Ep121: Intuition as the Ingredient to Professional Success

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What if the secret ingredient to your professional success isn't a harder skill, but a softer one? 

In today’s conversation, Aimee welcomes Jenn Cohen, an intuitive consultant and former entertainment industry executive, to explore how your intuition is not just a tool for personal growth but the ultimate guide for navigating your career, leadership, and creative work. 

If you're ready to stop talking to walls and start flowing with your purpose, this episode is for you.

Jenn takes us through:

• Why intuition is your first sense, not your sixth

• How physical pain can be a signal of being out of alignment at work

• The difference between intention (felt in the body) and goals (held by the ego)

• Why resistance and "procrastination" might be your body telling you it's not time yet

• How a leader's nervous system directly impacts the entire team

• And so much more!

Guest Bio:

Jenn Cohen has always been captivated by the power of intuition. After a life-changing experience in her 20s, she explored how intuition could shape her life and career. During her 27 years in the entertainment industry, Jenn found that intuitive decisions often led to success. Now an intuitive consultant, she helps individuals and organizations unlock potential, gain clarity, and achieve their goals through practical, intuition-based strategies. Jenn’s work fosters growth, creativity, and purpose in both personal and professional realms.

Connect with Jenn Cohen: 

Website: https://www.jenncohenintuitive.com/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenn-cohen-intuitive-consultant/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenncohenintuitive 

Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

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A: Hey there listener, maybe you have been hearing about increasing your intuition or maybe relationships or for personal happiness, but how could your intuition actually be the secret ingredient in your success as an entrepreneur or even as someone who works for a corporation or with a department of people? 

Today, I have Jenn Cohen, who is an intuitive consultant and channel, and we are going to explore not only how your intuition can help you grow as a human being, but how it can help you really be able to make a difference in the field of your work, of your study, of your passion in life. So stay tuned to learn more about your body as a tuning fork. 

A: Every day there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love. 

A: Hi Jenn, it's so nice to finally meet you. 

J: Hi, so nice to meet you, and thanks for having me on. 

A: My pleasure. I'm very excited for this conversation. I feel like what you're bringing forward when you talk about intuition is something that I think a lot of people in the past, maybe in like a previous paradigm that we're moving out of, have discounted this as not that valuable, not that important part of our system or part of our awareness, that there's other things like business acumen or certain kinds of certifications or accolades that give somebody real power. 

What I love is that you're kind of turning it around and saying, hey, this part of your nervous system, this part of your awareness is essential in maybe not even just like success, but feeling that sense of connection and satisfaction in your success. So I would love to hear just as a first baseline question, why is someone's intuition an important thing when they're working in the industry or in a corporation? 

J: Yeah, I love how you set that up because so much of my time in the industry, and I was in the entertainment industry for 27 years was really based on hard skills. 

And that was the focus for the corporations. Here's the hard skills. Here's all of the trainings around the hard skills. Towards the end, it started to get the language of soft skills and I applaud them for knowing the language but the curriculum wasn't quite there yet. It was still really based in hard skills and trying to translate them into kind of this new buzzy word. 

And now in this new age that we're entering and we see the patriarchal kind of more masculine way crumbling and the soft skills, the more feminine just by definition skills are succeeding. And that's what people are gravitating towards. And our intuition, I like to think of it as our first sense rather than our sixth sense. And in that very patriarchal time that we have lived through, it was scary for a lot of leaders. 

And it wasn't accepted and so it was demonized and it was looked at as a weakness and it was criticized. And when we are in our body and when we turn back to our self, there's nothing truer and there's no, as you said, more powerful tuning fork that guides us in the direction that we soulfully want to go. 

A: Beautifully said, yes, right? Because it's not just about whether we get there on time. It's about how do we show up once we're there? How does it feel to be in that moment? Does it feel correct or does it feel like, I don't know how I got here, but I feel like I'm in the wrong place? 

