Intuition in 2025

📍Bangkok, Thailand (Issue 205)

“Su su” means “keep going”, so keep going in 2025!

Well, happy new year!

The energy is fresh, and for a moment—perhaps only for a fleeting morning—our minds are washed clean from the traumas of 2024. Everyone is on holiday and the roads are empty.

We undertake one collective world-exhale and then brace ourselves for January.

Today, the overnight train will drag me north back up to Chiang Mai, so I have the day to loaf about in Bangkok cafes, like this darling Midsummer Cafe in Nonthaburi, north BKK. I'm listening to Thai Pop (shortened to T-Pop, and it's a sort of meowing housey noise) on the speakers; the cafe has brilliant pink gingham table covers and yellow square tiles around the bar. It's very twee and looks over a motorway. The BTS skytrain skips overhead, plodding south like an enormous concrete slug. On the table next to me sits an adorable cardboard Christmas tree with sleeping cats hanging like baubles. Everything about this place is CUTE.

Other solo visitors are meticulous about avoiding eye contact with me and enjoying their coffee while doing photo-ops using phone stands so it appears as if the photo was taken by somebody else, even when alone. The camera height is calculated to perfection. It's dystopian to watch people having coffee with themselves while taking hundreds of pictures of themselves. Although they probably think my hunching over my laptop is dystopian as I tear my hair out, trying to find the perfect word. "I'm creating art! I'm a writer!" — and they believe the same, only it's a different type of art. Every ten minutes or so, a boy in an oversized bike helmet wanders in; it might always be the same boy from Grab or Bolt. He arrives with a gust of warm air and collects a couple of iced cappuccinos in plastic bags (cups, straws, everything is single-use plastic! Even those florescent plastic straws are wrapped in plastic). The next moment, he saunters off into the midday heat, "kha khaaa".

Thailand, and Bangkok in particular, is fantastic, as many of you already know. I didn't expect to visit the future, but it's very much the future! This time last year (ahhh, farewell 2024!!!) I was sitting in Riyadh, another megacity from the future.

Since then, I've eaten out almost every night. The amount of caffeine I've had is disgraceful. I've read a fair amount, I've meditated less than I would have liked, I've slept pretty well, all things considered (how many different beds!); only once have I been struck by food poisoning (Mumbai), only once feasted on by bedbugs (Thailand); I've cycled, hiked and laid on the beach. I have no tan. I've done enough yoga to touch my toes again, and not more. I spent a month in Oman, the same as in Sri Lanka, six months in India, almost three months in Nepal, and a couple of months in Thailand. That adds up to thirteen months, which is a long year, but give or take, it felt like one.

It was a good year, all things considered, and if my knees allowed me to do that again for the next seventy years, I surely would. It's been dramatic; it's been beautiful.

I suppose from it all I have learned one major thing: To trust my intuition.

This lesson was clarified when reading Moshé Feldenkrais, the Ukrainian-Israeli physicist who developed the Feldenkrais Method, which teaches that "thought, feeling, perception and movement are closely interrelated and influence each other." Now, he explains that thinking is not speaking: that is, thinking often cannot be verbalised.

Have you ever been angry, and your partner says, "Why are you angry?" You have the limpest answer: you sulk ", I don't know, I just am". Maybe you apologise, but the reasons for your disillusionment are unreachable to your somewhat thick 'rational' brain, almost as if another (non-verbal) brain is working away.

I have often been in that situation, lost for words and quite stuck. Am I especially dim and out of touch?

Well, Feldenkrais says it's challenging to express our thoughts because thinking is non-verbal, and hence most of it can never be expressed. Similarly, my most incredible moments of clarity arise when I'm cycling or running and firmly not 'thinking' in a traditional sense; I'm distracted, and — as if zapped by lightning — an insight lands inside me. Some thank the Muse for these enlightened moments (and this ‘Muse’ idea may be helpful), but instead, I think we do a lot of non-verbal thinking in our subconscious, which is hidden from us. We can sometimes tap into it; sometimes it's joyous energy, and at other times it arises as a miserable knot in our chest or as a headache, but the point is that thinking is not speaking; it can't all be verbalised and shouldn't be treated like it can be.

Our intuition is often shrieking at us, trying to explain something. I said above that I had been out for dinner a lot in the last year. I frequently go into a restaurant, and intuitively, I sense the vibe is all wrong. I leave. A couple of times, this happens after I have ordered. Why? I can't say, but I intuitively know something is wrong. Maybe there is no soap at the sink used by the kitchen staff, or I smell a rat, or a cockroach climbs over my shoe, and I don't consciously notice. It also occurs in hotels and people's homes I stay with. It may be a silly example of intuition, though it explains why my time in India was so dietarily safe, even though I ate in the cheapest places imaginable.

This line of reasoning has some meaningful implications:

Firstly, if something feels right, then trust that feeling. We all have things in our lives today that we could commit to because they seem inexpressibly 'right'. Why 'right'? You might not be able to say, and that's okay. Put logic in the bin! A friend of mine is flying to Columbia as I type against the wisdom of her parents, but intuitively, it feels like the right thing, so she must do it! If there is no reasonable explanation, then that's fine. It just can't be verbalised. Do it anyway.

Similarly, it's worth giving space and investigating if something feels intuitively wrong.

On the negative, it may require more intellectual hard work in order to fish out the reasons for the discontent, especially if it comes from some conditioning, or if it's work-related, it requires some writing (writing is helpful: I only understand what I intuitively felt about intuition now I'm writing to you about it).

So, if I'm intuiting anything that I can verbalise to you today, it's to go ahead and trust yourself. In 2025, trust the intuitive voice screaming away inside.

Even if you can't quite explain how you feel, the fact that you feel something is not a biological mistake; you've unknowingly thought deeply about it! You're probably on to something.

Have an amazing year.

Su su!