Someone asked me recently, "What IS intuition?" What I said at the time, while first allowing that we don’t really know what intuition is – we can only speculate, is that it is a kind of inner knowing that by-passes our thinking process. It is a teaching from within. In-tuition.

Later I looked up the word "intuition" in my etymological dictionary – the history of the origin and changing meaning of words. This hefty book is one of my favorite sources of wisdom. To my delight, I found that the meaning of "intuition" lies in the origin of "tuition," which carries the sense of "protection, custody, looking after, taking care of." The word didn’t take on the meaning of teaching or instruction or teaching until the mid-1800′s.

So my answer now to the question, "What is intuition?" would be this: It is our inner knowing about how to honor our own truth and take care of ourselves

I believe that we are embodied intuition.

On the other hand, I notice that people tend to believe that intuition comes from "out there somewhere." We think of it as an external presence speaking to us: God, angels, a channeled source, our "Higher Self," a guide.

I do support the possibility of gaining wisdom and other perspectives from other realms of beingness. But I think that we have an innate wisdom within our own embodied spiritual presence. We are like lighthouses, showing ourselves the way. But we block our knowing with beliefs and critical judgments carried into our lives from the emotional inheritance of our ancestors.