J: Exactly, exactly. And that can change from our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. It changes. Thank goodness it changes. How boring would it be to never change in our life? And our bodies change as well. And rather than criticizing the way that our bodies are changing, our intuitive self allows us to grow together and understand in this communication that is so beautifully unique to us, the way in which it desires to move and the way in which it desires to show up and the way in which it desires to express itself. And it is a loving relationship between your intuition and your body. 

A: Beautifully said, there is that tendency to want to freeze ourselves at a specific time or a specific appearance or a specific relationship moment in our lives. We experience some kind of success and we just want to freeze ourselves there. 

Someone tells us we're beautiful in that color and we just want to freeze there. But what you're speaking to and what I think you're drawing a through line to our intuition is that it is the nature of things to shift from moment to moment, however subtly. And when we refuse to kind of ride that wave of the shifting and the changing, we struggle more. We suffer more. We miss out on those moment to moment signals that could actually be a vehicle for our next wow moment. 

J: That's it. An intuition can only live in the present moment. Yeah, beautiful. Once you're in the future and you're worrying or in the past and ruminating, you've lost that intuitive presence and ability. And your intuition has no reason to keep you protected. It's not here for smallness. It's here for greatness. And so there's an appreciation when you get that compliment or something that makes you feel lit up and again, living in that moment or the promotion or that job that you have been manifesting. 

And there's an appreciation in there. And when you can allow your body to appreciate fully, and that's something that takes presence. And our intuition is guiding us to remember that connection with our body. And our body is guiding us to tune in to our intuition. So it's this beautiful partnership where you can't have one without the other. And when we're able to do that, it will not feel like a jolt when you're ready to move on or when you're ready for that change to experience. It's more of a flow. 

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A: I know just what you're talking about. I love this. What do you think blocks people, what are some of the most common blocks that people have that prevent them from being able to sense and feel, as you said, this first sense, this very fundamental sense that we have? 

J: Yeah, fear. Oh, I've got a pain in my left shoulder. I'm just going to ignore that until it goes away. I don't want to go to the doctor because, God, what could it be? And then I'm not going to be able to do X, Y and Z. A lot of times what our intuition then when we start to, and I'm going to meditate on this, let me just think about this. Let me open myself up, which is getting your body into a place that it can receive this information. It's not our job to hunt down our intuition. It's our responsibility to put ourselves in a place to hear it. 

A: Oh, yeah. That's so true because people, it's something that's actually there all the time, just like your body is there all the time. It's about whether or not you're allowing that information, as you said, to be received to come through. And so you're speaking to fear as being a major blocker for that. 

Exactly. And then is it when someone starts to embark on this, basically unveiling of themselves to themselves, how much fear comes up for people in that process? Is there a releasing of fear that has to occur? What does it look like for people to be with that fear when it's showing up and in the way? Sure. 

J: It's such a good question because once you're able to identify what that fear is, you're able to bring it out in front of you. I always like to use the metaphor of a movie screen. And I'm sitting in the audience and I can put that fear on that movie screen so I have some distance from it. And it's like I'm watching the movie and I'm seeing the fear play out and then I can kind of look at it and say, oh, that's actually a fiction. 

That's not something that has real validity in my life right now. And so again, it's kind of taking it from the body, projecting it out, being able to neutrally almost without biases and prejudice, look at it and say, okay, I understand why I'd be fearful of that, but it's a pretty big stretch for that to happen. And the stories that we're telling ourselves when we can extricate those and put those in a place where we can really start to see them rather than feel them, witness, thank you, they start to lose their power over us. 

A: And can you give us an example from your own life? I know you were in the entertainment industry for a long time and as you started to realize that your intuition was calling to you and you started answering that call, I'm sure that there was some trials of slow fade out of the old paradigm. 

J: So yeah, I'm curious about that. Sure, there's so many, but one that's popping into my head right now is towards the end of my career, the entertainment industry, and it still is going through this, but there's a lot of acquisitions, it's the streaming was taking over traditional ways of watching on cable, and the film industry, I mean, completely upturned. 

