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Let's go to the show, Dear Latino USA listener.

Today, we're gonna dig into our archives to bring you an episode about intuition.

We're gonna look at exactly what intuition is while we ask is it real?

Do we all have it?

Okay, I know you're going to enjoy this episode.

Sitting in the studio with writer, producer, and storyteller Cindy Rodriguez.

Hey Cindy.

Hello, So Cindy.

All I know is that, let you know, USA has been working on a story around intuition.

It's been up on our whiteboard and I know that you're here to talk about it with me.

And that's it, Isla.

That's all you need to know.

I'm going to take you right through it.

Okay.

So it pretty much starts with I think my inkling, my obsession with intuition ever since I was a teenager.

I didn't really believe in intuition until high school.

There was a weekend I really wanted to go down the shore with friends.

Four or five of us were going to the beach, but my mom's super strict, super pertuana wants to know everywhere, like where I'm going with friends, and she the minute I asked her, she was like, no.

I feel something, very very strange.

She was just like no, no, mcaybien, You're not going.

Which means I have thisnition.

And I told my daughter, please don't go, No, not this time, because I feel sting.

I don't like it.

So I called my friends.

I was like, just tell tell our friend to take my spot.

And then I asked her thereafter.

I'm like, what was it about this particular trip that you were just so head on saying like.

No, doube accidente memante abe and an accidente.

And she's like, I just saw like an accident.

I just don't have a good feeling.

And that was very specific, and I let it go.

Three days passed by, my friends called me and they're like, something happened.

Our friend fell asleep at the wheel.

Oh my god, the car turned over.

And the person that replaced you passed away, and I was like shocked.

Even when I say it now, it kind of gets me emotionally.

It sounds completely unbelievable.

That was a moment when my mom called that accident specifically and what happened.

That was the moment where I started to like really respect my mom's intuition.

That's when I started looking at it like this is a superpower of sorts, Like how does she know about this?

Like how does she tap into it?

Right?

Like asking all these questions.

Quondo pil primerro riki to savilla luisiono.

Lyntusion I started, Okay, okay, simple type of of this nonly a set moscasso.

So your mom says that we all have the gift of intuition, but not all of us listen to it.

From Pluturo media, it's Latino Usa, I'm Maria no posa.

Today we get into a six sentido, the sixth sense.

We're gonna look at it from both a scientific point of view and also one of cultural understanding.

Intuition as a concept has long been a part of many spiritual practices in Latin America, and it plays a critical role one that today is guiding a Latin feminist movement.

First journalist Cindy Rodriguez is going to introduce us to some cold hard science about intuition in this story that we first brought to you in twenty twenty.

The way my mom defines intuition is that it's a gentle truth or an inner knowing.

But I'm a journalist, so I needed to look into this myself.

I started researching, and I realized people have tried to define and measure it for years.

Plato believed intuition was the basis of all knowledge.

Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond as an experiment to prove that he could rely on his innate instinct rather than society's knowledge, And as recently as twenty eighteen, the Office of Naval Research was conducting studies on how sailors and marines used their gut to make snap decisions.

But still, the idea that someone has a gift of perceiving or know going into the future is considered scientifically unprovable by many, but not all.

So my name is Golan lufianta doctor.

Lufitiano is one of those people who takes intuition seriously.

He's a researcher from Indonesia.

And I'm here Frightful Bread Foundations and currently I'm doing research bit NYU Lango in neurology, and I'm also working with Harvard University in cognitive neurology as well.

Nearly a decade ago, doctor Lufaiano was getting his doctor in neuroscience.

But when it came time to decide what he was going to do for his thesis, he was having a hard time.

I was thinking, like, what about investigating about intuitions?

But at that time it was really really hard.

And then a lot of people kind of like again like doubt, how do you message intuition?

But I really really wanted to do it.

And so he and a team of other researchers designed the study that would test people's ability to sort of predict the future.

So I kind of like set up like behavioral toss with random dot movement.

This is how it would work.

Imagine you're sitting at a computer.

On the screen, there are a bunch of dots moving either left or right randomly.

You watch this for a while, and then you're asked to try and predict in which direction the dots are going.

To move.

It would seem impossible to do this since there are no obvious patterns to the dots, but secretly there's a signal.

Right before the dots move, a subliminal image flashes on the screen.

The images are things like guns, or flowers or snakes, things that for most humans, create an emotional response, either really positive or really negative.

If you're flashed the negative thing like a gun, the dots move to the right.

If you're flashed the positive thing, like a flower, they move left.

