On Reason and Psychology: How to Unleash Intuition?

By: Psychologist Isa Pašalić

In the modern world, there is a belief that the only valid way to arrive at the truth is through intellect. We have begun to view intellect and mind as equivalent to reason. Considering that most of us do not use only intellect to make everyday decisions, but also use other tools.

However, what enables us to make good decisions are also other centers of perception, such as intuition and moral/spiritual feeling. For this reason, it is important to define the concept of reason. Reason is what unifies all three of these ways of perception or three rational centers. With this in mind, a rational decision is made only when all three rational centers are utilized.

The question that arises is how can we enable ourselves to expand our modern system of perception with this intuitive, as well as spiritual understanding. To answer this question, we must first understand how somatic psychology views the inner world of a person, and how it is used to solve psychophysiological problems and sharpen these rational centers.

Somatic psychology is a unique approach to psychology that does not deal with the mere intellectualization of human conditions, which we often find in modern psychology, but directly confronts a person with their inner world/subconscious and enables them to feel it, understand it, and ultimately become a whole being.

Every emotional state and instinct originates from some place in our body. These emotions/instincts are most often located in our torso, i.e., the part of the body from the top of the sternum to the pubic bone. Until now, it was believed that both emotions and instincts are something abstract, whose origin we are unable to grasp. Somatic psychology thus changes the paradigm of understanding human emotions and instincts and gives people the reins to use this inner world to navigate the outer world more easily.

The way we access our inner world is through interoception. Interoception is a sensory approach through which we perceive states in our body. This is an extremely important sense that has been lost in the collective consciousness of modern man. The way to deepen intuition is by allowing ourselves, through interoception, to begin to feel the instincts and emotions located in our torso.

And the way we do this is by allowing ourselves, through this interoceptive path, by directing our attention, to begin to reside in the torso and feel which parts of the torso do not allow us to fully surrender to this inner world.

The first obstacle we will encounter is the resistance of our established dwelling in the head and the inability to fully surrender to this new experience. After we allow ourselves to surrender, we may be surprised by emotions and bodily sensations that we were not even aware of feeling.

When this happens, it is important to stay with these emotions, allowing ourselves to feel them absolutely in the entirety of their intensity. After we cleanse ourselves of emotional burdens and learn how to process external stimuli through the body, we will reach a position where we can easily feel instincts and how our body reacts to the external world.

When we go through this painful process, we enable ourselves to navigate the world in a lighter and more complete way. This very feeling of understanding our instincts is the development of that intuitive component in a person, which is one of the factors of reason.

This is that “gut feeling” we often hear about, however, we have never been able to truly understand it until now. When we allow ourselves such an existence, we become broader and enable ourselves to “consult” our intuition in every situation. Through this process, we also facilitate easier access to the third, most important rational center, which is the supreme characteristic of humanity, and that is the moral/spiritual center.

We develop this center through our work and the need to do good, nurturing our connection with the origin of goodness.

The development of these two neglected centers is of extreme importance in both our private and collective lives. When we enable and teach people how to connect with their intuition, we get a society and people who become more capable of recognizing lies, deception, and insincerity in other people.

This detail is particularly important in politics, where instinctiveness and the ability to rationally assess the other party are of great importance. And we get a valid assessment through rational interpretation, which, as we have already said, has its roots in the three rational centers.

The individual is the basic cell of a society; by strengthening ourselves and our ability to make rational decisions, we directly strengthen the society to which we belong.

To be continued

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* Isa Pašalić is a psychologist with a degree from Lewis&Clark University, Portland, USA. After completing his studies, he returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina with the intention of developing a new approach to psychology. The knowledge, experience, and sense for the inner being of a person that he possesses have enabled him to create an approach to solving inner human problems that is not based on theoretical articulations of conditions and definitions, but on feeling the essence of the problem on an intellectual, physiological, and spiritual level.