And I remember there was so much fear because people's jobs were getting lost and all of the things that we've been taught to fear. And I was trying to push forward with creating some programs and just kind of moving forward in a creative way, I'll say it that way. And when I would speak with my boss and my peers at the time, I would get such resistance. And I remember saying it's like talking to a wall, talking to these people's like talking to a wall. 

And when I say this, it was a good two, three years that I was saying this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It sounds really frustrating. 

Very frustrating. And my body would take the stress on I would see weight gain, I would see inflammation, I would be exhausted, irritated, agitated anxiety, all the things. And this is a good thing about intuition as well. Sometimes it comes on boom, right there. But sometimes it's a slow burn because your body might not be ready for it. You know, you don't want to jolt. That's not what it's here for. That's not what it's doing. 

Again, if it's dire situations, you might get that hit. And again, thank you. And I was in meditation one day and it was probably again, two, three years where I would be saying this. And I would hear myself say these things. And I had this image of myself and she came around and she looked me dead in the eye and she said, it's like talking to a wall. And I was like, oh, man, this is me. This is me. And this is my choice. And this is this is the environment that I have grown up in essentially. And now my body is telling me my intuition is telling me it's time to move forward for me. It's time to get out of this space that is so frustrating and irritating. 

Honestly, that was the word. I was so irritable that when I made the decision to leave and I remember calling up my HR representative and telling her, I'd like to leave. And the resistance that I got from her, had I done that two, three years before, my body would have sensed up, you know, seized up and I would have been like, oh, maybe I shouldn't. 

This is exactly. But because I had gone through all of that growth. When she said that I got the biggest smile on my face because there was no doubt my body relaxed. It's almost like when you're telling the truth, you know, yeah, you don't have any adjuta, there's no bunchiness around that you're just telling the opposite. 

A: There's like a soothing your your shoulders drop and your body's like, Oh, thank goodness. 

J: Exactly. And that is how intuition feels. It's that knowing it's that absolute knowing and when in knowing there's there's no question attached to it. You know, knowledge doesn't operate in language, we give language to it. So our body is the language there. And oh my God, I got off the phone, I danced. I danced. 

And there was absolutely no second guessing. I had done that for two, three years. And it was the the most probably powerful decision I may I have made in my life. It set me free. 

A: I can hear that I can hear it in your share. And, you know, what I'm picking up on too is that, you know, that act of walking away from something that you had invested a lot of time and energy in that you had been but that had been really frustrating and had ultimately really not been your soul's calling or your destiny, right? That act was like freeing you from previous times in your life as well, where you hadn't been in alignment. So it really I can can feel that in that action. 

Yeah, that moment there was a lot that had built up. And what I also love about your story and about your share that you've alluded to a few times now, is that there really is like a really perfect timing that each one of us has in our body. And sometimes it can feel frustrating, because maybe on a psychological or emotional or spiritual level, like you're ready to be on with it and done with it already, I'm ready for the change, but your body's not really ready yet. And what I would love to hear you talk more about that, like what are some of those signs that our body is not quite ready to let go of this thing, this habit, this behavior that doesn't really feel fully aligned? 

J: Yeah. So recently, I was experiencing, I exercise quite a bit. And I was experiencing some pain in like my right side of my body. And again, I love the masculine feminine there. 

So the right side, which would be masculine. And I had a big presentation that was coming up, and I needed to sit down and do the pre and write out the presentation and just get to work on it. And the presentation was in my intentions, it was really where kind of my next leap was going to be. So I was doing a number on it in my head of like, oh, God, this is huge, this is big. 

A: I just got to say, because I'm a somatic educator, as you're telling the story, right side is the one that's moving, because you're revisiting that planning, right? And that's your left brain, which is analyzing. And so you're talking about an overactivity on your right side. 

J: Yes. Tell me more about it. Tell us the stories of the story. Yeah. And so the presentation was about a month away. And so I had started this in my self-flatulation. 

A: This is how I work. This is a very big pattern in my, in how I handle things, and move forward with things. And I'm a Gemini. I don't know if that... Very mental, right? 