Remember these are subliminal images, so you don't notice the images con just the point of the whole thing is to pick up on the feelings that subliminal images give you and use them to predict which way the dots will move.

If you can do that, you're more intuitive or more in tune with your emotions.

So basically what it's doing is it's measuring your capacity to trust in.

What you know, not so much what you know, but what you feel.

As doctor Lufayana explains, there are two types of decision making.

The first is rational.

Where you kind of like wait all of the options and the probability and stuff like that.

And the others intuitive, in which.

You use emotional kind of a memory to guide on decision.

What doctor Lufayano found is that both kinds of decision makers have a visceral emotional response to the images, but it's only the intuitive people who listen to their emotional ORCS responses and use it to make a prediction.

So your mom was right on the money that everyone does have intuition, but that some people listen to it more than others.

Yeah, doctor Lufaiano and his team didn't prove that people can see full visions into the future a lah, that's so raven style, but they were able to prove that people can use their gut instinct to make predictions.

After hearing about this research, we wanted to test our own intuition, but it's a whole expensive computer setup.

So doctor Lufaiano sends us a questionnaire that he says works just as well to measure how intuitive you are.

So for fun, we grabbed a bunch of people in the office and some of our friends to see if they could guess how intuitive they are.

So we gathered everybody into Latino USA's conference room.

Yeah, I've been on reporting on intuition for a year and you are all here, So we can test your intuition, how good it is, how you think, how you make decisions.

Before subjects took the questionnaire, everyone went around and said a little bit about themselves and how intuitive they felt.

First up, someone who does believe she's already in touch with her intuition.

I'm Amanda Alcantra, the digital media editor here at Latino USA.

I'm Dominican and Dominican culture.

You know, there's a lot of Afro syncritic religions and beliefs, and I have been doing a lot of family research now, and you know, I found out I have a great grandmother who was a witch.

She had a whole alter devoted to like, you know, different sort of spirits.

I feel like I'm a very intuitive person, but I have a hard time listening to my intuition because my rational brain is.

Like no, So yeah, Then we have somebody who has been fooled by his own intuition before.

My name is Tommy McNamara.

Tommy is a stand up comedian that lives in Brooklyn.

We didn't talk about any feelings.

I would say, as an Irish Catholic Midwestern family, I think I used to to trust my intuition more I got took advantage of a few times.

He fell for Craigslist scam.

And now I don't trust my intuition.

I would say.

I'm Alisa Scarce.

I am a associate producer here at Latino USA.

Alisa grew up in Los Angeles and she's on the fence about the role of intuition in her life.

So on my dad's side of the family, the Cuban side, my great grandma was still alive and I remember looking in their closet one time and seeing this board, which is like a Ouiji board.

So they would make a lot of their decisions with the Ouiji board.

It was not something like my parents thought that was weird, so and so it was not something that I really got in touch with.

But I remember as a kid like thinking it was very cool.

Feel I have a lot of feelings that feel like intuitions.

My name is Zach Swan.

Zach is yet another stand up comedian.

I'm very white.

My family background is I'm very white like Scottish and Welsh, maybe French Canadian.

He wasn't raised to think about his gut instincts.

My family, we didn't intuition wasn't really like a subject that was mentioned.

I would fall in a similar campus Tommy.

I think I feel like I'm certainly not intentional about intuition.

And when it comes to you, Maria.

I think I'm definitely an intuitive and a lot of what I kind of stand for, kind of even in my life and my work is to say own it, trust it, believe it.

You know the way you're seeing it is right, because I feel like, oftentimes as a woman, and certainly as as a woman who wasn't born in this country, it was like, you're an impostor, you shouldn't be here, that's the wrong thought.

You're going to mess up, and that what actually helps us is when we get grounded.

I trust it.

I absolutely trust it.

And then the questionnaire began.

First question, I would rather do something that requires little thought than something that is sure to challenge my thinking abilities.

The questionnaire was only ten questions long.

Each question was about how you handle decision making and problem solving.

I don't like to have the responsibility.

I would prefer complex to simple problems.

I had to anticipate and avoid situations.

Number five, I trust my initial feelings about people.

Pencils down.

Good.

I feel like a teacher I'm like, give me your homework, please, thank you.

After ten minutes of telling the results, I came back.

I have everyone's scores here, and I was like, huh.

Interesting.

The way the scoring worked was that everyone had two separate scores, a rational score and an intuitive score, twenty five being the highest score you could get on either.

First, Amanda got her results.

Rational at ten.

That makes a lot of sense because I'm like fighting my rational all the time, and that's a Libra thing.

I have a hard time making decisions interesting.

