Can we talk about discernment for a second, because I think it’s one of the most important skills in any kind of spiritual or conscious living practice, and also one of the most misunderstood.
Everyone talks about it. Trust your discernment. Use your discernment. Discern what’s true for you. And most people nod along like they know exactly what that means, and then go home and spend three hours overthinking a decision and call that discernment.
It’s not. And the confusion between the two is actually costing people a lot, because overthinking and genuine discernment feel completely different from the inside, they just both involve your mind engaging with a question, which is where the mix-up happens.
So let’s actually get into what discernment is, where it lives, what gets in the way of it, and how to start trusting it when everything around you is competing for your attention and everyone seems to have a very confident opinion about what’s true.
Discernment isn’t a thought. It’s a feeling.
Here’s the most important thing I can say about this and I want to say it as clearly as possible. Discernment is not a cognitive process. It’s not the result of thinking long enough or hard enough about something until you arrive at the right answer. It’s not a pros and cons list. It’s not research. It’s not asking everyone you know what they think and then weighing the responses.
Discernment is a felt sense. It lives in the body, not the head. And the reason most people struggle to access it is because they’ve been trained their whole lives to trust their mind over their body, to override physical sensation with logic, to dismiss gut feelings as irrational and prioritise reasoning as the reliable path to truth.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, both in my own experience and in watching other people navigate this. The body knows before the mind does. Every time. The felt sense of something being right or wrong, aligned or misaligned, true or not true for you, arrives in the body first. Sometimes as a warmth or an opening. Sometimes as a tightening or a contraction. Sometimes as a specific sensation you’d struggle to put words to but you know, you just know, what it means.
That’s discernment. That quiet physical signal that arrives before your brain has had a chance to talk you out of it or into it.
What overthinking actually is
So if discernment is the felt sense, what’s overthinking?
Overthinking is what happens when you don’t trust the felt sense and go back to the mind to check. And then check again. And then check one more time just to be sure. It’s the mental loop that runs when you’ve actually already received the information your body was trying to give you but you don’t quite believe it yet, so you keep asking the question hoping for a different answer or a louder confirmation or something more concrete than a quiet feeling in your chest.
The give away that you’re overthinking rather than discerning is the loop. Genuine discernment tends to arrive and settle. It might be quiet, it might be uncomfortable, it might not be what you were hoping for, but it has a quality of stillness to it. It doesn’t keep changing. It doesn’t get louder when you argue with it. It just sits there, waiting for you to stop running from it.
Overthinking, on the other hand, keeps moving. It generates new angles, new concerns, new possibilities, new reasons why the thing you initially felt might not be right. It’s busy and circular and exhausting and it almost never leads to more clarity than you had when you started.
If you’ve been going around the same question for more than a day or two and you’re no clearer than when you began, you’re probably not discerning anymore. You’re overthinking. And the information you need is probably the thing you felt right at the start before your brain got involved.
And then there’s wishful thinking
Here’s the other thing that gets confused with discernment, and this one’s a bit trickier to untangle because it involves the heart rather than the head.
Wishful thinking is when you want something to be true so much that your desire for it starts to feel like confirmation that it is. It has a particular quality of warmth and excitement to it, a sort of “yes, this is it, I can feel it” energy that’s genuinely intoxicating. And it’s not always wrong. Sometimes what you want is also what’s true. Sometimes desire and alignment point in the same direction.
But the way to tell the difference between wishful thinking and genuine discernment is to ask yourself one question: how does this feel when I take the wanting out of it?
Sit with the thing. Feel whatever you feel about it. Then, just for a moment, imagine fully letting go of the outcome. Not deciding against it, just releasing the grip on needing it to be a particular way. And notice what remains.
If genuine discernment is there, it’ll still be there once the wanting has settled. The felt sense will persist independent of your preference. If it was wishful thinking, releasing the want tends to reveal a quieter, less certain signal underneath, sometimes a signal pointing in a completely different direction.
