Let me start with something that might land a bit differently than you expect.
You already have the gifts. All of them. The intuition, the energetic sensitivity, the ability to read a room before anyone’s said a word, the deeper knowing that arrives before the logical explanation catches up, the capacity to notice things most people walk straight past. All of it is already in you. It was never missing.
What’s been missing, for most people, is the deliberate activation. The decision to point your attention there. And here’s the interesting thing about that. The mechanism that makes activation possible isn’t mystical. It’s neurological. And understanding it changes everything about how you approach developing your own gifts.
Meet your reticular activating system
So there’s a part of your brain called the reticular activating system, or RAS if you want to sound like you’ve been watching too many neuroscience TikToks. It sits at the base of your brainstem and it does one of the most important jobs in your entire nervous system.
It filters reality.
Here’s what I mean. Your brain receives somewhere between eleven million and forty million bits of information per second from your environment. Your conscious mind can process somewhere between forty and fifty of those bits. Which means your RAS is constantly making editorial decisions about what reaches your conscious awareness and what gets filtered out as irrelevant noise.
The way it decides what’s relevant is extraordinarily simple. It pays attention to what you’ve told it to pay attention to. Through your focus, your beliefs, your consistent thoughts, and your deliberate decisions about what matters, you are literally programming your RAS to notice certain things and ignore others.
You’ve experienced this in its most mundane form. You decide to buy a specific car, say a white Range Rover, and suddenly white Range Rovers are everywhere. They were always there. Your RAS just wasn’t flagging them as relevant before. The moment you decided they mattered, they started appearing.
Now apply that same mechanism to intuitive information. To subtle energetic signals. To synchronicities. To the kind of knowing that lives below the threshold of conscious thought. If you’ve been running a background programme that says “I’m not intuitive” or “I don’t have gifts like that” or “that stuff isn’t real,” your RAS has been faithfully filtering out every piece of evidence to the contrary. Not because the evidence wasn’t there. Because you told it the evidence wasn’t relevant.
The activation isn’t about developing something new. It’s about reprogramming what your nervous system pays attention to.
What the gifts actually are
Before we go further I want to get clear on what we’re actually talking about, because “spiritual gifts” can sound like we’re talking about something reserved for psychics and mystics and people who channel light beings on YouTube.
We’re not. Or at least, we’re not only talking about that.
The gifts I’m talking about are the ordinary extraordinary capacities that most humans have access to and most humans systematically ignore or explain away.
Intuition. The felt sense of something being right or wrong before you can explain why. The thing that made you hesitate before you said yes to something, or feel immediately at home with someone you’d just met. That’s not a personality quirk. That’s a sophisticated information processing system that operates through the body and the nervous system rather than through conscious logical analysis.
Energetic sensitivity. The ability to feel the quality of a space, a relationship, a situation, at a level that goes beyond what’s visibly happening. Some people walk into a room and know immediately that something is off even though the conversation looks perfectly fine. That’s not imagination. That’s a real perception that most people have been trained to override with rational explanation.
Pattern recognition at depth. The ability to notice connections, synchronicities, threads that run through apparently unrelated things, at a speed that feels like it bypasses analytical thought. This is operating in most people as a kind of background hum that occasionally surfaces as a hunch or a feeling of significance. Activated, it becomes something much more consistent and useful.
Somatic knowing. The body as an information system, knowing things in the gut, the chest, the throat, before the mind has caught up. We talked about this in the body signals post. It’s one of the most consistently available gifts and one of the most consistently ignored.
These aren’t exotic abilities. They’re human capacities that got deprioritised in a culture that decided logic and measurable evidence were the only legitimate sources of information. Your RAS learned to filter them out because you were trained to dismiss them. Reversing that training is the activation.
Why most people think they don’t have them
Here’s the honest answer to why so many people feel like they missed out on the gifts.
It’s not because they don’t have them. It’s because they’ve been consistently told, directly and indirectly, that what they were experiencing wasn’t real.
You had a gut feeling and it turned out to be right and someone explained it away as coincidence. You sensed something about a person that others didn’t pick up on and you were told you were being oversensitive. You noticed something that didn’t fit the logical explanation and you were encouraged to dismiss it. And gradually, over years of that kind of feedback, you started dismissing it yourself. Before anyone else could tell you it wasn’t real, you’d already decided it wasn’t.
