We are living in the age of AI, and this unprecedented technology is amplifying the volume of inputs faster than any nervous system was designed to absorb. In the absence of a clear internal signal, it is making us overwhelmed, reactive, and susceptible to the noise it generates alongside the signal it surfaces. In my Intuitive Intelligence in the Age of AI workshop this past weekend, I brought leaders in AI together around a question that I believe is one of the most important of this moment: How do we stay connected to the signal of our own innate wisdom as cognitive tools expand exponentially around us?

I spent a decade at Harvard studying how culture shapes what we believe, how we get conditioned by our families, institutions, and society. The work I do now as a coach, healer, and intuitive is helping people come back to the signal of their innate wisdom beneath that conditioning. Intuition is mystical, but it is not mysterious. It is a perceptual system, trainable and precise, that surfaces information the analytical mind cannot reach on its own, and it is exactly the capacity that becomes even more valuable as AI expands.

While the analytical mind is deeply valuable, in our society it is overemphasized, and the work of connecting to our intuition is about counterbalancing it with a deeper innate wisdom. The clearer your internal signal, the better your questions to AI and the more discerningly you evaluate what comes back. The question is not about intuition versus AI, but about what it takes to remain fully intelligent in an era of exponentially expanding cognitive tools, and we are at a collective choice point about which capacities we choose to develop.

The Science of Intuition

We opened the day by with grounding in the research on intuition. I discussed Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s classic dual-process theory, which is often misread as an argument against intuition. What they actually showed is that valid intuition is distinct from System 1 noise like bias and reactivity, and that the best decisions integrate both systems. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis shows us that the body flags relevant information before the conscious mind catches up, and that patients with damaged emotional processing became worse decision-makers despite intact analytical faculties.

My favorite research is Lisa Miller on the awakened brain and the two modes of awareness, achieving (”how do I get what I want?”) and awakened (”what is life showing me now?”). In a 2014 study in JAMA Psychiatry, Miller and her colleagues found that 71% of this capacity depends on practice rather than genetics, which means it is trainable. Most leaders run on achieving awareness almost exclusively, and an antidote, the entire day was designed as practice in living in a mode of awakened awareness.

Mapping Intuitive Channels

We then moved into mapping our intuitive channels, the specific ways our system receives information below the threshold of conscious reasoning, whether through the body, inner vision, direct knowing, or the felt sense of energy. Everyone has access to all channels, but most of us have a primary and secondary one. When you think about the significant decisions you have made, like whom to marry, which city to move to, which job to take, most of those were made from an intuitive place, and when we are truly aligned with our intuition, the mind becomes a tool of discernment rather than our default.

We guided participants into a memory of a past decision where they made a choice based on their intuition, and mapped how they received that wisdom to the five channels so they could sense where their signal comes through most clearly. We then moved into a guided inquiry where each person held a real challenge and dropped into their primary channel to receive whatever arose. As one participant reflected afterward, the information is always there, the question is whether we are open to it.

Collective Intuitive Intelligence

In the afternoon, we turned to each other, and practiced building a collective resonance field. We live in a deeply individualized culture and forget that we are embedded in collective ways of knowing. In many traditions, indigenous, contemplative, and ancestral, consciousness is understood as something inherent to reality itself, not just to individuals, and when we are confined to the analytical mind we are in a very tiny sliver of what could be known.

Woolley’s 2010 study in Science found that what predicted collective intelligence was not individual IQ but social sensitivity. Hasson’s lab at Princeton found that when genuine communication is present, neural activity across individuals literally synchronizes. This group had been building coherence all morning, and what became available in the room that afternoon was more than the sum of their individual knowings.

Three people volunteered to bring their challenge to the group in a “care seat”, and we practiced holding a collective channel. The skill here is learning to tune into someone’s energy field, remaining present to their system, and allowing images, sensations, and information to come through. The field functions as a collective sacred mirror, and participants were able to receive insight into their challenges beyond what their own individual channel would have received.

One participant described it as intense to receive guidance from “a whole group of people, just like a string of pearls coming together.” Another reflected that each perception she received felt like “a whole body of literature underneath it.” One participant who had attended Quaker gatherings said it reminded him of waiting worship except far more intense and multimodal. Another put it most directly: “I feel like I can bring my full self here, and I’m like, oh, maybe this is a collective problem-solving exercise. Why are we doing this individually right now?”

What the Day Revealed

We discovered together that fear and intuition feel similar in the body but move differently: fear loops, accelerates, and carries urgency, while genuine knowing arrives quietly, and stays steady when you sit with it. One participant described this as distinguishing between “the intuition that is coming through me from a higher being, showing up somatically in my body, and programmed, fear-driven reaction on a cellular level.” Another arrived struggling to disambiguate between receptivity and passivity and after the day felt so much lighter, and that “this way of connecting into the collective resonance field was a new experience for me, so it was so special to have this human connection in a group container setting.”

Many people in the room are well versed in holding, giving, and carrying for others, and the field invited them to be held as well. One participant described the day as “a beautiful experience of the surrender and receiving of the collective field” and the discovery of how to discern “between when to let my energy out and when I need to bring the energy back into my center.” Another named the “palpability of fellowship”, the feeling that intuition had become more tangible through the group field, as though a spotlight had been shining on a capacity he had always had but never quite trusted.

We closed with a vocal soundbath for integration, and then held a question as an entire group: As AI becomes more dominant, what is intuition being called to do? One participant observed that this moment in human history, with a new form of intelligence coming awake, may be as significant as the Axial Age or the Enlightenment, and that we are at a collective choice point about whether we to treat cognitive processing as the only legitimate form of intelligence or whether to develop sensitivity, empathy, relational attunement, and the felt intelligence that emerges when human beings are genuinely present with each other.

