Listen to Your Intuition

I used to let other people tell me what to believe about my own life. When I became seriously ill, the opinions came from every direction. The more I listened to what I was told was conventional wisdom, the worse I became.

I didn’t yet understand that I had stopped listening to myself.

For a long time, I trusted the voices around me more than the quiet voice inside me. I thought other people could see what I could not. I thought that if someone sounded certain enough, they must know what was happening to me.

Then, at a moment when I had run out of answers, I began to listen differently.

The moment I began to listen to my intuition

My illness began after a tetanus shot. I was heavy metal poisoned, and my health unraveled. I received diagnoses including chronic Lyme, Hashimoto’s, celiac disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, and mast cell activation. My body reacted to almost everything. For a time, I could eat only three foods.

I lived with a decade of brain fog. I couldn’t remember things. I was hot and cold. POTS left me bedridden, and my life shrank to the size of a bed.

I was frightened, exhausted, and searching for a way forward. But as I tried to keep my family informed, I heard a barrage of conventional and dramatic opinions. The message underneath them was familiar: This must be all in your head.

I had already spent years allowing other people to define what was happening to me. In my essay about biological dentistry, I wrote: “Up until this point, I allowed everyone around me to dictate who I should be and what to believe during this crisis, and not once did I ever contemplate following my intuition. Until that moment.”

That moment did not arrive with a perfect plan. It began with a decision to keep searching, even when the people around me doubted what I was doing. I looked for a biological dentist because something in me said there was more to understand.

I was not handed certainty. I was handed a thread. I followed it.

Never outsource your health

Listening to your intuition does not mean having every answer. It means refusing to hand over your inner authority because someone else sounds more confident. People used to tell me that’s what the liver and kidneys are for. Poor them. Poor people. They simply don’t get it. And it was confusing nonetheless — I heard it enough times to start doubting what my own body was telling me.

For me, taking the reins meant paying attention to what my body was telling me and looking beyond the explanations I had been given. I could not outsource my health and expect someone else to know the full story of my body. The more I followed what was called “conventional wisdom” without listening to myself, the worse I became. So I stopped. I asked my own questions. I kept searching when the answers I had been offered did not match the life I was living.

At the root of my illness, I came to understand a limbic system injury: the missing piece no doctor had told me about. In my own healing, detoxification and chelation were one half of the rescue, and limbic retraining was the other. I needed both. The physical burden and the nervous system’s alarm had to be addressed together.

Here is the truth I carry: NEVER outsource your health. Not once, not a little, not for convenience. No one will ever live inside your body but you. I took my life and my body into my own hands, and that decision is the only reason I am here to tell you this story. Your lived experience matters. Pay attention to it. Don’t let anyone persuade you that you have to disappear from your own search for answers.

Your body and your consciousness

I have spent years wondering about the relationship between consciousness and the body. While interviewing Toni Ghazi for the Broken and Healed podcast, I heard him describe a stutter he had lived with for 41 years. When he entered a channeled state, he said, his stutter vanished. I witnessed the shift during our conversation.

I had experienced something that made me ask a similar question. In the jungle, while working with plant medicine, the pain my body had been carrying vanished during the periods when I was “in the medicine.” I knew what it was like to enter one state of consciousness with pain and experience another state without it.

What if changing our state of consciousness can change what happens in the body? What if trauma, identity, belief, fear, suppression, and the stories we have carried for decades influence how we experience ourselves?

I don’t claim to have all the answers. I know what I witnessed and what I lived. And what I know is this: don’t be afraid to sound woo woo. It is not woo woo — it is physics. Consciousness has a relationship with the body that we still don’t fully understand, and maybe the lens we’re trying to understand it through is broken. What becomes possible when we stop listening only to the thinking mind and make space for another kind of knowing? Everything. That is what becomes possible.

That curiosity lives at the heart of my work. It is why I created Story Is Medicine, my own method for writing as a practice of self-discovery. I sometimes describe it as yoga with pen and paper: a way to listen inward, give experience language, and begin to re-story the past.

Is your story stuck in your throat?

I think of the throat chakra as the energetic center of expression, truth, and voice. When we have been taught that our words are too much, too risky, or not important enough to share, our stories can become stuck inside us.

Many of us have been told that what we have to say isn’t “essential business.” We keep working, planning, shopping, and doing the things that seem urgent. Then, in the quiet, a question rises: Why am I stuck? I have so much to say.

The chronic condition that nags you is often the memory of who you were meant to be, lodged in your energy field — asking… begging — to be heard. So let it out. Let it be part of the conversation. We need each other’s stories. That is how we learn. They are more accurate than any lab report, peer-reviewed article, or documented case study.

Imagine there is a hole in the universe shaped exactly like your true story.

We need each other’s stories. That is how we learn. When we re-story the past, we re-write the future. There is no condition too big for your truth.

A small practice for listening inward

When I began writing in 2019, I was sick and did not know how my story would end. I developed a way of entering the writing process with headphones and frequencies. I would light a candle, get quiet, and open myself to what wanted to come through.

You don’t have to know how the story ends. You just need to put your headphones on and begin.

Here is a small practice you can try at your own pace:

1. Find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably.
2. Light a candle if that feels grounding. Put on headphones and choose a sound or frequency that helps you settle. I often use 528 Hz.
3. Take a few breaths. You might picture your ancestors or guides beside you, if that feels meaningful.
4. Write without editing for ten minutes. Begin with one of these questions:
   • What do I know about my experience that I have been afraid to say?
   • What have I been told to believe, and what do I notice for myself?
   • What does my inner voice want me to hear today?
5. Stop when you need to. You do not have to make sense of everything on the page.

You are allowed to go slowly. You are allowed to write something private, or to discover that you are not ready to write today. The point is not to force an answer. It is to make a little room for your own voice.

Begin with the voice you already have

I spent years looking for answers while my life grew smaller. I know what it is to lose trust in your body, to feel overwhelmed by other people’s opinions, and to wonder whether you will ever find your way back to yourself.

My memoir, Awakening in an Age of Metals, is where this journey lives in full. And through Story Is Medicine and 1:1 story coaching, I help people use writing to explore the stories they have carried and find the words they may have been holding back. If you feel called to find yours, reach out to me directly at michellekatz2010@gmail.com — I would be honored to walk that road with you.

If you are at a crossroads, start with one honest sentence. You do not have to know what comes next. Listen for the voice that is yours.

Then begin.