J: Like, yeah. Very mental. Very mental. And so basically, this started coming on and what I would notice is any time that I would think about, oh, you know, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to start this presentation, I would decide I'm going to go on a walk or I'm going to get halfway through and the right side of me would be like flare up, you know, and I'd kind of push through and I was working with the trainer and, and, you know, we would like roll it out and, you know, like, like, but there was a gnawing at me that it was, it's, this isn't it. Like this is like, I kept saying to him, I don't understand when this came from. 

It literally came up overnight. I haven't done anything different. You know, all of the questions were coming back, negative, negative, negative. And then something happened in those in about two weeks in where I had an experience that was really going to add to my presentation. And I needed that experience to happen. And it was happening because my body was kind of telling me that, you know, it was struggling in a way. 

It was, yeah. And it wasn't until after that, then I was literally, sorry, this story, it gets a little muddy, but I'm trying to condense it as much as possible. But I was speaking with the trainer again. And again, the presentation was in a week now. And he asked me a question in a different way where it was just like, boom, like, this is it, I now need instead of the exercise, I need to sit down and I'm ready now because of this experience that happened in between to incorporate it into my presentation and go. And when I sat down and I wrote, it was, it was automatic. 

And I was done in half hour. I mean, you know, what I had had been conjuring up in my head. But again, I'm not saying that had I started the presentation before my body, you know, was letting me know that it wouldn't have been a good presentation. But the part of the presentation that my body really taught me, I incorporated it into that. 

And it was the meat of it. And so it was like my intuition was telling me through my body, but I wasn't quite ready at the very start to sit down and do that. So that's just a really fluid example of, you know, our intuition doesn't often get loud, but it does repeat itself. And so, you know, again, like, our body is always trying to give us these signals. And, you know, if we don't take them so literally, like, you know, okay, my leg hurts, you know, that's just because I did, you know, 20 squats yesterday or whatever. 

But, you know, that's more than anybody. But once we can tap into that pattern, and what our spirit really is trying to tell us, it's a whole new game. And it's so cool to have this built in function of something that so many of us take for granted every day. 

A: Oh, yeah. And there's so many pieces of this story that I just really, yeah, I really, I really love, like, that you're demonstrating in this story that even when we might call it something else, it can be our intuition. 

Like, we might call it that you were procrastinating and putting it off or distracting yourself by going on another run, you know, and even maybe in the moment before you had that kind of breakthrough experience, right, there could have been more some frustrations and agitations and fear, right, that's like coming up. That's what's wrong. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? How can I fix this versus an approach that would say, I don't totally know what's going on yet. 

I have, I'm not quite at the point where I can get my body to sit down and do this thing, but I trust that I will. And I think that, you know, trusting us, trusting ourselves, is a big part of trusting our intuition, right? Yes. Have that trust for ourselves because we have, like I said, so many other labels that I don't think are helpful. Yeah. Like, recently, I've kind of moved away from this term self-sabotage because I don't actually believe in it anymore. I don't think that we do that. 

I think that it may look like that from the outside. A lot of times, whatever it is that we're doing, our body needs that old patterning of something, right? That feels safe because we need to feel safe. 

And, you know, I don't know, chocolate chip cookies at 2am make us feel safe. Yeah. Yeah. It's not actually self-sabotage. It's just, you know, it's that safety that we need for a moment before we're kind of headed into our next layer of awakening or our next layer of growth. Because the other thing is that the contrast of how you feel after eating cookies at 2am will get you back in touch with what's really aligned for you, right? 

J: Oh, yes. That didn't feel good. Right. But instead of going that self-sabotage and like smacking our hand and going bad girl, what if we went, okay, I must have needed that. But I'm feeling right now that that's not really what I'm going to need in the future. 

I'm going to need self-in the future. Yes. Oh my God. You said that so beautifully. Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Absolutely. And it comes in those beautiful stages because when I got asked to do this presentation, it was an immediate yes. And my body was like, yeah. And then, you know, you go and you go into that next phase. And then it gets easier and easier and easier and it becomes, you know, like working out a muscle, you know, but yes, I love, I love how you describe that because after that, I had another opportunity and I was watching how clever my body was where it was like, okay, I'm going to just switch this out for that. And then, you know, again, it's different levels. And in the wiser, we can- The wiser choice. But yeah, beautifully put. Beautifully put. 

