The Universe Is Knocking. Are You Listening?

By Annette Densham

A monk once told me a story at a retreat that I’ve never been able to shake. He said the universe doesn’t usually ambush you. It taps you on the shoulder first. Quietly at first. It’s polite in its attempts to get your attention. Almost like it’s giving you a chance to notice what you already know. If you ignore that tap, it comes again, a little firmer. Ignore that and, in true human fashion, we argue with reality until the universe stops tapping and starts smacking. By then we’re flat on our backs, stunned, blinking at the ceiling, asking, ‘How did this happen? as if we didn’t get a series of increasingly obvious nudges along the way.

We’re told to listen to our gut, yet so many of us ignore this built-in warning system.

I know I have, many times, much to my detriment. It’s not because I’m naïve or unintelligent. It’s because listening to my gut was inconvenient. It required me to slow down when I wanted momentum, ask questions when I’d rather be liked, and trust myself when I don’t yet have proof or been listening to the fairy tales telling me to follow my heart.

For people-pleasers, I’ve had my moments, the stakes feel even higher. I don’t want to rock the boat or be seen as too sensitive or impolite. I don’t want to be the one who makes things awkward. Instead of treating that gut feeling as useful information, I treated it as a character flaw I needed to manage. I doubted myself, softened my edges, explained things away, and told myself I was being reasonable.

The trouble is, my body didn’t care about being reasonable. My body cared about safety, alignment and truth. It was keeping score even while my mind was busy negotiating with potential. But my body was telling me all I needed to know way before my logical brain kicked in.

Research shows that even mild, ongoing relational stress activates the body’s stress response. Cortisol levels rise, decision fatigue increases and creativity narrows. You’re not operating at full capacity because part of your system is busy monitoring for threats. When something is misaligned, your body knows it long before you articulate it.

My body was falling apart. I was tired….all…the…time. My eczema, which had been well managed, flared up. I got psoriasis on my scalp, which I hadn’t had since I was a child. I felt sick every day. Yet, I put it down to being busy.

My professional life has been built on discernment. I’m an award-winning journalist with more than 45 years’ experience. I’ve interviewed thousands of people, listened to polished answers, watched the micro-expressions, noticed the long pauses, and learned to hear what isn’t being said. That’s a journalist’s job: read between the lines and separate substance from spin. It’s also why I’m good at what I do now, helping entrepreneurs turn their experience into credibility, and credibility into visibility. I don’t just write. I dig, question and pull out what people don’t even realise is their strongest proof.

Which is why it’s mildly infuriating that, when the universe had something important to tell me, I ignored the tap. Not once but over and over again over a couple of years. Deep down I knew something was wrong but I told myself I was overreacting.

The first time I really noticed it was in a business partnership that looked perfect on paper. It had all the shiny things: aligned goals, complementary skills, and the promise of growth. Yet something about the early conversations left me feeling slightly off-centre. I couldn’t point to a specific sentence and say ‘ah ha, that’s it’. It was more a subtle tension beneath the surface, I felt it in my stomach but couldn’t explain it.

I did what many experienced, rational people do when faced with a feeling they can’t justify: I talked myself out of it.

I told myself I was overthinking, it was normal nerves and I didn’t want to be difficult. In journalism, you don’t lead with feelings, you lead with facts. Proof matters. ‘I don’t know why, but something feels off’ doesn’t pass the test of professional decision-making.

Here’s what I’ve learned: intuition isn’t a vibe. It’s data.

I didn’t make this up. Scientists have been studying our brains for a long time. Showing what makes us tick. Your brain is constantly processing information below the level of conscious awareness. Your amygdala, which is involved in threat detection, reacts faster than your rational brain can put language to what’s happening. Your nervous system picks up micro-signals in tone, inconsistency between words and behaviour, subtle power cues, and the emotional temperature in a room. You may not be able to explain it yet, but your body has already clocked something important.

Then your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that loves logic and tidy explanation, jumps in to smooth everything over. It dislikes uncertainty. It prefers a story that makes sense. It starts writing one for you:

• They didn’t mean it like that.

• You’re being too sensitive.

• Stop making a fuss.

If you’re someone who prides yourself on being fair and open-minded, you become spectacularly good at building convincing arguments against yourself.