Intuitive Intelligence Practice

Golden Light Channel

We are ultimately light and energy, and this practice is a way of coming home to your central channel. It is a version of the meditation we returned to throughout the day, and works by bringing you into the still point. It takes ten minutes.

• Place both hands on your heart. Close your eyes. Three slow breaths. Come into stillness, that place where there is no space and time, the infinite still point of now. You are not looking for anything. You are just noticing what is already there.

• Begin to breathe into the golden orb of light at your chest center. Imagine you are a blazing sun of source energy. With each inhale, breathe in warmth and love. With each exhale, allow the light to expand slightly beyond your physical body, not forcing but allowing gentle, controlled growth.

• Let the golden light expand to fill your shoulders, your arms, the space around your torso. If the light contracts or dims, notice where there is blankness, resistance, or fog. These are not obstacles, but doorways.

• As the light expands to fill your entire energetic field, notice your connection downward into the earth and upward into the cosmos. You are not only expanding outward but grounding and reaching simultaneously.

• Once your field feels expanded and steady, return to your primary intuitive channel. Body: notice your gut or chest. Vision: soften your inner gaze. Hearing: listen inward. Knowing: open and receive. Energy: notice what you are drawn toward or repelled by.

• Sit in this open, expanded state for a few minutes. Do not force anything. This is the state from which intuitive intelligence becomes accessible. The more often you practice entering it, the more quickly you can return to it in the moments where it matters.

• When you are ready, bring the golden light gently back toward your body, letting it rest as a soft glow at your heart center. Set the intention to carry this expanded but peaceful presence into whatever comes next. Open your eyes.

Still Curious?

I will be offering more Intuitive Intelligence workshops, both online and in person in the Bay Area. If you want to be the first to know when registration opens, subscribe to this Substack. Thank you to Astrid Schanz-Garbassi for co-facilitating and to Anza Retreat for hosting us in the Berkeley Hills.

Nina Guilbeault, PhD is a coach, author, and intuitive helping people and organizations develop their Intuitive Intelligence.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited as the first guest on The Purpose Project podcast, a community founded by Carl Miller and Michaela Zuckova. We talked about intuition, fear, collective intelligence, and why the leaders who are most effective in this era are the ones developing capacities that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet. Carl and I met at a retreat around AI alignment and field coherence. Much of the conversation these days is about AI alignment, but what I work on is internal alignment, helping people come back to a coherence within themselves, which is becoming even more important in the age of AI.

Intuition as a Skill

One of the things I wanted to make clear in this conversation is that intuition is not something that just occasionally happens, that you cannot control, that is not systematic or scientific. It is a skill, it is innate, and it is something we have access to as children but then get trained out of in our lives. I talked about the five intuitive channels, body, vision, hearing, direct knowing, and energy, and how everyone has a primary channel through which their knowing arrives most clearly, and most people have never been taught to recognize which one is theirs.

When you think about the significant decisions you have made, who to marry, which city to move to, which job to take when you were not sure, most of those were not made with a spreadsheet. We are often making them from an intuitive place, and when we are truly aligned with our intuition, the mind becomes a tool of discernment rather than the primary driver.

Fear and Intuition

The most common question I receive is how to discern between intuition and fear, and we spent a good portion of the conversation on this topic. Fear typically has a somatic quality of activation, there is urgency, a sense that you have to make a decision right away, a lot of “if this then that” thinking, analysis paralysis, spiraling. Intuition is that deep, quiet, still knowing that you simply cannot ignore.

Michaela raised the question of trust, and I talked about how trauma complicates this picture because trauma lives in the body just as intuition often does. For those of us who have trauma in our history, it takes time to discern the signal from the noise. Imagine we are a blazing sun of source energy, and trauma is the clouds that obscure that light. It might seem like a cloudy day, but it has always been very sunny underneath. The work is clearing the clouds, not adding light, and it takes time, but the more we come back to the truth of our nature, which is inherent wholeness, the more we can trust.

The Still Point

Carl asked me about where intuition comes from, and I described what I think of as the still point, the place where there is no past or future, where we are simply suspended in the infinite now. Intuition comes from an awareness of wisdom that is beyond material reality, and in this material reality we live primarily from the conscious analytical mind. Our intuition is the way we access knowledge that is beyond our conscious awareness. It lives in stillness, and when we slow down enough to come into that stillness, the signal becomes available.

I also talked about sacred mirrors, people you truly trust who can reflect your knowing back to you, because even though my own intuition is deeply developed, there are times I reach out to trusted friends precisely because around a particular topic I do not fully trust my own channel fully. When we are emotionally charged about something, we can unconsciously bias our own sense of what our intuition is telling us, and having people who can hold that mirror for you is essential.

Purpose and Intuition

The conversation naturally arrived at the relationship between intuition and purpose, and I shared my own story. Leaving academia was the first moment I truly listened to my intuition, despite my advisors, despite everyone telling me to go down the professor path. I always knew I would be a teacher, that was deep intuitive wisdom, but I knew I was not supposed to be an academic.

What followed was a long and difficult process, a true dark night of the soul searching for how I was meant to be in service. After five years, I can finally say it feels deeply clear: I was meant to learn how we get conditioned, and now I am meant to help people uncondition. What I call intuitive intelligence is innate to all of us. It does not exist outside of us, but lives deeply within us. Everything I offer is just a way of coming home to the deepest wisdom with us.

Still Curious?

Learn more about The Purpose Project, which is dedicated to exploring what brings people alive, what drives them forward, and what the messiness and joy of purpose looks like in practice.

Nina Guilbeault, PhD is a coach, author, and intuitive helping people and organizations develop their Intuitive Intelligence.