I'm mad at this result, but I'm also very proud.

I also want to be intuitive, and it's it's pretty good intuitive.

I mean, you.

Got a twenty three versus a ten, so you definitely lean on the intuitive side if you were going by this.

Alissa, So I am twenty one rational twenty three intuitive, which it kind of makes sense to me that they would be around the same, but like a little bit more on the intuitive side.

Tommy, I got eighteen rational, ten intuitive, which I think is what people would have expected to be lowly intuitive based on my answers, so I am not too surprised.

Zach I got twenty one for rational and twenty four for intuitive.

Isn't that the highest intuitive score we've heard so far?

Well, Marie is not.

The results are in.

Rational I got eighteen and intuitive I got twenty five.

Not surprised at all.

No, that sounds about right, Maria.

Of course you got the highest intuitive score.

And overall, with the exception of Zach, people were very good at guessing how intuitive they would be, and that's what doctor Lufreano found during his research as.

Well, at least one of my studies.

They actually we actually found that when they say that they are intuitive, it is accurate that they are going to behave intuitively.

So basically, if you think you're an intuitive person, you use your intuition more like a self fulfilling prophecy totally.

And you can hear people's answers about their background, how much their families impacted the way they viewed their own sense of intuition.

And that made me wonder if my own culture plays a role in my intuition, because if you ask my mom, it absolutely does.

Tu cure queto renduisiones, kumo masso so and lo latinos and.

Latino porque porquereo and a familiar and to a parties.

Basically, your mom is saying that Latinos and Latinas grow up with this sense of intuition, that you hear about it from your family, your neighbors, your friends.

Yeah, that you hear about it everywhere.

Coming up on Latino USA, how Blu has modern day LATINX witches are harnessing the power of intuition.

Stay with us, Hey, We're back, And on today's show, producer Cindy Rodriguez has been teaching us about intuition.

We just learned about the science behind it and the way we use it in decision making.

But now Cindy's going to explore the cultural role of intuition for the Latino community, specifically how intuitive women are spearheading a Latina feminist movement.

In my quest to learn about the role of intuition and the Latino community, I quickly found myself at the epicenter of the millennial decolonized wellness movement.

The epicenter of the millennial decolonized wellness movement.

Yes, okay, I didn't know that there was a decolonized wellness movement, but let's.

Go mm hmm.

We're hearing the drums of Battala and all women Afro Brazilian Samba reggaed Percussion band, one of the many performers during the Brooklyn Bruheti FS.

The festival was held in Dumbo under the Brooklyn Bridge.

The festival felt like a reunion in a lot of the vendors.

There are my friends and the performers are people have gone on hikes with I live for these sacred spaces.

Why wasn't I there?

Oh, you would have loved it.

How come you guys didn't invite me?

I know we should have invited you.

Mira Iodo, You're coming.

It's magic.

There's astro readers, tarot readers, music like indigenous music where you you feel like you feel seen.

Of these people on stagers, Afro Columbianos, Afro Brazilians and it's just a bunch of people of color celebrating their ancestral heritage.

Hello, thank you so much for taking time.

And we got to talk to the person who was bringing the whole thing together.

I'm Chikita Ruhita.

This is Brooklyn Bruheti at the festival.

This is a gathering of magic, music, drums and community.

Chikita Bruhita one hundred percent believes in intuition.

So there's intuition of trusting your intuition, but then there's the next step of actually believing indivination.

Right, So if you trust your intuition to trust your guides enough for them to give you messages and then take action towards those, right, it's the deepest trust of intuition.

So I grew up, you know, receiving messages from espiditistas and being told, you know, be careful with this, don't go out there.

You know, So and so got a message like me.

Ruhita learned to believe in intuition because of her family spiritual practice.

She comes from a long line of Afri Latina spiritual women who grew up practicing Santadiya.

Her grandmother started practicing when she moved from Puerto Rico to New York City.

So, my grandmother was crowned a priestess of Yamaya more than forty years ago.

My grandmother and my mother is a priestess of Ochun.

Bruhita says that her grandma was a crown priestess of Yamaya, one of the orishas or gods of Santadiya.

All who practice Santhidia are initiated to a particular orisha to their own deity.

Right and Yeamaya is mother goddess represented by the ocean.

And Santidia is a religion that is the combination of African spiritual practices that melded in Cuba with Catholic elements as a result of the slaves trade when the Yoruba people were brought to the Americas.

Tho to Yuba people still live in what we know today's Benin in western Nigeria.

Chelsea said that her mother was a priestess of osh O'shuan is a goddess of divine femininity.

