The muses, the gods of creative inspiration, are all depicted and storied as female, and some modern thinkers attribute beauty, love, movement, and color to the “divine feminine”.
Are women naturally more in touch with their intuition? Is intuition intrinsically more of a feminine thing, remaining relatively inaccessible—or even inappropriate—for men?
It does certainly seem to be true that, in general, more women are more intuitive, but is that the result of nature or nurture, of inborn inclination or of society and circumstance?
My own experience is that, like anything else, we get good at what we do, and that intuition gets stronger with practice, regardless of gender. Some women are more familiar with their intuition—but let’s consider for a moment the possibility that much of the reason why is only that men haven’t practiced it as much.
Intuition is a fundamental part of our human essence, and while there is infinite variety in how intuition is expressed and experienced, including perhaps some innate differences between men and women, the basic capacity of what Carl Jung called “perception via the unconscious” is available to everyone.
And not only is intuition available, it is required. To live well, we need our intuition. None of us can truly thrive without the power of unconscious cognition. An over-dependence on our analytic, conscious minds leads to anxiety and depression. Many spiritual and wellness practices are specifically intended to give us relief from the constant striving and suffering of the conscious mind: for example, Buddhism’s dukkha only relieved by degrees of enlightenment, Stoicism’s focus on equanimity as the solution to the suffering of being, meditation as a way of calming the ‘monkey mind’, which is the endless ruminating of the default mode network.
Cultivating a stronger relationship with intuition offers an alternative to the stress of effortful decision-making, and therefore another way to lessen the suffering of consciousness. Intuition is a way of tuning into the natural patterns of our being—which are also the natural patterns of our world.
As gratifying as it may be (if only because it’s familiar) to grind your gears until you come up with what seems to be the ideal analytic solution to a problem, what greater joy it is to discover an answer as a natural expression of your awareness and embodiment in the world! Our conscious mind wants credit, and so it constantly strives to think it’s way onto the stage, but what a relief to discover some truth without being aware of exactly how we arrived there.
Intuition, my friends, is for everyone. And, since in general men have not practiced (or, exercised) their intuition as much as women, men have even more to gain by strengthening and better understanding their intuition.
