have found that women on average score slightly higher in reading nonverbal emotional cues, things like facial expressions, tone, and body language. That's what psychologists call social sensitivity.

It's not about women being more magical or men being less intuitive. It's simply that women often, through biology and socialization, tend to notice more emotional signals and cues in a room than our male counterparts do. That kind of social intuition can be a real gift in relationships, in leadership, and in community.

But let's talk next about deeper levels of consciousness. How do we access intuition and those deeper layers? This is where prayer, meditation, and spiritual practice can come in. Science tells us that meditation literally changes our brain and it's why it's such a core part of my daily practices and it's why I include it in all of my podcasts and make it available to all of my coaching clients.

Long-term meditators show less activity in what's called the default mode network. It's the part of the brain that likes to replay the past and worry about the future. When chatter quiets, we get clearer perception and more insight. Other studies have shown that advanced meditation can create what's called gamma synchrony,

This is where brain waves activity reflect integration across the brain as a whole. Some neuroscientists actually believe that this might be connected to higher levels of consciousness. I personally believe that that is the case. When you develop a meditation practice, I truly believe that it allows us to access that part of our consciousness, that big iceberg, right? That's 90 % below the water. I believe that meditation allows us to access that 90 %

of higher consciousness and higher knowing that we don't utilize unless we really build and flex that muscle.

Prayer too has also been studied. Neuroimaging shows that during prayer or chanting or any type of contemplative practice, the brain shifts into a state very similar to meditation where it's deeply focused, there's reduced self-talk and chatter, and there's a heightened sense of connection.

Andrew Newberg, a researcher in the field of neuro theology has shown that these types of practices actually light up the brain in ways that align with feelings of clarity and peace and insight. So whether you call it prayer or meditation or simply a quiet, calm presence,

What's really happening is that you're clearing the noise, clearing the chatter, giving intuition a chance to be heard. And this is why so many of us that engage in regular prayer activities or meditative activities are such firm believers in the practices because of those feelings of deep connection and clarity and peace that come from those practices and the effects they have on our brains.

So let's pause a moment and I wanna offer you a very simple practice that you can use to explore this on your own. Wherever you are, take one very slow, deep breath. Ask yourself a simple prayer. Show me what I can't see today. Show me where I need to focus my energy today. Then sit in silence for just a moment and notice what comes up.

It could be image, could be a word, could be a sensation in your body. That is the doorway of intuition opening up. And this is a simple practice that can allow us to flex that muscle so that it grows stronger and easier to hear.

But intuition is not just about finding moments of stillness and connection. We can also look to our own bodies as a compass and trust that sometimes our bodies actually know before our brains do. Intuition doesn't just come from our brain and it can actually live within our body.

Science calls this interoception, the ability to sense internal signals like heartbeat or breath or gut tension.

Studies have found that people with stronger interreceptive awareness, those who can accurately feel their heartbeat, for example, usually make better intuitive decisions. But here's the thing, for many of us, our bodies are filled with stress and so those signals can really mislead us.

That's why practices like mindfulness can help us filter what's real wisdom versus what's just worry. Here are two practices for body work that you can use today. So hold a question in your mind and we're going to conduct a three-point body check. Hold that question in your mind and then bring attention to your heart, your throat, and your gut.

These are the chakras in our body that are aligned with trusting intuition, believing in ourselves, speaking our truth and really feeling our own power and efficacy. So connect with that heart, throat and gut. And notice as you contemplate that question, do they feel open? Do they feel closed? Do they feel tight? Do they feel neutral? Sometimes the answer is already written in your body if you just take a moment

and check in with that power center, that heart center, and that voice center in your throat chakra. The other option I use a lot in my coaching practice is the simple somatic A-B test. Think of two choices available to you. Maybe you have a tough decision ahead of you you're not sure which path to take. Think of those options. Then I want you to spend one minute imagining and contemplating the you execute option.

A. As you contemplate and imagine and slip into the reality, the potential reality of that choice, notice your body, notice your breath, your posture, and scan your body for any potential tension that may be sitting there as you experience hypothetically what it would be like to execute on option A. Then reset, take a few breaths.

and do the same with option B, imagining it coming true, imagine yourself executing on that option, and then checking in with your breath, your posture, your body for any tension. And asking yourself, which option felt lighter in my body? Which option felt heavy? The body often knows before the mind can even explain it. So if you're really feeling stuck, this is a quick and simple way to check in and access some higher knowing.

and guidance.

I wanna end today with a simple kind of tool that you can use for everyday decisions. And this is something that's just kind of a thought pause loop to help you explore your decisions and connect with that intuition as a regular habit. First, we're take a simple pause, three breaths before acting. Then we're gonna pray or set an intention asking for clarity and alignment. And again, prayer is not

Isolated to any unique particular religion, it's simply asking for guidance from your higher self, your higher knowing, or your higher power, whatever resonates with you. So pause, pray, asking for clarity and alignment, and then look for patterns. Ask yourself, have I seen this before? If yes, trust your experience. If no, slow down and gather an additional fact. Next, we proceed.

we move forward using a very simple rule. For example, if this doesn't align with my top value, it's a no for me. Or if it's small and reversible, maybe I'll give it a whirl.

That is the simple question that we ask ourselves. Is this path forward in alignment with my greater intentions and highest purpose? Or is it something small enough that it's reversible and maybe I'm willing to try it? Because here's the thing, making time to pause, pray, pattern and proceed allows you to begin flexing that muscle and developing strength. But remember,

Intuition is not about always being right. It's about being aligned. If your gut speaks clearly, check it against your values and take one external fact check and then move on.

Because using our tuition in this way is not about finding the right or the wrong answer. It's about constantly checking in with ourselves and having our own backs and ensuring that in everything that we do, we are operating in alignment with our highest and greatest self and moving forward in our life in a way that aligns with our greater intentions.

By checking in this way and asking ourselves and weighing the question against those intentions, it allows us space to really do that literal gut check and see if the path forward is really in alignment. And if it's not and we're unclear, is it worth experimenting with and potentially unwinding later?

As we wrap up today, I wanna leave you with a simple seven day practice to take with you. Every morning when you wake up, take just a few minutes, two minutes, maybe three minutes for a breath or prayer. And as you're sitting in this contemplative state, either praying or just centering yourself,

ask yourself one question and use your body to check in. Use that A-B test to feel into the decision and access guidance and knowing. Then each night after you've made a decision or executed allowing that intuition to guide you or not, check in and ask yourself, what did my body say to my question for today? And what happened when I followed that guidance from my body?

or what happens when I didn't follow that guidance from my body. And really allowing yourself to just experiment, gather data and test how it works out for you in your life to pause, pattern, pray, check in and then move forward accordingly.

your intuition will grow the more we practice listening to it.

It's not separate from science and it's not separate from spirit. It's the way that your mind and your body and soul really whisper the truth, the true path of alignment. And it's just on us to start listening. So this week, try listening and trust every quiet yes that comes up and see where those decisions take you. Until next week, my friends.

Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm gonna be rolling out some brief meditations as well as some moon rituals. So be sure to tune in so you can celebrate the upcoming full moon and new moon and gather some meditation practice to help you access even more intuition and consciousness. I look forward to seeing you next week.