I identify as a third generation practicing Bruha in the traditional sense or what I understood for my life to be the traditional sense, which is someone who practices our black magic.

Rugita says that well, she can trace her intuitive sense to her family's African and indigenous roots.

She's seeing a lot of Latinas now, regardless of their family history, calling themselves bruhas or witches.

I love that Bruja has become and I'm seeing it becomes sort of this all encompassing term for being like a Latina LATINX feminist, right, like being part of this moment of empowered, you know, so empowered that I can create magic, right, So this is how we're informing bruha.

You know, it kind of feels like Brujas are having a big moment right.

Now, definitely, and maybe the best place to witness the Bluha boom is on social media, thanks where LATX influencers have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who seek out spiritual advice on everything from money so arias your money for February twenty twenty is coming in the form of the Nine of Swords, to taking care of plants.

Not only do they clanse the air of toxins blots, they also provide amazing energy and sometimes it's just too cold for outside on Hunger Street.

Working on your relationship.

I'm Valeria Ruelas the Mexican which welcome to pick a card, advice for your love life and dating life.

And yes, of course getting through our current global crisis.

So we're going to talk about the coronavirus from an astrological point of view.

But blu Haas don't just talk about self optimization.

The same person we just heard offering dating advice has some thoughts on our political system as well.

Yo.

I love knowing that we're going to prevail against all of this evil and bad government.

Hell yeah, witches.

That's really well, that's taking brujas and bruhiiad to a whole other level.

Brujas don't play often.

Being a Bruja means being an activist.

A lot of blu Haas say they're fighting against a patriarchal, white supremacist society in their practice.

In twenty fifteen, writer and activist Ganny Slady uploaded a video of themself and other Buhas hexing Trump Abio Trump.

But this idea of tapping into magic or spirituality more generally as a form of political resistance is not new.

We see spirituality as really an integration.

Of this is Latin Medina, a Chicana scholar of spirituality and religion and professor at the California State University Northridge.

Spirituality very much nurtures intuition.

Doctor Medina says it's an act of political resistance to look within oneself for answers.

In other words, trust your own intuition, because for centuries, people of color have been conditioned not to trust their intuition.

And our intuition is grounded in our feelings, our emotions, our bodies.

During colonization, brujos and brujas and healers, intuitive people or people with powers in any way were persecuted in Latin America.

Our indigenous cultures carry so much scientific, spiritual, medicinal knowledge that was erased silence displays through colonization.

Doctor Medina brings up La Bidille gall Lupe as a specific example of the invalidation of black and brown instincts.

So anyways that colonized her or tried to colonize her.

The story of Labiti Guadalupegos like this.

In fifteen thirty one, an indigenous man named Juan Diego saw a vision of her on a hill.

She spoke directly to him in Nahwa, his native language, But when he told the Spanish Catholic fire by what he saw, the friar didn't believe him and told him to go get proof.

There is a longer story here, but to simplify, Juan Diego went back to Lavitin, and when he came back, his cloak was full of roses and Labita's image was printed on it.

The history is debated in academic circles.

But according to doctor Medina, even after Juan Diego brought proof, the Church didn't recognize her formerly as a saint.

Four years.

The Catholic Church resisted the devotion to her.

They were fearful that the indigenous people were going to confuse her with the ancient divine mother Donna sing.

But finally the Catholic Church couldn't deny her.

But the only way they could accept her was to name her as Guadalupe, which was the name of a madonna from southern Spain, which is where most of the conquisadors were from, and to say that she's marry mother of Jesus.

So the overall point here is that because of colonization, the knowledge and wisdom of indigenous people was rejected and then invalidated by the West.

Yes, Labisi Le Guadalupe story can be interpreted as an example of colonizers rewriting what an indigenous man saw, denying his experience, and that's why today things like intuition in bruheti A are a way of decolonizing and reclaiming that knowledge.

It's just really difficult times that need not just political responses, but spiritual responses.

For many, la Vitin is seen as both a religious and political symbol.

Today.

She represents you know, brown women.

She represents around ancestry of the Americas.

She represents the indigenous sacred cosmology.

These days, a lot of young LATINX feministy Labitin is a symbol of empowerment.

She's on boat of candles.

Everywhere there are jean jackets with labitin details on the back.

I think for many of us Latinas, we're looking to spirituality for more meaningful answers than the world is giving us.

We will be right back.

Yes, hey, we're back.

We're going to jump back into the story.

So your mom seems to be like a central figure in all of this, So tell me a little bit about your mom, just kind of in from a spiritual place.

My mom got here at the age of thirty with my older sister.

