A Gentle Return to Trust – Part 1
There comes a point—I think for many of us—when a quiet realization begins to surface that something within us has gone missing. A sense that we’ve drifted from ourselves somewhere along the way, even if we can’t quite say when it happened or how we got here.
For many women, this wondering becomes the beginning of a quiet return—of learning to trust your intuition after 50 and finding your way back to yourself.
This series, A Gentle Return to Trust, grew out of that space for me.
It reflects the path I’ve been walking over the past several years—a path that has asked me, again and again, to trust myself, to trust my life, and, perhaps most challenging of all, to trust what I cannot yet see.
Each part of this series touches on a piece of that journey—intuition, allowing, resistance, and eventually, trust and surrender—not as ideas, but as experiences I’ve had to live my way through.
And like so much of this work, it begins with something simple.
Learning to listen.
We Don’t Lose Intuition—We Learn to Ignore It
In the past, I’ve had a complicated relationship with intuition—with my own inner guidance system—as I think many of us have.
But I’ve come to see that intuition is something deeply intrinsic to every human being. I’ve come to see that I have always had it within me, even in the years when I would have insisted I had none.
With a little distance and a willingness to look honestly at my life, I can see now that I didn’t lack intuition. What I lacked was trust in it. What I lacked was the willingness to listen when it told me something I didn’t want to hear.
And I don’t believe I’m alone in that.
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to turn away from ourselves.
We learned to override our feelings, to question our instincts, and to look to others for perspective rather than inward for guidance.
This programming often begins in childhood, when our creativity, our emotions, our desires, and our inner knowing are shaped—sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully—into something more acceptable to others and to the world around us.
For women, that conditioning runs even deeper. We are often taught, directly or indirectly, that to be trusted, respected, or even loved, we must soften our instincts, prioritize external peace at the expense of our own inner harmony, and defer to what is considered rational or “reasonable,” even when something inside us is quietly insisting otherwise.
And so we learn to ignore that quiet insistence.
We learn to doubt it.
We learn to abandon ourselves.
And perhaps this is why, later in life, the process of trusting your intuition after 50 can feel both unfamiliar and deeply necessary—like returning to a language we once knew but haven’t spoken in years.
When We Know… and Don’t Like the Answer
If I’m honest, I can look back on countless moments in my life when I knew something wasn’t right. With the benefit of hindsight, I can look back and see countless times I already had the answers to the questions I was asking.
Not always in a dramatic, undeniable way—but in the quieter, more persistent way that intuition tends to speak. A tightening in my chest. A sense of unease. A knowing that didn’t quite make logical sense but refused to go away.
And still, I stayed.
There was a relationship in my early adult life where I repeatedly dismissed what I could clearly see and feel. I was told I was imagining things, that I was overreacting, that I was misinterpreting reality. And instead of trusting myself, I chose—again and again—to believe that version of the truth.
It took me five years to leave.
Five years of slowly eroding my trust in myself because I believed someone else over the quiet voice that had been trying to guide me all along.
That’s the part that’s hard to admit, but it’s also the part I think so many women can recognize and relate to.
I didn’t ignore my intuition because it wasn’t there.
I ignored it because listening to it would have required me to change something I wasn’t yet ready to change.
Removing the Noise That Drowns It Out
For a long time, I told myself I simply wasn’t intuitive.
It wasn’t until I began doing deeper healing work, which included learning from Jeffrey Allen, one of my greatest spiritual teachers, that I started to understand that intuition is not something we acquire, but something we uncover by removing the layers that we unconsciously use to bury it.
At first, when I began to intentionally work with my intuition, I thought it would arrive in some unmistakable form—clear words in my ear, direct answers, something I couldn’t possibly misinterpret. I imagined it would feel different, almost otherworldly.
But what I came to realize over time, and after some frustration, is that my intuition speaks in the same quiet way it always has—it was I who had been too distracted, too doubtful, or too resistant to recognize it.
Instead of something loud, my intuition often arrives as a quiet knowing that feels distinctly different from my usual stream of thought—less meandering, less negotiable, and far more certain.
And it requires me to slow down and get quiet enough to hear it.
How Intuition Speaks (If We Let It)
Looking back, I can see that intuition has always spoken to me in small but powerful ways.
I remember being a senior in high school, completely stuck on a biology project with no ideas and very little time left. And yet, instead of panicking, there was a quiet confidence within me that if I simply gave it space—if I slept on it—something would come.
The next day, an idea appeared so fully formed and unexpected that it felt as though it had been waiting for me to step out of the way.
At the time, I didn’t call that intuition.
And the more I look back, the more I realize that moments like that were never rare in my life.
They were simply unacknowledged.
I know now that my intuition becomes clearest when I allow space for it, and that space has taken different forms in my life—quiet hours spent journaling, soul-nourishing time spent in meditation, and early morning walks alone.
