I really feel that the more that we’re tapped into our intuition, the more that we are capable of weaving a more beautiful future for humanity, and not just for our own lives.
– Amisha Ghadiali
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
We sit down with Amisha Ghadiali, the host of the acclaimed podcast, The Future is Beautiful, for a conversation on purpose, vision, and how intuition can guide us to live our true path. Amisha is a woman of purpose, substance, intelligence, and so much more. I would describe her as the flutter of a wing of a butterfly— simply beautiful to watch in purity and lightness, a field of energy and creation that can’t fully be described.
In this episode, we explore the theme of Amisha’s new book, “Intuition,” which she wrote while living in a treehouse during the pandemic. She shares how we can all access our intuition and trust this potent intelligence. Amisha believes that this is the most important skill of this time, as we are all having to discern our way through so much chaos, and within that, live our truth. She shares how the more we tap into our intuition, the more that we are capable of weaving a more beautiful future for humanity.
SHOW NOTES
The Future Is Beautiful Podcast | Intuition Book | Amisha Ghadiali Instagram
Episode Transcription
Amisha Ghadiali
It’s just so painful that that’s the world that we live in. That the deepest wisdom that lies in each of our bodies, is something that we dismiss as “weird” or “woowoo” or “strange.” And we make jokes about it so that people don’t judge us for it, or we just flat out deny it and don’t listen.
Vanessa Cornell
Welcome to The NUSHU Podcast. I’m your host, Vanessa Cornell. I invite you with love into this space to learn and grow with me. And for a brief moment of the day, come home to yourself. You may know Amisha Ghadiali as the host of the incredible podcast, The Future Is Beautiful. But today, we switch seats. And I have the great privilege of interviewing her about her book Intuition. That word seems to be everywhere. But do we really know what it means and how to cultivate it. But Michelle walks us through what it is and what it isn’t, and how to develop a real relationship to our intuition that can serve us in our everyday lives. She and I share a belief that there is a deep wisdom inside each of us, that is simply waiting to be discovered that the answers lie inside all of us. This is one of the fundamental and founding premises of NUSHU Group. If this is something you’d like to experience, we’re currently offering a complimentary introductory NUSHU Group, you can find us on Instagram @nushu and sign up through the link in bio.
Amisha Ghadiali
Welcome, Amisha. Thank you. It’s such a joy and honor to be here with you, Vanessa.
Vanessa Cornell
First Amisha, I just want to welcome you, and invite you to share with us your journey of writing this book, Intuition. I know that you wrote it during the pandemic in a tree house. And I’m just fascinated by that. And just tell us a little bit about your process where it came from. Whether the book came out of you and knew or had been in you for a long time.
Amisha Ghadiali
Yeah. So I was asked to write this book on intuition at the end of last year. And it’s not something that I would have ever said, “Okay, I’m going to write this book.” Then to be in this experience of being in a treehouse, during lockdown, I ended up being there for 11 weeks. And it was because I was wanting to be somewhere close to my parents in case they needed any support. But I also knew I needed to be in my own space where I could really feel, especially because the pandemic just really like got going. And it was the week that like everything was really like, everything was stopping and everything was being canceled. And I knew that the only way that I could do this project service would be to find a way not to block out the noise, but to just quiet in it and be able to really listen. It happened to also be never actually the spring Navaratri which is the Hindu festival of the goddess where we celebrate the goddess and the battles that the Goddess is able to fight. And it was also I spent a lot of time in Bali, and it was the Balinese celebration, Nyepi, which is a day of complete silence where nobody speaks. And it’s, it’s kind of said to be like when the when the evil spirits are coming over the island. Because everyone’s being quiet. They go. Because they don’t they there’s no one there making a noise. And so it felt really strong to me that I needed to go and be in silence during that time. And to really rather than getting pulled by the panic, and the fear and the unknown, to use it as an opportunity to really anchor deep into the roots. And into that knowing that exists inside of each of us. And what was really powerful was that, as I was writing this book, of course, it’s it’s what I know, it’s actually what I feel we all know, especially those that identify as women, because it’s such an innate part of who we are as humans, and it’s something that’s been conditioned out of us over a long period of history. And yeah, we become afraid of this power or even worse than afraid. We doubt it. We ridicule that we make jokes about it. And that’s to me like it’s just so painful. But that’s the world that we live in that the deepest wisdom that lies in each of our bodies is something that we dismiss as weird or woowoo or strange. And we make jokes about it so that people don’t judge us for it or we just flat out deny it. Don’t listen.