A: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's But it's that goal is to create. And as you said, you know, we've come from this paradigm where a lot of it's about competition, it's about hard skills, it's about like, you know, things are a means to an end versus something that's coming from an approach that says all steps along this journey and this process carry value. Yeah. Right. 

Even the ones that feel like a difficult, you know, struggling thing. Yeah. Don't make sense right now. Right. And so there isn't this same kind of like comparison or competitive tone to how we're interacting with our own bodies. Right. 

J: Right. And when we can become attuned to that and when those things pop up because they'll pop up all the time, and I'll go back to the corporate world, when I would walk into a room and have maybe a difficult conversation or experience something that was out of alignment with myself, feeling the constriction. And rather than saying now, what an a-hole that person was, it would be thank you because you were able to reflect to me a place that I need to really dive into. When I could do that, the system starts to speed up. And so, you know, when we're in that space of, you know, I know I should be farther along than I am. 

Why isn't this, you know, happening quicker? That's the opportunity to see, okay, this experience happened today and my body constricted, my stomach started hurting, you know, I got an instant headache. Whatever your symptom is, it's the opportunity to do that you turn back into yourself and say, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 

Why am I getting these clues and cues from my body? Okay, thank you, body. Okay, I'm going to remember this so that when I'm in a quiet place, I can really come in and if I'm feeling, you know, discomfort in my chest, I can actually talk to my chest later. And I can put my hand in my chest and just say, okay, like talk to me. Talk to me. 

And in those moments, when we're able to breathe into that and really tend to that body part that is aching for us to give it some attention, it will give us amazing information. 

A: Yeah. And so, when you're working with, you know, do you work one-on-one or do you work with groups? I'm so curious how you apply these things, right? Like if you're, say, you know, brought on as a consultant for a business and they're, you know, working with a team and they've got all these people, right? And they all have different issues, right? Like some of them are very stressed out. Some of them aren't as stressed out, but maybe, you know, everyone has like their own way that they're handling the group dynamic. 

You know, what are some of the things that you take people through so they can start checking in with themselves and not being so externally focused that they're forgetting about their body, their intuition and awareness. 

J: Yeah, exactly. So, depending on the group and depending on the openness, it all starts with kind of the leader and, you know, if you've got a really open leader, that's, you know, we'll be able to move through things a little bit quicker. If you don't, then that's still fine. 

It's really for the leader, probably at that point because that's where the energy is really culminating from. But let's just take more of an open business or department. We'll talk about breath. We'll talk about intention versus goals. And that intention will work through some practices, but intention when people that aren't really familiar with their intuitive sense, a lot of times we'll get like, well, I don't have intuition. Nope, we all have intuition. 

And so that's a beautiful first step of debunking. And you know, the coherence between the brain and the heart and what that feels like in the body. So that's, again, part of the breath work as well, just to get quickly into there so that they can see, oh, I'm feeling a little nervous about this, woo-woo, and what is this, and blah, blah, blah, and we quickly move past that. When we get to an intention, it's much more of, you know, a global kind of feel. 

And we can feel that in our bodies. And then when we go to goals, that's where the ego really starts to come in. And so we talk about the left side of the brain versus the right side of the brain, you know, the critical thinking and the ego mind. 

And again, ego is not bad. When it's in check, the cautiousness, the fear-based versus the creativity, the nonverbal, the expansive. And when we can really identify that, you know, people will start to say, oh, I get the intention. Okay, this is the intention. The goal here is different from my personal goals. And we'll talk about their personal goals. 

A: That is so important. That is so important that you're having people differentiate because I feel like especially in team settings, it can get real murky. People are not clear that what they're pushing about is actually about them. It's not about what's best for the project or best for the team. Exactly. 

J: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And also, I'll just speak from my experience. We were not trained. We were not prompted to do that. It was a very competitive situation. And that was rewarded. 