Activities that take place in the sanctuaries of silence, solitude, and stillness.
Learning to Trust What We Already Know
Journaling is a powerful pathway back to that inner voice.
There is something almost alchemical in the act of writing—of placing one word after another without knowing exactly where they’ll lead, only to find that clarity emerges somewhere along the way. So many times, I’ve begun writing with confusion or heaviness, only to arrive, several pages later, at insight, truth, and understanding.
Not at something I created, but at something I uncovered.
It reminds me of what I came to understand during my own healing journey—that the path back to ourselves is not about becoming someone new, but about remembering who we were before we learned to doubt ourselves. I talk more about that process in previous posts, including My Journey to Self-Love and Feeling Lost: Finding Your Spark Again After 50.
Meditation is also one of the most direct ways I’ve learned to hear myself again. It strips away the noise, the urgency, the constant pull and distraction of the external world, and in that quiet, something deeper has room to emerge.
It was during one of those quieter moments—on a walk at dawn, not long after I had begun rebuilding my life after my own Dark Night of the Soul—that a phrase came into my awareness, almost out of the blue, with unusual clarity:
Trust and surrender.
It wasn’t something I had been consciously thinking about, and it didn’t arrive as part of my usual mental chatter. It landed differently—steady, certain, and with a weight to it that I couldn’t overlook.
As I thought about those words, I could acknowledge that trust and surrender were lessons I needed to learn but, in truth, it took me a few years to drop my resistance to them.
I continued to insist on control.
I couldn’t yet embody the trust and surrender needed to make way for the opportunities and inspiration that now come almost daily in my pursuit of the aligned life I want for myself.
And all I had to do was step out of the way.
But that first clear message marked the beginning of a shift.
Because intuition, on its own, is not enough. We can hear ourselves clearly and still resist what we hear. We can know exactly what is right for us and still hesitate, still hold back, still try to control the outcome.
And this resistance can be conscious or so subconscious that we don’t see how we’re showing our distrust of the messages that come.
A Return to Ourselves
Even now, I don’t always receive answers immediately. There are still times when I overthink, when I circle a question for days, when I momentarily forget everything I’ve learned about trusting myself.
But when several days have passed without clarity, I try to remember to do this:
First, check (honestly) to see if I already know the answer in my heart but keep asking the question in hopes of getting a different answer.
Second, (if I don’t know the answer already) wait and trust that it will come.
Because it always does.
Trusting Your Intuition After 50: A Return to Yourself
What I’ve come to understand is that intuition doesn’t exist to solve our problems for us. It exists to guide us back to ourselves. To help us make choices that align with who we truly are. To remind us that we are far more capable of navigating our lives than we have been, perhaps, led to believe.
Because the truth about this life is that we, and we alone, are responsible for our own happiness. Looking elsewhere for that kind of fulfillment will leave us always chasing a moving, unreliable, and unsustainable target. And happiness doesn’t last when we do that.
In many ways, this is what trusting your intuition after 50 becomes—not a single moment of clarity, but a quiet, ongoing return to yourself.
When I think back to the woman I used to be—the one who doubted herself so deeply, who abandoned her own knowing because it was easier than facing what it asked of her—I don’t feel sadness or shame anymore.
I feel compassion.
She was doing exactly what she had been taught to do.
But she’s become someone who doesn’t live that way anymore. Now she’s someone who trusts herself implicitely, has confidence standing up for herself, and disregards anyone who tries to feed her any stories that don’t align with what she knows for herself to be true.
And you can, too.
If you find yourself in that space now—questioning your instincts, second-guessing your knowing, wondering if you can trust what you feel—let this be your gentle reminder that nothing has been lost.
Your intuition has been there all along.
Quiet. Patient. Waiting for you to return to it.
And when you do, when you begin to listen—even a little—you may find, as I did, that the voice you were searching for was never outside of you at all. And in the listening, a new challenge presents itself—not whether we can hear the truth, but whether we are willing to live by it.
Because intuition will ask things of us.
It will ask us to pause when we want to rush, to walk away when we want to stay, to trust the unfolding when every part of us wants to see the path in its entirety beforehand.
And this is where many of us find ourselves getting stuck—knowing but not yet allowing.
If you feel stuck in a place like this, I gently suggest taking stock of what you know. Even if you aren’t ready to make any changes yet, let the knowing be what it is. Don’t hide from it because that doesn’t help you trust yourself. You can have the answers and still accept that you aren’t ready to do anything about it… at least not yet.
And that is completely okay.
In the next part of this series, I’ll explore what it means to soften that resistance… to stop forcing, stop controlling, and begin allowing life to meet us where we are.
Because trust, I’ve learned, is not built in a single moment.
It is built in layers.
And allowing is the next one.
