Your Emotions Are Not Getting in the Way of Your Intuition—They May Be How It Speaks

emotions intuition lotus painting Sep 04, 2026

Intuitive painting of a luminous lotus emerging from dark, layered water.

Article By Anna-Emilia Hietanen

Intuitive Soul Painting

Recently, I was meditating to reach a decision. I already knew what I wanted the answer to be, so I did what I usually do — I tried to set that wanting aside. My assumption was simple: the "right" answer would arrive quietly, without emotion attached. That's how intuition is supposed to work, isn't it? Clear the noise, and the truth appears underneath it.

But the feeling wouldn't clear.

It wasn't anxiety. It wasn't confusion. It wasn't even the desire I'd been trying to set aside.

It was love — the longing to be near the people I love, to show up for them, to give my daughter something I once had myself.

And an insight arrived with it: the decision doesn't have to be rational to be the right one.

That stopped me. Because I've spent a long time believing that emotions and intuition live on opposite sides of a line — that feeling something strongly is exactly the moment to distrust myself most. Fear disguises itself as caution. Desire disguises itself as certainty. So I learned to separate the two, to wait for the quiet, detached whisper before I trusted anything.

But what if that's a false choice? Not because emotions never cloud intuition. They often do. But because some emotions, the clear and deeply rooted ones, aren't static in the way. They're one of the ways intuition speaks.

Emotions can't always be turned off to be able to hear intuition, as I learned. But they also can't be turned off even if we don't want to deal with them. Even though I teach others how to work with emotions through art, it still happens to me: sometimes an emotion seems to be too much. It's those times when everything seems so overwhelming that putting emotions on hold for later sounds like the best thing to do. "I don't have time to deal with this right now" becomes the plan. "I need to be functional. I cannot deal with my emotions right now, because then I will not be able to deal with everything else. I'll feel later."

Of course, that rarely works.

The emotions don't dissolve just because we postponed it — it waits, and if it waits too long, it starts speaking in other ways. Irritability. A short temper with someone who didn't deserve it. Sometimes even the body, tightening or aching where the feeling had nowhere else to go.

"Working with" emotions can sound as if every feeling must become a project—something to analyze, shift, or turn into wisdom. But sometimes we do not need to do anything to the emotion. We need to stop pushing it away long enough to let it exist. Just sit with it, and let it come.

This is why intuition and emotion are so closely connected for me. Neither always speaks in complete sentences. Both can arrive through the body, an image, a memory, or a symbol that keeps returning.

Art gives that wordless knowledge somewhere to go.

When we paint intuitively, the purpose is not to make a beautiful picture. We can let a color hold anger, let a line follow longing, or allow an unexpected shape to appear. A painting can become a meeting place between what we know and what has not yet found words.

When I am unsure whether an emotion is obscuring my intuition or carrying part of its message, I ask:

What am I actually feeling? Not what should I feel, but what is here?
What is this emotion trying to protect, reveal, or ask me to notice?
What remains true when the first wave softens? Intuition is often not the intensity itself, but the deeper truth still there after we give the emotion room.

Sometimes the clearest answer is rooted in love, grief, desire, or the knowledge that we have been making ourselves small for too long.

Perhaps emotional clarity is not about becoming emotionless. Perhaps it is about becoming honest enough to hear what our emotions—and the quieter knowing moving through them—have been trying to tell us.

This is, in a way, the whole premise behind Lotus in the Mud — the idea that what feels murky, tangled, or "too much" isn't the opposite of beauty or clarity. It's often where they grow from. The lotus doesn't bloom despite the mud. It blooms because of what the mud holds.

If you've been sitting on an emotion you haven't had the time, the words, or the courage to work with yet, Lotus in the Mud is a free creative practice to help you meet it — not to analyze it from a distance, but to actually sit with it, through art, and let it show you what it came to say. You do not need to consider yourself an artist or know what your painting will mean before you begin.

[Get Lotus in the Mud — free →]

https://www.intuitivesoulpainting.com/courses/lotus-in-the-mud

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Your Emotions Are Not Getting in the Way of Your Intuition—They May Be How It Speaks

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