Amisha Ghadiali
I really feel that the more that we’re tapped into our intuition, the more that we are capable of weaving a more beautiful future for humanity, not just for our own lives, like, it’s not like, oh, I’ll use my intuition. And I’ll get the nice car and the perfect husband. And like all of that, it’s like, I use my intuition, and it will guide me towards, to weaving my thread in this greater tapestry of our future. And so I was in the treehouse for 11 weeks, and and then I went to my parents and my father died within three weeks. And the book went to print two weeks after his death in the days that he was dying. And right afterwards, the deadlines were pretty intense. It was like, Oh, this whole section is going to be Americanized on, like in 24 hours, can you just check that this is the last chance to change anything and all of that. So it felt like this was a very, very much an initiatory process. And it felt that it, it just invited me to like really dig deep into what I know. And in a way, the kind of pressure cooker ness of it, it meant that there wasn’t a lot of time to doubt myself or to check things or to cross reference, or to ask anyone, if they what they thought it just meant. I had to trust what came out. And that in itself is a powerful initiation around intuition.
Vanessa Cornell
It certainly is. And what this makes me think about is, when you mentioned people doubting it, or dismissing it, or making it sound woowoo, there is a certain aspect of it, where people think of it as it’s just this like, magic thing you just know. And so my question is, for people who hear what you’re saying, are interested in what you’re saying, but feel like that’s not accessible? Like, what is that thing you’re talking about? that inner knowing? How have you in your life cultivated that?
Amisha Ghadiali
And so for me, it’s been a very wild journey, that’s for sure. And definitely one that perhaps does feel kind of supernatural and magical. It’s definitely quite strong. But before I share about that, I want to share that intuition is a part of our intelligence. It’s not like something outside of us that’s magical. Like, we are magnificent human beings, we each are, and we have all of this like dimensionality to us. And we have been so trained to live through our mind. And, and it’s really just this one part of our brain to think things through and to reason and to rationale them into, it can only be validated if it’s been written in this book, or this person said it or it’s in this magazine, like, that’s how we’ve been trained. It’s not how we work. There’s this huge intelligence, that’s part of us. It’s quicker, it understands more, it picks up more signals, it guides us in more ways than our mind than what we consciously go, Oh, yeah, I know that can do. And we all have it, and we all use it. And there is this, this one aspect of our intuition that’s survival based, everyone’s tapped into that. And that’s that one is a bit easier to understand because it can kind of be externally validated, like, most of our society does run off that, like, people have training doctors, firemen, they don’t have time to then do an analysis and like, pull up a spreadsheet and work out what to do. And to run all the scenarios through, they make very Snap, snap decisions. And we’ve all had moments in our own life where, you know, we’ve just walked into our child’s bedroom, just as something was about to fall on them. And we’re like, oh, I’m just like, being able to scoop them up, you know. And this happens with kids like all the time. And and what took you there at that moment, it’s your intuition, or you found a friend just at that moment that they really like needed someone we’d pop around, or when we don’t think about it, we use our intuition all the time.