I think when she got here, as she has told me before, she relied on her intuition to make all the decisions because a year into moving here, she didn't have a husband anymore, she's divorced, she's alone, she doesn't know the language.

So she tells me that I use my intuition out of survival.

You know, it's really interesting to hear you say that, because we learned earlier that scientifically intuitive decisions are based on emotion rather than information.

And it really sounds like all your mom had to go off of was her gut.

Yeah, And I think that could be the experience for a lot of immigrants who move somewhere and don't speak the language or know the customs.

Something that surprised me is that my mom says it's been harder to listen to her intuition the longer that she's been here in the States.

In Latin America is mat passiva lao no tennessee correcre this and hab.

She says that life in Latin America is lower paced, that it's easier to listen to your feelings there than it is here in the US.

So your mom says this thing, the corricor is So what's the corricory.

Corricory is the hustle and bustle of just like running around to get it done, whatever it is that you're trying to get done.

It's like super American, super American, just moving ahead, moving ahead, because that's what you do.

That's what you do.

You get to the us.

You hustle, you launch things, you become an entrepreneur, you become successful, all of these things that are supposed to define your happiness.

And she said, no, corricorre.

I asked her, what is something that she would want me to just never forget?

Apisa down, Practica down, down, free okum on Latina in to me if Amilia cabin this.

She says that although this country can be so practical, so cold, that she hopes that because I am a Latina and because she raised me, that I will always know how to protect my spirit.

But it's something I honestly hesitated to do for a long time.

I wouldn't take my parents seriously when they tried to impart their spiritual wisdom.

But then I hit rock bottom?

What do you mean you hit rock bottom?

What happened?

About five years ago?

I was laid off for my job at CNN, which meant that I had lost my health insurance, which I really needed.

At the time, I had just been told I needed to get surgery for a potentially cancerous lymph node, And to make matters worse, I was in the middle of leaving a long term relationship of ten years.

I was thirty one years old at the time, and it felt like I had lost everything and I didn't know how to begin again.

So I moved in with my mom.

Her first thing on my to do list to get better was when olympiasa.

You know, you leave a breakup, you lose a job, you start to think, okay, maybe the world is against me here.

So she prescribes me this baynyo.

She prepared umbagno, which means she prepared a bath for you, a particular kind of bath that means flowers, usually some kind of particular sand, oftentimes candles.

And just like, tears are rolling down my face and you don't rinse the bath off where you have to air dry.

So I am forced to just stand there naked and think emotionally about everything I've ever wanted in my life and at the same time everything that I've lost up until then.

And so it it was a transition in my life, like I remember this day very clearly, thinking like something changed, something shifted.

I go for a hike every time there's a full moon, burn some palos.

It's the first thing I do.

I like to set the vibe.

Palo Santo is a wild tree native to the Yukotan and it's found in many Latin American countries, including Peru, where my family's from.

And what you'll hear there is my lighter.

And what I do is I light my palo.

I'll ask my ancestors to watch over me, to bring me guidance, and to send me any messages that they think I need to know right now.

And so as I write down what I'm gonna let go of, which I already did, I say I'm ready to go of X and replace it with X.

It's a little personal, so I won't exactly share what it is.

Now.

I will light the paper.

The paper's very small.

What I'm burning, it's all gone now, it's turned to ashes, honoring my inner knowing.

It's a way of connecting to my ancestors and their traditions, voices that have been silenced through a history of colonization.

And it's all led to reclaiming a part of myself that has always been there.

But I just wasn't listening.

Snidro Didez, thank you so much for opening up and for taking us on this journey with you.

Thanks so much for having me.

That was Journalists Cindi Rodriguez the Brooklyn Brugetia Festival is still going strong every year.

This episode was produced by Antonio Serejuidro and Cindi Rodriguez.

It was edited by Sophia Palisa car and mixed by Stephanie Lebou.

Fact checking for this episode by Nidia Bautista.

Special thanks to Maya Hurst Rodriguez.

The Latino USA team also includes Roxanna Guire, Julia Caruso, Jessica Ellis, Renaldo Lanos Junior, Andrea Lopez Gruzsado, Luis Luna Drooni, mar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Monica Morales, Garcia, jj Carubin and Nancy Trujillo.

Beene Ramirez and I are co executive producers and I'm your host, Mariao Jossa.

Latino Usa is part of Iheart's Michael Gudap podcast Network.

Executive producers that I heard are Leo Gomez and Arlen Santana.

Join us again on our next episode, dear listener.

In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media and remember, if you want to get to the meat of the story, just skip through.

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