Your RAS got the memo. Filter this out. It’s not relevant. It doesn’t count.
And so it did. Faithfully, helpfully, exactly as designed.
The good news is that the same system that learned to filter them out can learn to filter them back in. It just requires a different kind of consistent feedback. Which is what activation actually is.
How to actually activate what’s already yours
Here’s where it gets practical. Because understanding the mechanism is useful but it’s not enough on its own.
Start with the decision. This sounds almost too simple but it’s genuinely the first step. You have to make a deliberate, conscious decision that these capacities are real, that they’re yours, and that you’re choosing to pay attention to them. Not a tentative “I’ll try it and see” decision. A real one. Your RAS responds to commitment in a way it doesn’t respond to experimentation. Tell your nervous system this matters and it will start treating it as if it does.
Begin logging what you notice. Keep a simple record of your hunches, your felt senses, the times something lands in your body before your mind catches up. Not to analyse them obsessively, just to create a trail of evidence that you can look back on. Most people discover, when they actually start tracking, that they were picking up accurate information far more often than they realised. They just weren’t counting it. The log is the data that starts to reprogram the “I’m not intuitive” belief at a deeper level than affirmations ever could.
Practice asking before you think. When you encounter a situation, a decision, a person, a piece of information, before you analyse it, ask your body what it notices. Not what it thinks. What it notices. The answer often arrives as a felt sense, a temperature, a quality of energy, an immediate yes or no that’s softer and faster than thought. Practice catching that first response before the analytical mind rushes in to explain or dismiss it.
Deliberately notice synchronicities. Given what we now know about the RAS, every synchronicity you consciously acknowledge is a direct instruction to your nervous system to keep flagging these. The acknowledgment itself is the programming. You don’t need to know what every synchronicity means. Just notice it. Say, out loud or internally, “I see that.” That’s enough to keep the channel open and gradually widen it.
Spend time with people whose gifts are activated. This one is underrated. Your nervous system is genuinely contagious, we talked about this in the energy post, and being around people who take their own intuition seriously, who speak naturally about energetic information, who treat these capacities as normal rather than exceptional, recalibrates your own system toward what’s possible. You don’t absorb their gifts. You expand your own sense of permission to use yours.
Work with what comes up rather than waiting for dramatic experiences. A lot of people are waiting for a lightning bolt moment of undeniable psychic experience before they’ll take their gifts seriously. But the activation usually happens through the accumulation of small, quiet, easily-dismissed moments that you choose not to dismiss. The subtle knowing that turned out to be right. The small hunch you followed. The slight unease you listened to. These are the gifts in their everyday form and they’re where the practice actually happens.
The nervous system piece
I want to come back to the nervous system for a moment because there’s something important here beyond the RAS.
A nervous system that’s chronically activated, living in a low-grade state of stress, vigilance, or overwhelm, is actually less able to receive subtle information, not more. The fight-or-flight response narrows your perception to immediate threats. It closes down the very channels through which intuitive and energetic information tends to arrive.
This is why spiritual practices that support nervous system regulation, breathwork, meditation, time in nature, adequate rest, genuine play, aren’t separate from developing your gifts. They’re prerequisites for it. You can’t hear the quiet signal when your nervous system is blaring static.
The activation of your gifts and the regulation of your nervous system are the same project approached from different angles. Tend one and you support the other. Neglect one and you undermine the other.
Which is also, incidentally, why the “I’ll develop my gifts when my life is less stressful” plan never quite works. The nervous system regulation is what makes the gifts accessible. You can’t sequence them. They have to happen together.
You were always this
Here’s the thing I want to leave you with.
The gifts weren’t given to some people and withheld from others. They weren’t distributed based on some cosmic lottery that you may or may not have won. They’re capacities that exist in human beings, in you, and they’ve been waiting for you to decide they’re worth paying attention to.
Your RAS has been taking instruction from you your whole life. It’s filtered in what you told it was real and filtered out what you told it wasn’t. And you can change that instruction. Right now. Today. By making the decision that this stuff is real, that you have access to it, and that you’re going to start treating the quiet signals as the information they actually are.
The gifts don’t need to be earned. They don’t need to be deserved. They don’t require a dramatic awakening or a specific lineage or years of dedicated practice before you’re allowed to access them.
They just need your attention. And your willingness to stop explaining them away.
That’s it. That’s the whole activation.
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.
