There is a kind of knowing that arrives long before the explanation does.
You feel it in the particular discomfort that precedes understanding — that subtle tightening in the chest, the shift in your breathing, the sense that something is off before you can articulate why. You feel it in the pull toward a person or a place or a direction that makes no immediate logical sense. You feel it in the resistance to something that looks perfectly reasonable from the outside but that your body refuses to settle into, no matter how convincingly your mind tries to negotiate with it.
Most of us have been taught to distrust this kind of knowing. In the culture many of us grew up in, knowing without evidence is treated as suspect. Logic is the gold standard. Proof is what counts. The feeling that arrives before the explanation is dismissed as a lucky guess at best — and at worst, as something unreliable, indulgent, or even dangerous.
But I’ve come to believe that this dismissal is one of the costliest mistakes we make.
And June — with its long, slow evenings and its invitation to soften, to pay attention, to feel the world with more of the body and less of the mind — seems like the right month to say so plainly.
The Moments When Logic Failed and Instinct Was Right
Think of a time when you overrode a feeling in favour of a reason.
Perhaps it was a relationship you stayed in long after the quiet truth had begun to whisper that something wasn’t right. Nothing was dramatically wrong, you told yourself. Things were fine. And the discomfort you felt was probably your own flaw — your difficulty with commitment, your tendency to overthink, your fear of hurting someone. You had a tidy list of reasons why the feeling was not to be trusted.
Or a job you took because the salary was good and the opportunities were clear and it was, by every external measure, exactly the kind of role you had been working toward. Except that something in you — from the first week — was quietly asking to leave. You called it nerves. Then adjustment. Then the thing you simply had to get used to.
Or a decision you made because it was the sensible one, the expected one, the one that would require the least explanation to the people around you — and which has sat inside you ever since with the particular heaviness of a choice that was never truly yours.
The feeling was right. You knew before you could explain.
And the explanation you eventually reached — after the cost, after the confusion, after the slow accumulation of evidence — led you to the same truth the feeling had offered at the beginning.
Why the Body Recognises Truth First
The body is an extraordinarily sophisticated instrument.
It is processing data continuously — data gathered over a lifetime. Every experience of safety or danger. Every environment that nourished or depleted you. Every relationship that felt fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Every moment of alignment or misalignment between the life you were living and the life you quietly longed for.
This data lives in the body. It is not lost. It is not forgotten. It is simply stored in a language older than thought.
The body processes this information beneath conscious awareness and produces outputs we call feelings: discomfort, ease, contraction, openness, the subtle shift in breath or posture that arrives before the mind has finished its analysis.
When we dismiss these outputs as irrational, we are not being rigorous. We are discarding data.
We are telling a highly calibrated system that its readings are unreliable simply because we cannot immediately trace their source.
But the source is everything you have ever known.
The feeling is the body’s summary of that knowledge. It deserves at least as much attention as the logic that follows it.
The Childhood Instincts We Were Taught to Override
Children are astonishingly good at this.
They know when a person feels safe and when they do not. They know when a room has a strange quality to it. They know when something is wrong in a house that looks perfectly fine.
They feel their way through the world with a directness adults often find either charming or inconvenient. And then we teach them out of it.
We teach them to override the feeling in favour of the social expectation. To be polite when their body says retreat. To be grateful when something feels wrong. To trust the adult’s explanation more than their own sensing.
We mean well. We are teaching them how to function in the world. But somewhere in the teaching, many of us lose access to the signal itself.
June is a good month to reclaim it. To offer yourself the trust you once extended to your own sensing before you learned not to.
Softness as Intelligence
The distrust of intuition is, in many ways, a distrust of softness. Of non‑linear knowing. Of the kind of intelligence that arrives through presence rather than analysis. Of the willingness to feel what is actually there rather than what the situation demands you feel.
But softness is not the opposite of intelligence. In many situations, it is a more advanced form of it. Softness incorporates information that purely analytical thinking misses. It responds to the full complexity of a human situation rather than its measurable surface.
Eli, walking through the fog on the moor, discovered this. The panic — the insistence on certainty — lost him the path entirely. The softness — the willingness to slow down and feel — revealed the path beneath his feet.
Softness is not always comfortable. It requires a tolerance for not‑yet‑knowing that feels like uncertainty until you trust it. Then it begins to feel like a different kind of navigation entirely — less effortful, more accurate, more aligned with the truth of where you actually are.
Not every truth arrives as certainty. Some arrive as a quiet pull — and those deserve your trust at least as much as any argument.
A Reader Exercise
Before you move on, I want to invite you to sit with two questions. Not to answer them quickly. Not to force clarity. Just to carry them gently for a day or two and see what rises.
What truth do you already suspect? Not the truth you can prove. Not the one you’ve reasoned your way toward. The one your body has been signalling while your mind has been managing.
And: what would happen if you trusted it gently? Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just gently. Just enough to stop dismissing it. Just enough to let it be present.
The feeling has been waiting. This month is as good a time as any to let it be heard.
With warmth, Joanne
If this month’s theme resonates with you, I’ve put everything together into a 100-page companion — essays, stories, practices and journal pages — that you can find right here.
https://jomohitch.gumroad.com/l/JuneCompanion
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