A: Right, right. Right. And push the hardest who can be the most persuasive. Yeah. Even if it is not the best thing for the group, it's just what this person thinks needs to happen, right? 

J: That's right. That's right. So that's why, you know, if you've got a leader that is open to, you know, not pitting people against each other and again, really for the benefit of the project of the department, it's amazing to watch, you know, the transformation and then the ripple effect to other departments. 

A: I love this. I'm going to draw parallel with some of the work that I do, you know, from time to time, I'll have people ask me if I work with children, you know, oh, my daughter, she's depressed or she's got bad posture or like something's going on, right? And I will say, oh yeah, I do work with children, but I also, you know, have to work with the parent, like, you know, depending on the parent, not always, you know, some parents are really, you know, connected and they are, you know, taking care of their nervous system and then some parents don't have those skills, you know, and a lot of the stress that their child is experiencing is actually because they're connecting to and aligning with their parents' stress and their parents' nervous system. 

So the leadership piece, right, about the leader is really co-regulating with everybody there. And so if they don't have that sense of connection and calm in themselves, the whole department is going to feel that and they may not even know, you know, because maybe the person is, you know, got really good intentions, they're a nice person, they're not like that, you know, typical shirk boss or something, but they're really out of alignment internally, right? And they're stressed and fearful. And that comes across to everybody. Absolutely. 

J: And I use this example because I have a puppy and I was just using this example with the corporation and I got a trainer for the puppy. And I'd like to say I got a trainer for me because the puppy, when I have that leash on that puppy, my energy is feeding through the leash to what the puppy is doing. And so if I'm holding that leash tight and there's tension on there, the puppy's like, what the heck is going on? There's a threat. There's something I've got to be on alert. 

And I don't even realize I'm just doing that because I want protection for the puppy. I feel like, oh no, you know, and there is that energetic leash that these leaders have with their teams. And so it's getting that looseness in our body. It's allowing and trusting and saying, if something does happen, I've got the leash and it's a quick correction. But I don't need to be in constant fear. Fight or flight, I don't need to be there for a 12-hour period of the day. I can allow my puppies to work and be. And if they need me, I'm here. 

So yeah, just so many beautiful metaphors that happen in our daily life that we can incorporate into our work because so many people bifurcate themselves and say, oh, I'm this person when I go to work and then when I come home, I'm this person. I'm like, really? How? How? How do you do that? I would love to know because I've got one body. You know, how does that work? 

A: That's the crux of compartmentalization is that we get fragmented. We split ourselves and then we wonder why we're not satisfied or feeling that sense of wholeness in our lives, because we're forcing fragmentation when there doesn't need to be. To go back to what you said about hard skills and soft skills, because I think that there are a lot of there's a lot of resources that these corporations and companies have. They literally have budgets for health and well-being for their employees because they've starting to more and more recognize that you need to have take care of people in order for their brilliance to show up, which then makes your business a top contender in the world. 

You need people to be nourished. And so there's more companies that have this intention. And I think that mindset and the hard skills around communication have gotten a lot of play. But I know from personal experience, someone can be saying all the right things. And if their energy and their intuitive skill is not on, it lands completely differently than someone who is maybe saying the right things. But again, that idea of intention, what's behind the good words and following the, what I mean, all the NLP things that they learned. Who are they being when they're saying those things? 

J: Oh my gosh. I mean, I'm laughing because I had towards the end just a really tough boss. I'm like, how nice am I going to be? A really challenging boss. And it wasn't just for me. 

I'll say that. Like it was, it was known. And the buzzword at the time was empathy. And he would come into these meetings and we all just need to be more empathetic. You know what that word means. But exactly to what you're saying. 

A: It's like, yeah. And that is a hard, that is a hard boss. That's like, you know, that's a pretty like heavy level. When they got the words, they got some of the concepts, but it's not actually embodied or even applied eternally. But then they know how to go around and correct everybody else on that. 