Amisha Ghadiali
I think when it gets more complicated is when we are wanting to get that guidance for our own lives. And because we haven’t been trained very well to use our own intuition and to trust our own guidance, you know, then people can end up going to psychics or fortune tellers, or like, they’re all like great tools, but they’re still outside of you. So they still disconnect you as much as they open up doors to your intuition. And so for me, I was definitely a very intuitive child like very sensitive child like creative A child and I had like, very dark teenage years that were really difficult. And part of it was, I understand now, because I kept being told, like, no, you’re too sensitive, you need to change us to be more like this, you. And I felt disconnected from myself, I didn’t really understand like how to function properly. And I think that that’s why I had very like wild teen years with like, a lot of drinking and drugs and partying, because I was just trying to like, find like a place that made sense. And I guess that the one thing that I found, you know, I grew up in England and in England, people don’t talk about their feelings very much unless they’ve drank six pints of beer. And so I also gravitated towards those places, because that’s where people were being more open and being more real. And I could connect better to that. But of course, that came with its own pain. And they had a series of near death experiences. When I was 19, I went down the side of a mountain in Bolivia and a bus crash, and we went 50 meters down the side of a mountain and stuck on a tree stump like and the bus turns, and then there was a drop afterwards. And somehow we all survived. I was in hospital for a little while afterwards, but it was nothing major. And that happened at 19.
Amisha Ghadiali
That was like, ok wait. What’s going on here? And like, what would I want my life to be about. And then, when I was 21, I got driven over by a four wheel drive pickup truck. And when I say driven over, I mean, like, you know, normally when someone says they got run over, they just mean they got hit by a car. But in this scenario, I got hit by a truck. And then he was so actually drunk, and I think probably high and he didn’t realize, and he carried on driving, and I had one, we’ll go over my hair, and then the other will go have my thighs. And, and so I was so lucky, because if you can imagine I was a little bit that way or a little bit, that way, it would have gone over my head or my organs. And I probably wouldn’t have survived that. But we went over my thighs, and then the back wheel got like stuck on my, on my thighs. So that was a really powerful experience where I really had to do a lot of healing physically from it, I had to understand like, how that had happened and how I survived. And actually, I had to, I had to go a lot deeper in order to get the healing. So I found that when I went to the hospital, the physio or whatever, didn’t, wasn’t getting rid of the pain. And, and it was when I went to a cranial sacral, and energy healer, and then she was able to see things and show me things. And then I was like, Okay, this, this is helping. And then when I was 24, I was actually in New York and one of my close friends I was staying with she got hit and killed and a hit and run in front of me. So in those early years of being an adult, I was put into these very deep experiences that were very unlike anyone, no one I knew could relate to any of those experiences, let alone all three of them had to really like go deep and explore healing, and death. And what’s more than what we can just see in this reality, because what we could just see in this reality no longer made sense to me.
Amisha Ghadiali
It wasn’t until a little bit later that I had a moment which, where it just was very clear to me that I had to put that aspect of myself, which you can call spiritual, but it’s also just that aspects of myself that isn’t just like, “Hello, I’m Amisha I’m this age, I do this I live here. I like to do this at the weekends.” You know, like, the part of me that there was so much more of that I didn’t understand fully. But that was so real. The part of me that felt connected to everything on on a bigger level. And the part of me that understood that there was a part of a life that was unfolding. That was nothing like what I was told life was going to be. I was working in politics. When I got run over. I just interned in the US Congress. And that was 2004, I had been volunteering on the Kerry campaign, which didn’t go well. So we’re counting on where you’re placed. And then I gone after the truck, I was working in the house, the parliament in the UK in Westminster. And I thought that was my trajectory. I’m going to work in politics and I’m going to do this and I’m going to make a ball better in this way. I’m going to wear this uniform, like this is what life is I get married at this age, I’ll do this I’ll do that and and then life just kept happening to me in these ways that were saying that’s not what you’re gonna do. That’s not what your life’s about. That’s not what you’re here for. And eventually there came a point where I got really sick, just with mono, but I was in my late 20s You don’t get on a glandular fever, really, at that age, and it really floored me. And I was working for what’s now the future is beautiful, it was called thing kept boat. And we just published our book and I was doing a TED Talk. And I was lying on the floor, because I had no energy in my body. Before I went onstage, the people running the event was so worried I was gonna ruin the whole event, because they were just, they, they’ve got an exterior rehearsal the night before. And I was like, I really need to just go to bed and they were like, We need to see your talk. And I was like, Okay. And then they said to me, “Please, can you do it with a bit of more feeling?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah. I will.” They were really panicked. Anyway, I got up off the floor, I was just conserving energy and got up off the floor. Did this talk, I think I flew to New York, or to Rio straight afterwards to do like more talks.
