Awakening Intuition
by Mona Lisa Schultz, M.D., Ph.D
Digested for Intuitive-Connections by Lorrie Kazan

Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz is a physician, practicing psychiatrist and holds a PH.D in neuroanatomy and behavioral neuroscience—the study of the brain and intelligence.

She is also a seasoned medical intuitive, providing clients psychic phone readings on physical health, which of course takes in the spiritual and emotional.

Schultz believes that all significant life experiences are encoded in our cells and these long-forgotten memories blindly continue to influence and form the way we see and respond to the world. These memories and forgotten emotions speak to us in a language unique to each individual. She wants us to understand that intuition exists and is available to everyone. One common way they speak is through illness and disease.

Having suffered from debilitating injury and disease, herself, she proposes that each of us learn our body’s symbolic language so that we can respond to the body’s needs early so that it never has to break down into full-blown disease in order to get our attention. She wants us to understand that intuition exists and is available to everyone. Clearly she sees an emotional component to disease and cites numerous scientific studies to support her contention, even linking emotions to particular organs.

The author found her intuitive voice through illness. Early family messages stressed the importance of rational (analytic thinking) over the intuitive. Many of us still suffer from the idea that intelligence is good and intuition is in some way bad or disapproved of. Intuition tends to be so subtle that how can you prove it?

Intuitively, the author had solved difficult math problems at an early age; when she turned away from her intuition and relied simply on her rational analysis, her success began to wane.

Diagnosed during her junior year at Brown University with a brain disorder, similar to narcolepsy, in which the patient falls asleep unpredictably no matter where they are or what they’re doing, Dr. Schultz became unable to rely upon her analytical thinking and had to return to guessing, to intuition. She took a leave from college and went to work in a laboratory. There she quickly developed a reputation for the accuracy of her intuition in the office football pool, and when pressed to come up with a substance to facilitate a biological experiment, her intuition led her to a scientific breakthrough. Rather than admit it was an act of intuition, she cloaked it behind intellectual theories. Soon she began taking a new medicine, which stopped her sleep attacks, and enabled her to return to school where she again relied upon the brilliance of her newly restored intellect.

However, shortly after graduating, the author out on a daily run was struck by a truck and suffered numerous injuries. She then discovered that the medication for her sleep disorder was not fully working, and it was killing her blood cells clearly endangering her life. Despite her pleas to the contrary, doctors discontinued the medication. At this point she realized that her body was sending her a message to follow her intuition. It certainly hadn’t led her into the kind of trouble and pain she was currently experiencing.

She noticed that worry caused the sleep attacks to increase, as did bad relationships while healing modalities, such as acupuncture, exercise, diet seemed to minimize them. “This was my first introduction to the truth that my body was speaking to me, intuitively, about emotions and issues in my life that needed to be addressed and resolved.

She was led to a medical intuitive who advised that she could stop the sleeping attacks with her mind. “In fact, she said, most of my mind’s ability and my emotions were frozen. Unless I unfroze my emotions and got my mind and body in sync, I would never heal.”

Inwardly searching, she stumbled upon Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and put Hays’ affirmations into constant, consistent practice, and in so doing believes that she taught herself and her all her cells “how to love and accept myself, how to forgive, and how to believe that I deserved health. To my complete astonishment, it worked.” Ultimately, and under doctor supervision, she was able to wean herself off the medications.

Shortly after, she began medical school clerkship in a busy and chaotic hospital. Given the name of her first patient, she had a vision of the woman and her problems, which upon later meeting the woman turned out to be accurate. Before meeting her, however, she took the time to check the medical research on the problems she perceived, and came into the patient’s room with her intuitive and intellectual skills acting as a strong team.

Dr. Schultz believes that we all have fixed ideas by which we come to live and which we may not even realize are only ideas we’ve come to accept. Many of these ideas are self-limiting; for example, “I’ll always struggle.” “There will never be enough money.” “I’ll always be alone.” These ideas become encoded in the cells and affect the body’s health and ability to function.

Her innovative theories:

Illness creates holes through which intuition can seep

Encoded memories speak in symptoms

We are all intuitive, just need to understand the language in which our body speaks.

Suspension of disbelief—we have to take it on faith that Neil Armstrong and other astronauts walked on the moon.


“The temporal lobe serves as the heart of the intuition network and sends us intuitive thoughts and feelings through its connection to other centers in the brain and the body.” It’s important to visual and auditory experiences and to dreams and intense emotions. “It tells us how we feel about something and what we ought to do about it.”

“The temporal lobe also plays a vital role in memory formation, one of the critical elements of the intuition network. It contains the hippocampus, which helps form verbal memory (memories in the brain) and plays an important role in dreaming, and the amygdala, which constructs memories you can’t put into words, which is known as body memory.

Some investigators believe the temporal lobe is sensitive to low electromagnetic energy frequencies, the currency in which intuitive information is believed to be transmitted and received.”

It’s long been noticed that particularly intuitive people have changes in the temporal lobes. It’s often speculated that trauma does something to the temporal lobe that ultimately allows one greater access to intuition.

Dr. Schultz discusses between the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy, a disease in which the temporal lobe “hyperfunctions or actually seizes,” thus creating a range of dreamlike affects and generally increased access to intuition.

Interestingly, she notes a similar timing between temporal lobe seizures and precognizance, stating that intuitive insights often occur between 10 and 11 p.m. and 2 – 4 am, which are the most frequently noted times for temporal seizures. “We all have microseizures, or microspikes, in our temporal lobes at night when we dream. The most hidden information comes to us in the darkness of the night.”

She cautions us to work with our dreams and trust them as a major source of intuition. She also tells us about a chilling experiment done to monkeys, who at the beginning of the experiment rightfully regarded the experimenters as dangerous but after having the amydala removed from their temporal lobes, the monkeys saw their captors as sources of nourishment and tried to mouth them, copulate with them, or simply bond.

“In our society, what do so many people who are confused, who don’t know how they’re feeling or what to do about anything, do instead? We eat, and we have sex. Our temporal lobes may be in tact, but we sometimes walk around disconnected from them….Like the monkeys, we become passive. One of the leading causes of depression, especially in women, is passivity—helplessness and hopelessness.”

Learned helplessness is one of the factors considered to instigate the onset of disease. Schultz shows us from the scientific perspective that our bodies and minds are wired to give us information and that we can live healthier more abundant lives if we realize the importance of this connection and maintain it rather than avoid it.