J: Exactly. Exactly. And this is a story I haven't told in a while, but I do love this one. Towards the end of my career, I would start to bring in crystals into my office. And I had selenite and I had a chunk of selenite and I would start to bring it in because this boss really my body, I had never experienced this before, but my body was revolting against this energy. 

And so I brought in this stick of selenite and I was holding it. We had Monday morning meetings at 8am every Monday. It's so fun. And I was holding it in my hand around this table and there's probably a good, you know, 30 people in the meeting, 25, 30 people in the meeting and he takes center stage and loves to speak for a good hour, hour and a half. And I was holding the selenite and I remember I wasn't gripping it too hard. I just had it in my, in the palm of my hand and it and all of a sudden I felt and I looked down and it had split into about four shards. And that was the moment where I'm like, okay, this energy is transmuting through my body and my body is so powerful that it is showing me right now what is happening in physical form. 

It is, it has just split this into perfectly parallel shards. I mean, talk about the power of your body being able to show you what your mind probably knows. Like I could say, you know, I could justify this and I could rationalize it and I could I could go back and forth and back and forth. This is why I'm not leaving. This is why this is just part of the industry. They've made movies about this. Everybody has this. The grass isn't always greener. 

All those sayings that have kept me in an industry for, and again, it was, I had a great career, but it was time to go. The body was like, okay, look, look. This is what's really going on. Yeah, yeah, and that is and that happened with a lot of things in my life. I could rationalize why my parents did certain things, but I hadn't processed it through my body. So it would keep showing up in different forms through my life. And so it is, it's the ultimate tuning fork and it's the most beautiful physical because we live in the physical world. It shows you and a lot of times that's how we begin to trust it more in our intuition is by our body showing us. 

A: Yes, I couldn't agree more. It's really amazing because on this podcast, I get to talk to people who work in all different kinds of fields of somatics and different modalities and it's my belief that it's not just going to be one technique or one thing that helps a person move forward and heal. It's usually going to be like a synthesis of different things that work for that specific person. And so you've already mentioned breathwork and I'm assuming you're doing guided meditation and those kind of things. What are some other tools that you think are really helpful for people to be connected to their intuition? 

J: I love this because it's so personal, but it's what you love to do and your body feels good when you're doing it. For me, it's being out in nature. For me, it's taking hikes and walks and being by the ocean. Like I instant, like even just saying it, my shoulders go down. For some people, it's taking a ride in a car with their windows down and singing at the top of their lungs. That's where again, you put yourself in the place to receive because you relaxed your body. For some people, it's cooking. For some people, it's gardening. For some people, it's music. That's what's so beautiful about our intuitive sense is that it's so simple, but simple things aren't always easy because we have been trained. The harder you push, the more you got to grind in order to succeed. And that really goes against what our body and our intuition are saying to us, taking a nap. 

Oh my god. I was exhausted, but I would take so many naps. I had to debunk that you're lazy. You took a nap today? Yeah, because my body needed it and my mind needed it and my intuition was downloading while I was dreaming. 

A: Yes. Yes. So that is, and it's fascinating because writing, journaling, reading even, but when I'm working with people, sometimes I don't know what I like to do. And I get that. Right, people say that. Yeah. I get that. Yeah. 

Well, and what do you, I mean, I have my own idea about the answer to that question, you know, but why might someone not have an idea of what they like? Yeah. 

J: I always like to say this unraveling of coming back to our body. You look at infants, you look at children, you know, they're so connected, you know, and it's their purest form, and then culture starts to dump. 

A: And yeah, and family culture are conditioning that has us, instead of having that first person experience, right, we're always looking at ourselves from the outside, having certain expectations of how we show up in the world for others, right? And then we lose that sense of like, what is it I even like doing? 

J: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Because if I do this, then this person's going to be pleased. And then I get rewarded rather than doing something because my body loves it, I love doing it, it makes me happy. So yeah, and I feel like that's just kind of life. And it's what we've replaced on this earth to unravel and come back to. And there's no wrong reason for doing things. And it's you've probably had this experience, but when you can get back to that self, oh my God, the just freedom that you feel and it comes in layers. 

