Trusting Your Experience
There’s a moment that happens sometimes—maybe you’re in a conversation, or facing a decision, or perhaps navigating a tricky situation—when you suddenly realise you’ve been overthinking everything. Your mind has been spinning elaborate scenarios, weighing pros and cons, analysing every angle, and yet somehow you feel further from clarity than when you started. Meanwhile, somewhere beneath all that mental noise, there’s a quiet knowing trying to get your attention. We’ve all been there. That place where our heads are so full of thoughts that we’ve completely lost touch with what we actually know to be true.
The Wisdom We Forget We Have
Here’s something remarkable: you’ve lived your entire life. Every experience you’ve ever had—every conversation, every challenge overcome, every moment of joy or heartbreak— has left its mark. Not just as memories you can recall, but as a kind of embodied wisdom that lives in you. It’s the reason you can walk into a room and sense the atmosphere before anyone speaks. It’s why certain decisions feel right in your bones while others make your stomach churn, even when you can’t articulate why. This deep knowing is real. It’s not mystical or magical—it’s the accumulation of everything you’ve learned, integrated at a level far deeper than conscious thought. But here’s the challenge: this wisdom speaks quietly, and our thinking minds speak loudly.
When the Head Takes Over
Our minds are brilliant problem-solvers. They can analyse, strategise, and plan. These are genuine gifts. But somewhere along the way, many of us learned to trust only what we can think through logically, what we can explain and defend. We learned that gut feelings aren’t reliable, that intuition is suspect, that we need to figure everything out before we can move forward. So we think harder. We make more lists. We seek more information. We analyse until we’re exhausted. And paradoxically, the more we think, the more disconnected we become from what we actually know. It’s like trying to remember a word that’s on the tip of your tongue—the harder you chase it, the more it eludes you. But the moment you relax and stop grasping, there it is.
The Space Between Thoughts
Accessing your deeper knowing isn’t about thinking better or harder. It’s about creating space for something other than thinking to emerge. It’s about learning to recognize the difference between the anxious churning of an overwhelmed mind and the quiet clarity of embodied wisdom. This wisdom often arrives not as thoughts but as sensations. A sense of rightness or wrongness. An expansion or contraction in your chest. A feeling of energy or depletion. Your body is constantly giving you information, but you have to slow down enough to notice it. Think about a time when you ignored your gut feeling and later regretted it. Chances are, you knew something was off, but you talked yourself out of it. You let your thinking mind override what your whole being was trying to tell you.
Coming Back Home
So how do we get out of our heads and back into connection with our deeper knowing? It starts with noticing. Notice when you’re spinning in thought. Notice when you’re trying to think your way to an answer that thinking can’t provide. Notice the quality of that mental state—is it open and curious, or tight and anxious? Then, pause. Just for a moment, stop trying to figure it out. Take a breath that travels all the way down to your belly. Feel your feet on the ground. This simple act of coming back into your body interrupts the thought spiral and creates an opening. From here, you can ask yourself: What do I actually know about this? Not what do I think, or what should I know, or what would someone else know—but what do I, from all my lived experience, actually know? Sometimes the answer comes immediately. Sometimes it emerges slowly, over hours or days. Sometimes it arrives as a question rather than an answer. Trust the process. Your inner wisdom has its own timing.
“What an amazing experience working with Caryl and her herd of horses. It was extremely insightful, literally being in the field with the horses. There was personal learning and awareness on the day, however I am noticing even more perspective and wisdom after the day”
If you are interested in creating the space to pause, breathe, check in with what you know beneath your thoughts and rebuild trust in your inner wisdom, please get in touch with Caryl at caryl@change-dynamics.co.uk to book an initial chat with Caryl.
By Alison Lincoln