This takes practice. And some honesty with yourself that isn’t always comfortable. But it’s one of the most reliable ways I know to distinguish between what you genuinely sense is true and what you’re hoping is true.
Discernment in the age of too much information
And then there’s the context we’re all actually operating in right now, which makes this whole thing significantly harder.
We are drowning in spiritual content. Channelled messages, oracle card pulls, numerology readings, astrological forecasts, human design analyses, gene key deep dives, teachers with very confident frameworks about exactly what’s happening in the collective and what it means for you specifically. Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is well-meaning but not quite right. Some of it is projection dressed up as insight. And some of it is outright manipulation, people using spiritual language to create dependence rather than sovereignty.
And if you don’t have a strong relationship with your own discernment, you can end up in this exhausting position of trying to reconcile seventeen different external sources of information without any reliable internal compass to orient by. Every reading tells you something slightly different. Every teacher has a different take. Every message from the universe seems to contradict the last one.
Here’s what I want to say about that. No external source of spiritual information, however gifted the person delivering it, however resonant it sounds, however many people swear by it, is more authoritative about your life than your own felt sense. Full stop.
Good spiritual content, good channelling, good guidance of any kind, should make you feel more connected to your own knowing, not more dependent on someone else’s. If you walk away from a reading or a teaching feeling like you need to come back for the next piece before you can move forward, something is off. Not necessarily with the person offering it, but with how it’s landing for you.
The whole point of developing discernment is to need external confirmation less. Not to find better external confirmation.
How to actually start developing it
Okay so practically, what do you do with all of this.
Start with small things. You don’t need to develop your discernment on life’s biggest decisions. Start with the tiny ones. When you’re trying to decide where to eat, or which email to respond to first, or whether to take the call or let it go to voicemail, just pause for one breath and notice what your body says before your brain jumps in. You’re not making high-stakes decisions here, you’re just starting to listen to the signal.
Learn your body’s specific language. Discernment doesn’t feel the same for everyone. For some people it’s a warmth in the chest for yes and a tightening for no. For others it’s more subtle, a sense of expansion or contraction, a pulling toward or an easing away. Some people feel it in the gut, some in the throat, some as a shift in their breathing. Get curious about what your specific signals actually feel like. They’re unique to you.
Notice the first response before the second-guessing starts. The first response is almost always the signal. The second-guessing is the mind trying to override it. You don’t have to always follow the first response, but start noticing it. Start treating it as data rather than noise.
Practice sitting with the discomfort of not knowing. A lot of the overthinking loop exists because not knowing feels intolerable. Discernment asks you to sit in the uncertainty while the signal clarifies itself, which can feel uncomfortably passive if you’re used to thinking your way to answers. The tolerance for not knowing yet is actually a prerequisite for genuine discernment. You can’t hear a quiet signal if you’re making a lot of noise trying to drown out the uncertainty.
Trust the thing that doesn’t go away. If you’ve been sitting with a question and one felt sense keeps quietly returning no matter how many times you think your way around it, that’s probably the thing. Discernment is patient. It’ll wait. But it tends to persist in a way that noise doesn’t.
The signal was always there
Here’s the thing I want to leave you with. You’re not trying to develop a new ability. You’re trying to reconnect with one you already have that got buried under a lot of training to not trust it.
Every time you were told you were being too sensitive. Every time you overrode a gut feeling and it turned out the feeling was right. Every time you talked yourself into or out of something because it seemed more logical than what you actually felt. All of that created distance between you and your own discernment.
But the signal didn’t go away. It’s still there. It’s been there the whole time, quietly sending information that your mind has been intercepting before it could reach you.
Getting quiet enough to hear it again, that’s the practice. Not a special skill. Just a return.
More of this kind of thinking lives on the Woo & Wonder podcast. Come and listen whenever you’re ready.
No pressure. No rush. Just an open door.