And thank God it comes in layers, I'm so excited for my next layer to appear. And that's when we were talking about the timing of it. And again, we can talk about time, but the timing of it is so divine. Because if I were in the place that I am in right now, even seven years ago, I would have been going through an existential crisis, I would have, if I just would not have been ready for it, it would be like taking geometry when I hadn't learned addition and subtraction. 

A: Right, right. I really relate to what you're saying. I mean, when I first started my business as in somatic education for people, I would see kind of connect with them on like a soul level and I could really see like, oh, I can see where you want to go. I can see what you really want in your relationship or in your career, or in your personal experience of your life. And I could connect with that potential. But what I had to learn real quick was that I might not be the person or this might not be the timing for that potential to blossom. And then as a guide, it's really not in my interest to push or try to hard sell anything to someone who may be ready on like three different levels, but then on the one most important level, which is like their body, they're not. 

J: And so I think that that's like something that I had to work through as a coach or I don't really think of myself as a coach as a facilitator, but more so than me working through it. 

I had to invite sometimes the person on the other end of the call to really consider that as well. I know that you say that you want these things, but there's also a lot of resistance showing up that might be saying not yet, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I experienced that as well. And what that taught me was I needed, and again, I always come back to me, I needed to learn that my connections are going to come in alignment. And that that's my intention is to have clientele and like be in partnership and community with people that are ready so that I don't get irritated and so that I'm not frustrated and that I'm not putting myself in a room again that is out of alignment. 

A: That's a great way to put it. Yeah. And for the sake of the client too. 

J: A thousand percent, but that ripple is what happens. And when I can be generous with myself and really say to my body, you don't need to like, no, you don't need to stress out about this. The universe is conspiring and like, oh my god, what a beautiful opportunity to see. Thank you. Thank you. 

I'm going to allow this to move and allow this to flow and I'm going to allow my body just to say, oh my god, I just made room for the most amazing thing that's coming. Yeah, it's a whole different ballgame. 

A: It is. It's really exciting. I love the way that you're speaking about this and sharing about this. Where can people find you and learn more about what you do if they're hearing this podcast and they're going, wow, that's something I need to have my company do or that's something that I as a leader need to get more connected with. 

J: Yeah. And even just people that are, I work with moms, I work with parents, people that are, am I in the right job? I think I might be ready to leave. I'm kind of done pushing. 

I'm getting those same hits that you talked about earlier. But my website is gen with two ends, co-in, intuitive.com. And there's a place you can contact me and email. 

I can talk about this for hours and I'm so happy to answer any questions. And yeah, it's all right there. And then on Instagram, genco and intuitive as well. Sweet. 

A: Yeah. Well, this has just been such an amazing conversation. I feel very attuned to everything you're talking about. And frankly, I think that not just individuals, but like collectives, like a corporation and a business, they really need you. 

J: They may not know. They may not know it yet. But this is the new paradigm that as we said that we're stepping into. This is the future of how things are going to work because it works. 

And we're realizing that we've been like, as you said so beautifully, like we've been talking to a wall in so many other ways in our previous way of operating as a human race. And so I just love what you're up to. I think it's really cool. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I could talk to you for a long time. Yeah, this was awesome. This was awesome. 

A: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, definitely check out the information in the bio for Jen's Instagram handle. Reach out. Let us know. Reach out to her. Reach out to me. Let us know what you thought about this podcast. If you maybe even have a particular story that came up for you that you want to share with us, I love getting feedback about the podcast. I love hearing your thoughts. So please let us know what you thought. And we look forward to hearing from you. 

I look forward to connecting with you further in the future, Jenn. Absolutely. Yeah. Is there any last like something that you feel like you want to say to our audience here at the end? 

J: I think, you know, we have one body in this life. It is more magnificent and knowledgeable than we give it credit for. And when we can couple it with our intuitive sense, I mean, there's absolutely no boundary, you know, that we can't break through. It's what a gift to be on this earth with this body at this time. 

A: Thank you. 

J: Thank you so much. 

A: Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram at AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution. 

And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating. And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.