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Something in Me Already Knew

On intuition, premonition, and the quiet things that arrive before we're ready for them

19 June 2026

There are experiences I've carried since before my awakening that I've never quite known what to do with. They don't fit neatly into anything. They're not dramatic enough to be dismissed outright, and not explainable enough to be filed away comfortably.

They just sit there, asking to be held.

What I've come to understand — slowly, and not without resistance — is that the body and the deeper mind seem to know things before the conscious self does. Not always. Not reliably. But sometimes, with an accuracy that is difficult to explain away.

This is the story of three moments that happened before my aortic dissection in August 2021, before any of what I now call my awakening. I'm not going to tell you what they mean. I'm going to tell you what happened, and let you sit with the question alongside me.

The vision on a July afternoon

It was a sunny summer weekend, most likely early to mid-July 2021. My husband and I were preparing for our three-week holiday to Italy — a trip we'd been looking forward to. On one of those warm afternoons before we left, I was lying on our bed in the quiet of the bedroom. No phone. No book. Just resting, eyes open, simply being.

And then, without warning or invitation, an image came.

I saw myself lying on an operating table. My chest was open. My heart was exposed.

It wasn't a long vision. It wasn't elaborate. But it was vivid enough, and specific enough, that it stayed somewhere in the back of my mind — even as I let it pass.

I didn't tell anyone. I didn't write it down. I had no framework for it. I have Marfan Syndrome, and in 2009 I'd already had elective open-heart surgery — a procedure my cardiologist had recommended before I tried to get pregnant, because my aortic root had dilated to a point where pregnancy would have been dangerous. So the operating table was not an unfamiliar concept for me. For years between 2009 and 2021, the phrase "ticking time bomb" had lived somewhere in the background of my awareness. I knew the risk, even in its quietest periods.

Was the vision just that? A mind that had lived with a known risk for twelve years, finally surfacing it as imagery on a still afternoon? I can't rule that out.

But here is what I know: when I came out of surgery, some days later, the vision was one of the first things I remembered.

The word on the boat

We left for Italy. The first two weeks were spent in Marche, along the Adriatic coast. On one of those days we went out on a sailboat excursion — the kind of afternoon that stays in you: sunlight off the water, salt air, the particular freedom of being out at sea.

At some point we set anchor, and we jumped from the side of the boat into the sea to cool off. Each time I jumped, I adjusted my body carefully — held myself as straight as a needle as I entered the water, minimizing resistance, minimizing impact on my chest.

I did it because a word had come into my mind.

Aorta.

It had been arriving for a few days by then, passing through my thoughts at random moments. Not a sentence. Not a warning that announced itself as a warning. Just the word, appearing and dissolving the way thoughts do. But on the boat, it arrived with enough quiet presence that I listened to it — that I changed how I held my body before hitting the water.

I didn't consciously think: I am protecting my aorta. But that is exactly what I did.

The hand between my shoulder blades

In the final week of our holiday we were in South Tirol, staying with my mother-in-law. During the first week of our vacation, her mother — my husband's grandmother — had passed away. She had been slowly declining before we left, so her death was expected, but grief doesn't wait for a convenient moment. We received the news while we were still in Italy.

One afternoon in that last week, I was lying on a bed in my mother-in-law's home, reading. The house was quiet. I was alone in the room.

And then I felt it.

A pressure between my shoulder blades. Gentle. Deliberate. Like a hand resting on my back. Not startling — the opposite. It felt like comfort. Like reassurance. Like someone placing a hand on you when you're carrying something you haven't yet named.

Her mother had died two weeks earlier. I was lying in her daughter's home. I was alone in the room.

I believe it was her.

I want to say that clearly, and without layering it in qualifications. I am aware of how it sounds. I'm also aware that I have a reason — a separate experience, from a few years earlier, that I'll write about another time — for trusting this kind of knowing. That earlier moment gave me a foundation for what I felt in South Tirol.

My belief, held quietly and with care for who I share it with, is this: in death she was no longer confined to our construct of time. She could see what was coming in the human realm. And she reached back across whatever threshold she had crossed to rest her hand on my back — to tell me, in the only way available to her, that I was going to be alright.