Amisha Ghadiali
Then I was just like, “What are we doing?” And this moment of, I’m sort of like half listening to myself and half completely ignoring myself. And that’s not going to work. And so I made a decision that this is what needs to be central to my life, this deep listening. And that’s the listening to myself, but also the listening in order to find my place in the world and to orient my work in a way. That’s not about like, proving anything, or meeting milestones in the conventions, of which I had been taught. But that actually was, what does the world need. And so allowing that vision to be connected to my own intuition, and also my own sense of worth, I didn’t have to prove anything, I just, I’m here I just am, right. And this is, this is what I’ll do. And so when that happened, a whole load of teachers appeared. There was one teacher in particular that I was that I was spending a lot of time with it missed it. And, yeah, we would just have these very, like casual chats, but they were full of transmission. And one day, we were talking and I was asking him questions, and then he just said, you know, me Sure, like, everything you’re asking me, you know, you can do, like, why are you asking me like, you actually need to step up, because you’re here to be able to serve and hold space for others. But you’re asking me, you’re taking up space, instead of the other way around? And it’s like, how long do you want to do this for and we went through this process, and part of it involved, literally talking to trees, like he told me to go and find this particular tree, and this tree would give me this information that I needed in order to work with people. I had done my Reiki Master years before, back when I thought I wasn’t spiritual. When I was like studying politics, and my undergrad, I was like, going off to India and doing Reiki masters but hadn’t connected together. Then I started to work with people, I realized that I, through this particular mistake, and various other teachers, that I had a way that I could see into people’s subconscious, I could see what were the trauma patterns were and I could clear that and open up the gifts that we all have dormant inside. And so, you know, that’s part of my journey. And there’s been like a lot of twists and turns along the way. And I feel like the main points from it are the bits that I think are universal, which are breaking down of like that, which we think is reality, like that conditioned sense of, of what the world is, who we are, and to be able to be open to, to the information that’s there. It’s all there. And then the next part, which I feel is to do with the systems of oppression in which this world has been created, from all of the colonizing to and all of the witch hunts, that those cultures that have centered intuition, because it’s such a central part of who we are, because of the way that they’ve been treated in, in history over the last like three 500 years, it has meant that we’re all scared of that part of ourselves when it’s just so natural.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you, Amisha, for sharing your beautiful story with us, and so much wisdom with your story. So what is your process? And how are you making choices and decisions in your life? And how do you actively tune into your inner knowing to guide your tomorrow, your next week, your next year?
Amisha Ghadiali
My life has been really dramatic, and I wouldn’t advise that. I wouldn’t say that something to aspire to. And I wonder if as a teenager, I’d had different role models around me. I grew up you know, immigrant family. We didn’t have any family. The around like, if I’d had that Auntie that was like, Oh, I understand this, let me show you what this is, I might not have had to go down all that distraction and have those big wake up calls. And I feel like if you’re getting those big wake up calls, you’ve already missed those little, there were little knocks that you missed along the way. And, and when I made that decision that this has to be the center of my life, it was because I was like, I don’t want these big whips anymore. I want my growth and evolution to be more gentle. I work with people in my leadership mentoring program. And it’s not like, okay, now like you need to end that relationship and stop that job and go and do something else. It’s more like, well, where can you bring more of who you are into what where you are. And that’s often the invitation like, bring more like to where you are. And so for me, now, I would be lying. If I said that I always knew where I want to go, what I want to do every decision and it was completely smooth, I definitely have still those panics. Like, I don’t know what to do about this. And far less than I had years ago. And far less than I had a year ago, before I sat and wrote this book and really just allow that wisdom to seep into my body and into my cells. For me a lot happens through talking. And so I find that if I want to know, where I’m really out with something that there are particular friends that I can call and talk it through with and I will answer it myself. It’s like, they will tell me that they’ll hold space for me, that will allow me to say the thing. And then I’m like, Okay, that’s it. And I feel that also, I’m okay with the uncertainty and the not knowing and, and so often, if there’s something that I’m going to do, like I was on my way back to Bali in March, and my dad was saying, you booked your flight if you wish your flight and I was like doesn’t feel right yet. And no, I decided not to go. And then the information was changing. And it just didn’t feel right. And he was actually getting annoyed with me for being indecisive and being indecisive. You’re about to die. But we don’t know that yet.
