I read a fascinating story in Oprah’s magazine. A lady living in Shreveport, La. was happily married. Life was good until the dreams started. One night She dreamt she was on one side of a barb wired fence while on the other side were about five humanoid ghostly figures desperately trying to communicate with her.

She awakened. Chilling dream but she thought, “Everybody has dreams like this sometimes.” She let it go.

Then a week later, the dream appeared again. This time about twenty ghostly figures with huge, vacant eyes pleaded about something, but were unable to bridge the gap of communication. The dream deeply disturbed her. Not knowing what to do, she intuitively called her doctor. She explained her dream, and asked her doctor to do a blood test on her even though six months earlier she passed her yearly physical with flying colors. To appease her, he did. Her results were normal.

Forcing the dream out of her mind, she decided to move on. But the final dream popped up a week later. Against the same backdrop, behind a barbed wire fence this time, there were no humanoids. On the other side, the lady fell to her knees crying, ” What is it? Tell me. What is it?” To which she heard a faint voice from nowhere say, “Look deeper.”

Puzzled, she again called her doctor and intuitively asked, “Where is the deepest part in the body?” He thought and replied, “I guess that would be the colon. “OK then, she said, “I want a colonoscopy.” The doctor incredulously responded, “A colonoscopy? You’re too young for that!” But because she insisted, he did it. He even acquiesced to the unusual request of this patient— she also insisted on remaining awake during the procedure.

At the start of it, the doctor probed expecting nothing but then, a black mass was discovered deep within her colon.”Oh my God,” the surgeon blurted out. “Sedate her! Sedate her!” A malignant, fast-growing tumor was removed. If she would have waited even a month more the doctor said she would have died.

You can trust intuition to avert you from danger.

But why do we sometimes listen to it and at other times not?

Look back. Do you remember the still small voice that insisted you make a right turn in your car as opposed to a left one? As a result, you avoided an accident. It was also that “knowing” in your gut that told you to shut up when you desperately wanted to refute a very enraged co-worker.

For me, it was intuition that awakened my then nine-month-old son out of a deep sleep whereupon he pulled up on the crib railings, and screamed, “Mama, Mama!” at eleven pm— the exact time I was involved in a car accident. This is the testimony of his grandmother.

This other way of “knowing” is powerful.

If intuition is another powerful way of knowing, why do we have such a casual relationship with it?

Quite often it rubs against your common sense, and therefore we resist its request.

But be mindful that responding to a persistent hunch might be worth listening to.

To benefit from intuition even more, normalize it. By recognizing and acting on them regularly you are giving hunches permission to appear. Also, learn how intuition speaks to you. I’ve learned through observation that often a quick picture will flash in my mind followed by a strong knowing in my gut. When this happens, I pay attention.

Practicing these two tactics will reap huge benefits.

As we encounter the world each day, why not empower intuition by recognizing it and integrating it into your choices and decisions you make? Start by allowing hunches to influence small decisions, and as your faith in calculated hunches grow, let them influence bigger, more complex decisions. In that way, you are giving yourself the advantage of both logic and this other powerful way of knowing. Life has just gotten richer.