One week later

About a week after I felt that hand on my back, my aorta tore.

The first thing I felt was a sharp, sudden pain.

Between my shoulder blades.

The exact same place.

I am not going to tell you what to make of that. I'm not sure I can fully articulate what I make of it myself. What I can tell you is that when I eventually had enough space — some days after surgery, when the pain had settled enough for thought — I found myself moving through each of these moments in sequence. The vision on the July afternoon. The word arriving on the boat. The hand in the quiet room. The tear, and where it announced itself.

None of it had felt significant at the time. Each moment had passed the way ordinary moments do.

And yet.

What does it mean to know something before you know it?

I want to hold this carefully, because this is where it's easy to overreach.

There are reasonable ways to account for what I've described. The vision could be a mind that had lived with cardiac risk for twelve years, finally surfacing it as imagery. The word aorta could be a body already sensing changes that hadn't yet broken through to conscious awareness — Marfan Syndrome means my cardiovascular system has always been something I've paid close attention to. The hand could be grief and exhaustion presenting as physical sensation in a quiet room. The location of the pain could be a coincidence that gained meaning only in hindsight.

I don't dismiss any of those possibilities.

But I also know what I experienced. And I know that the sequence — held whole, in order — has a quality that simple coincidence doesn't fully account for. Not for me.

What I've come to trust is this: there are forms of knowing that don't arrive through reasoning. They arrive as images, as single words, as physical sensation, as a sense of something you can't yet name. And most of the time, we're conditioned to let them pass — to disregard them, push them away, move on with the afternoon.

That is exactly what I did with the vision on the bed in July. I let it pass.

I'm not sure it mattered that I did. The surgery happened anyway. The recovery happened. The awakening that followed changed everything.

But I think about it differently now. I think about what it means to be more present to those quiet arrivals — not with fear, not with obsession, but with open attention. The bindle vision. The phone call I felt before it rang. The image on a sunny afternoon.

Something in me already knew.

I'm still learning what to do with that.

A note on intuition and fear

I want to address something directly, because it comes up often when people start paying attention to this dimension of experience.

There is a significant difference between intuition and anxiety.

Anxiety imagines. It runs forward into possible futures, multiplying threat. It is loud, insistent, and self-reinforcing — the more you engage with it, the more it grows. Fear wears the costume of knowing.

What I've experienced as genuine intuitive knowing has a different quality entirely. It tends to arrive quietly. It doesn't demand. It doesn't escalate. It's more like a note left on a table than an alarm going off. The word aorta passing through my mind on the boat wasn't accompanied by panic. It was almost matter-of-fact. Enough to shift how I held my body. Not enough to ruin the day.

The distinction isn't always easy to make, especially during an awakening when perception is heightened and everything can feel significant. What I've found useful — and I offer this as a starting point rather than a rule — is this: genuine knowing tends to be quieter than fear. It tends to arrive once and wait, rather than repeat and escalate. And it tends to leave you with enough calm to act, rather than enough noise to spiral.

Your experience may be different. But learning to tell the two apart is one of the quieter, more useful skills this journey seems to cultivate.

One of the things that helped me most in the early months of my awakening was going back and writing down experiences like these — not to analyze them, but simply to record them before the details faded. The vision. The word on the boat. The hand on my back. Getting them out of my head and onto a page gave them somewhere to live, and over time a pattern emerged that I couldn't have seen while I was still inside the experience.

That's a large part of why I created the Awakened Journey Journal — a guided journal designed specifically for this kind of unfolding, with space for exactly these moments: the ones that don't fit anywhere yet, the ones you're not ready to explain, the ones that simply need to be held somewhere safe. It's available now on Lulu, with Amazon coming soon.

If any of this resonates — if you've had moments of knowing you couldn't explain, or if you're in the middle of learning to tell intuition from fear — I'd genuinely love to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact form below.

And if you're finding that this journey is something you'd rather not walk alone, the Awakened Journey Collective is a community of people doing exactly that — sharing the experience as peers, without hierarchy or performance. You're welcome to join us.