The Night I Stopped Trusting My Intuition — And What It Took to Come Back

There was a season — a long, quiet, humiliating one — when I stopped trusting myself entirely. Not dramatically. Nobody would have known from the outside. I still showed up, still held space, still moved through my days with what looked like steadiness. But internally, every time a piece of knowing arrived — that flash of recognition, that cellular certainty — I second-guessed it into dust.

I have a Cancer Ascendant. My rising sign is the threshold of my entire chart — the way I meet the world, the antenna through which everything enters. Cancer Rising means I feel everything at the door before it has even crossed the threshold. Before the mind has a name for it, the body has already registered the full energetic signature of whatever is approaching.

For most of my life, I experienced this as sensitivity I did not quite know what to do with. In a season of significant confusion and rupture, I experienced it as a liability. Because when your nervous system is dysregulated, everything comes in at the same volume — the fear and the genuine knowing, arriving together, indistinguishable.

The Problem With How We Talk About Intuition

Most conversations around intuition in spiritual spaces treat it as this pristine, always-reliable signal. Get quiet enough. Clear your channel. Trust. But nobody talks about what happens in a nervous system that has experienced repeated rupture. Nobody talks about how the body that learned that trusting the wrong person has consequences begins to experience fear and intuition on exactly the same frequency.

In somatic healing, this is one of the most important distinctions we work with: the difference between a genuine intuitive signal from the body's deep knowing, and a fear response from a nervous system that has learned to pattern-match for danger. Both feel like knowing. Both arrive quickly, with certainty. One is guidance. One is protection.

When you cannot tell the difference, you stop trusting either.

What My North Node Was Asking Me to Do Anyway

My North Node sits in Gemini in my 12th house. The 12th house is the house of what lies beyond the veil — the liminal, the mystical, the channel that receives what cannot be proven. My soul's evolutionary direction, by the most fundamental map I carry, is toward trusting exactly that. The knowing that arrives sideways. The information that comes from beyond the ordinary bandwidth of lived experience.

And here I was, in a season of profound confusion, unable to land in any inner knowing at all. When I finally sat with this placement through the lens of somatic healing — not just intellectually, but bringing the body into the conversation — I understood something that shifted everything: this was not my intuition failing me. This was my North Node curriculum. The thing I came here to develop being tested at its very root.

The question was never whether my intuition was real. The question was whether I could build enough nervous system regulation to actually hear it.

The Practice That Brought Me Back

The work was not about becoming more psychic or clearing my channel more thoroughly. It was about building enough somatic regulation that I could feel — in the body — the actual difference between contraction and expansion. Between a fear response and genuine knowing.

Fear arrives as contraction. A tightening. A bracing. Genuine intuition — for me, and for many of the women I work with in somatic healing — arrives as expansion. As a softening. As something that opens in the chest rather than closes it. But you cannot feel that distinction when your baseline is chronic tension. You cannot hear the difference between signals when the nervous system is running at full volume.

My Cancer Rising had always been receiving accurate information. My 12th house North Node had always held the channel. What was missing was not the gift. It was the regulated nervous system that could finally receive what had always been there.

If You Have Been Doubting What Your Body Knows

If you are ready to see your own chart through this lens — not just the placements, but what your body has been carrying in response to them — a Soul Map Reading may be exactly what this season is calling for. It is a 1:1 session where we bring your natal chart and your somatic wisdom into the same conversation for the first time. I would be honored to hold that space with you. You are warmly invited to explore it at carriesymes.com whenever it feels right.

Blessings of Love & Light,

Carrie Symes

Celestara · carriesymes.com