Amisha Ghadiali
It’s like I was waiting for that clear sensation in my body that says yes. And, and actually, the way that I ended up in the tree house was that I was feeling into Okay, well what was I going to get from Bali, I was going to get this like, clear space, I was going to be a nature, I was going to be in community, I was going to be in a place where I’m connected to myself, I kind of asked him to the question like me, a lot of a lot of the inviting in my intuition is knowing how to ask myself good questions. And so whether I ask a question before I go to sleep, or you know, if you journal with a question, that the me that question was, how can I support my family and write this book and give myself what I need. And so I took that question into the shower. And then when I was in the shower, I remembered about this retreat center. And it was a retreat center that I had facilitated some yoga retreats that before. So I knew the family that ran it, and I figured it was locked down. So it’s going to be empty. And so then I came out the shower, and I called them and I was like, hey, like you guys are two hours away from my parents. Is there an empty tree house? Can I come? And so that answer came because I had a good question. And then I went into the shower, and and so I find that baths, showers going for a cold swim in a lake, that water can be really helpful. For clarity around things. I often will ask a question before I go to sleep. So that’s one of the ways and then I also have in the book, there’s 53 practices. Some of them are very basic things like meditation, yoga, the kind of things that strengthen your relationship with yourself and help you to get into that deeper relationship. And then it’s like, the knowing is more easy, because you’re releasing a lot of those should that, well, they think I should do this. And they think I should do that. And society thinks I should do that. And God thought I should do that. And like it just kind of gets really, really chaotic. But one of the practices that I really love that’s in the book is that you kind of use like a visioning process. So so you’re you’re deciding between two options. And you really allow yourself to feel and you take yourself into that scenario. And you have to become attuned to energy to subtle energy into your subtle body, which is why yoga and meditation and all of these things really help. And then you can feel like how does that scenario feel? And then you’ll do the next scenario, and you’ll feel it and then you pick the one That’s the lighter and the most expensive. And sometimes it’s surprising sometimes the one that your mind is like, yeah, definitely that. And then you feel it. And you’re like, oh, it feels like there’s this knot in my stomach and feels like clumpy and like, my right knees tinging. And then you might another one that you maybe you thought, Oh, that’s not, that’s not the right option for me. That’s a really powerful practice that I recommend.
Vanessa Cornell
I love those two beautiful practices. They are ones I use, but I love the way you describe them. I’d love to ask you, “How do you receive messages?” Are they a voice in inner knowing that comes to the surface of vision? Can you describe with more specificity how things come to you?
