The Somatics of Intuition

Understand common biases against recognizing the centrality of intuition within teaching and clinical practices and how the lens of interpersonal neurobiology helps to resolve them.
Contrast two main systems of information learning and memory within the human mind/brain/body: unconscious intuition versus conscious deliberation.
Identify seven emotion/motivational circuits common to all mammals in order to highlight the SEEKING, PLAY, and CARE circuits critical to the operation of intuition.
Examine the importance of spontaneity and a playful attitude for empathic and attuned responses, whether in the role of teacher or clinician.
Learn to identify embodied metaphors at the heart of healing interventions.
Describe the various subtypes of intuition helping to identify the unique blend that characterizes each participant’s own style.
Analyze when intuition is appropriate and useful and when it is not, including warning signs that commonly lead practitioners astray.

We explore the nature of intuition and biases against its formal recognition as a critical ingredient of therapeutic and teaching relationships. Major features of intuition are identified: sudden recognition; emergent awareness; holistic, integrative sensibilities; immediate knowledge; and nonverbal insight. We examine the primacy of the body within action-perception cycles as foundational to the neurobiology of flashes, hunches, and gut feelings. We identify two internal systems of information processing. Intuition has unconscious origins and bottom-up processing, while deliberation has conscious origins and top-down processing. Within daily life, the challenges of parenting or help-giving roles, both capacities are necessary, as we shuttle back and forth between them.

This module highlights the importance of an evolutionary perspective and developmental eye when considering the multifaceted role of intuition within humans among other animals. We explore the three layers of the brain: reptilian, mammalian, and neocortical. We contrast the closed neural circuitry of reptiles with the open neural circuitry of mammals. We explore the seven emotional/motivational circuits all mammals share in common, and highlight the importance of the SEEKING, CARE & PLAY circuits to intuitive processes. We home in on evolutionary changes within the hippocampus, our brain’s source of memory and learning. While its primary role is navigation through physical spaces within rats and other mammals, within humans it enables navigation through social spaces. We examine how free play during childhood may be a critical ingredient to become grounded and oriented in adulthood in order to move through the world from an ‘inside out’ feel.

Given that the PLAY circuit enjoys a central role within the human brains’ open wiring, this module examines how play implicitly underlies attuned response in parenting, friendships, teaching roles, and help-giving inside all fields. Within open-ended, growth-oriented psychotherapy, we explore the importance of embodied metaphors at the heart of psychological issues. We examine the role of creativity within therapist and patient alike, and how core metaphors—whether emerging from therapist or client— often illustrate the problem as well as the solution simultaneously. We explore yoga as a source of embodied metaphors offering key concepts for growth and healing applicable to all clinicians, whether somatically oriented or not. We explore important features of the creative practitioner, including authenticity, spontaneity, and full presence.

This module outlines varieties of intuition. We highlight more ordinary, everyday, and local forms that depend upon the physical, embodied presence of another person in contrast with intuition’s more extraordinary, rare, and ‘nonlocal’ forms that operate across vast expanses of time or space. Participants identify their own unique style and combination of registering flashes, hunches and gut feelings. We will share our own clinical war stories about moments of ordinary and extraordinary knowing. We contrast the benefits of intuition with its dangers, identifying warning signs of intuition’s misuse and common abuses. We conclude the course by identifying wisdom as the full flower of intuition within a fully integrated and balanced life that enjoys the privilege of coming to full fruition with maturity.

Beginning in infancy, each baby develops a rhythm of engagement (alert interest in the physical and social environment) and disengagement (rest and recovery needed). Attuned caretakers follow babies’ leads to establish attachment patterns that persist throughout life. This seminar explores developmental origins of intuitive styles—whether we ‘lean in’ or ‘lean out’—that unconsciously color every social interaction. We examine roots of attachment styles within early proto-conversation and other forms of childhood play. By learning to identify our own leanings, including their advantages and pitfalls, we can use conscious intentions to modulate what normally flies under the radar.

The true nature of our mind is brilliant, clear, and joyful. But we don't experience this reality amid the swirl of stresses, thoughts, and emotions of day-to-day life. This talk will offer practical suggestions on uncovering our naturally comfortable state of mind and reconnecting with the unconditional happiness that is already within us. Using straightforward, accessible language, Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche discusses the path of Pristine Mind meditation, a practice from the profound teachings known as Dzogchen. This path is a realistic, natural process that can be practiced and experienced by anyone.

Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute and at California Institute for Integral Studies, and a Core Faculty member of the Insight Center, Los Angeles. Dr. Marks-Tarlow has authored and co-edited numerous books, including The Eel & the Blowfish: A Graphic Novel of Dreams, Trauma & Healing (2022, IPBooks), Mythic Imagination Today (2020, Brill), A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology (2020, Cambridge Scholars), Play and Creativity in Psychotherapy (2018, Norton), Truly Mindful Coloring (2016, PESI), Awakening Clinical Intuition (2014, Norton), and Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy (2012, Norton), and Psyche’s Veil (2008, Routledge), all of which she has illustrated herself. Dr. Marks-Tarlow has presented workshops and seminars internationally and nationally, including a 2012 conference at the Tavistock Institute in London relating to her second book, Psyches Veil, on nonlinear dynamics, and the 2015 UCLA Interpersonal Neurobiology Conference. She was awarded by the Los Angeles County Psychology Association their highest honor: Distinguished Service to the Field of Psychology. Her book, Awakening Clinical Intuition, also recently received the Gradiva Nomination for Best Book.

The Somatics of Intuition

Flashes, Hunches, and Gut Feelings in Mind, Body, and Brain