Amisha Ghadiali
Yeah, I can. And I feel like when we hear how they come to other people, it’s just to open up doorways. We’re also different, and very, like audio visual. So I hear a lot in like, kind of crystal clarity. It’s different to a thought, there’s a certain tone to it, where I know it’s coming from that deeper place. And it’s not just like my mind. I also have very prophetic dreams. Not all my dreams are like that. But dreams will often show me. So for example, we didn’t know that my dad was dying. And exactly one week before he died, I had a dream that showed me that he was dying. And then I was like, okay, like, this is what’s happening. And now we just tend to this. And it stepped me into being like a death doula, rather than like holding on. I also get a lot of visions, like when I’m meditating, I yeah, I’m pretty visual. So I can I can see things. It’s a very, it’s very subtle, like still. So even though I’m saying these things, and that could sound very loud, but they’re, they are subtle. So you have to train yourself to be able to read, it’s like a language. It’s like, watching a kid has to learn how to like read a book, right? And we have to learn to read the signs and signals because we were not taught. People’s intuition comes through in all kinds of mysterious and wonderful ways. I have a friend who for her objects just fly out at her. I don’t have that. But like, she’ll be asking a question. And a book will literally just kind of like, pull off the shelf in front of her, and it will like the title will answer her question. That’s never happened for me.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you for sharing that. Again, to sort of bring it back to what I think people might be thinking is, I don’t have any of those gifts. Those are for other people. Those are for special people. And so your intuition, your connection to yourself, could lead you to be creating a business, or could lead you to being a mother, or it doesn’t have to lead you to what people think of as a spiritual path or a healing path. It might that might be your path. But there is healing spirituality and deep intuition possible in any type of path in your life, if it’s right for you. So what do you recommend to people who didn’t have dramatic events, but are seeking for change and inspiration in their ordinary lives?
Amisha Ghadiali
Yeah, it’s this aspect of what you should be doing. Like, how can you get more on a path that is unique for you, that is the right path for you. And it was for me to be like a healer and to be writing books about intuition. This is not what I wanted to do. I can’t even tell you how I like I’ve never fantasized about this, like, I wanted to be a politician. You know, like, this is not what I wanted. And that’s why it was so dramatic because I was trying to force myself into something that wasn’t where I was meant it was right for me to go. And so it was more dramatic. And I understand that now as I can see the pieces. But, but we all have these little markers that show us like where our longings are, and the parts of us that are yearning to be heard. And these can be such small and subtle shifts, they can be the kind of shifts that no one from the outside would even know you’ve made, but it will change your relationship with your own life. A lot of this is letting go of the shoulds, understanding our conditioning, understanding the ways in which we have made our decisions for other people or for a notion of what we imagined was expected of us and We might still want those same things, but it’s like changing the relationship with them. For me, yoga and meditation have been immense tools and gifts in not only the practices and the way that they’ve allowed me to know myself and to heal aspects of myself, but also in the community that they’ve brought. And that community has allowed me to feel more connected to who I am. And so I think it’s really nice to be around people that are asking similar questions, and making similar explorations. And so any of these ways that connect you deeper to yourself, are a great place to start. Yeah.
Vanessa Cornell
So a couple more questions. How can we de-stigmatize intuition?
Amisha Ghadiali
I feel it’s happening. Even the fact that, you know, written this book for DK books, they’re a mainstream publisher, they’re part of Penguin Random House, they make into information books. So they make books about like wine and tractors and things that you like, know about. And they decided that they wanted to have a book on intuition. And, for me, that’s a real signal that like, intuition is moving into the mainstream, that it’s something that’s going to be honored and respected and valued more and more, more and more people are talking about that. And more and more men are talking about it, which is really helpful, because it just so is in this world, that when white men starts talking about it, it makes it easier for everyone else. And so that shift is happening. And you know, we also can use our intuition about when and where to explain our processes, right. And unfortunately, that’s not a choice for me anymore, because I’m now the author of a book called Intuition. So I’ve had to fully come out of all closets, which I’m enjoying, but you don’t have to tell everyone, your processes and your practices, but I, I feel like understanding it as intelligence. And it’s like, why would we only use such a tiny aspect of our intelligence, like, that’s not intelligent. And so, for me explaining it as part of our intelligence, rather than explaining it as magic is definitely a way to de stigmatize it.
Vanessa Cornell
I want to thank you, Amisha, for being with us. I really appreciate it.
Amisha Ghadiali
Thank you, Vanessa. It’s felt like five minutes.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we welcome you to stay close and discover more of our offerings. Check us out on Instagram @nushu or visit nushu.com for more.