Hope doesn’t help either. The heart attaches to potential. It wants things to work and invests big time in imagining the upside. It convinces you that discomfort is just the price of growth. Sometimes that’s true. Misalignment and growth can feel similar at the start, and that’s what makes the tap so easy to ignore.

When the tap is coming from another human, it often arrives in words. Not always obviously cruel words, but phrases that make you doubt your perception and hand them the power of reality.

You’re overreacting.

I never said that.

You’re trying to make me look bad.

Everyone agrees with me.

People warned me about you.

You always… You never…

You don’t understand…

You’re too sensitive, too defensive, too giving.

You’ve made me feel…

Or there’s the passive-aggressive version: silence, withdrawal, the slow punishment of being ignored until you come crawling back to restore the peace. This is where intuition gets tangled up in manipulation. Because when someone consistently uses language that reframes reality, shifts blame or subtly undermines your perception, it doesn’t just create conflict, it creates doubt. Doubt is fertile ground.

What we now understand about gaslighting is that it isn’t always a dramatic psychological warfare tactic. Often it’s slow, subtle and cumulative. It works because it chips away at your trust in your own perception. You begin to question your memory, interpretation and reaction. Gaslighting is poison to the soul because it disconnects you from yourself. It distracts you from taking decisive action because you’re busy analysing whether your feelings are valid. The person using these phrases may not even see themselves as manipulative, but the effect is the same: control through confusion. It causes doubt to fester, and keeps you stuck analysing tone and intent instead of taking action. The person using these phrases counts on that. They count on you being a thoughtful person who will examine yourself first and on you wanting harmony. They count on your generosity, because generous people are easier to manipulate.

This doesn’t happen in one day. It happens slowly, insidiously, wearing you down. You don’t realise you’ve been pulled in until you’re drowning and wondering how you got there. Before you know it, you’re not just in a partnership or relationship; you’re in a net being dragged to the depth of the ocean.

That’s why so many smart people get caught. It doesn’t make you weak or stupid to fall into this dynamic. In fact, quite the opposite. People who are generous, open and inclined to see the best in others are often the most susceptible. It's an incremental compromise.

The cost of ignoring your gut is rarely immediate, which is precisely why it’s so dangerous. You don’t get an instant consequence that teaches you a lesson. You get erosion. Energy is diverted into managing the emotional weather around the situation. Your mind starts replaying conversations. You become hyper-aware of moods, over-prepare and over-explain. Your confidence starts to wobble because you’re constantly questioning whether your interpretation is fair.

For someone like me, someone whose work is built on clarity and discernment, that kind of low-level tension is expensive. When I’m operating at my best, I can see the whole ecosystem around a business:

where the credibility gaps are, what proof points matter, what judges will care about, what visibility breadcrumbs need to exist so recognition becomes leverage rather than a one-off. I built a method around that long-game thinking. When I’m stuck in misalignment, my mind shrinks to survival. While my mind was negotiating,my body was keeping. I stop building the future and start managing the present.

Then the prefrontal cortex steps in, eager to restore order. It builds a story that makes everything seem reasonable. It smooths the edges. It reminds you of the benefits. It tells you not to overreact.

Eventually, the universe stopped tapping me on the shoulder and delivered an almighty slap around the head.

For me, that slap wasn’t theatrical or really obvious. It was like a series of taps that got more pronounced. One day, after another moment of gaslighting, my eyes opened and I could no longer pretend I didn’t see the pattern. I remember thinking, with a kind of calm disgust, ‘I knew.’ Not in a way I could defend, like I do in an award submission with facts, proof and evidence, but in the deep, undeniable way your nervous system knows when something is wrong.

That realisation was confronting because it forced me to examine a pattern. It wasn’t the first time I’d ignored my intuition. There have been three people in my life I can vividly recall where the taps were clear, and I overrode them anyway. Each time, I promised myself I would change. Be less accommodating, less open and trusting. I like who I am. I don’t want to become hard or suspicious as a default setting. I don’t want to shut down my generosity or my willingness to collaborate. Those qualities are part of my strength. They’re part of what makes me effective in my work and connected in my relationships.

The change isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s sharpening self awareness and self trust.

Listening to your gut doesn’t mean reacting dramatically. It doesn’t mean storming out or accusing someone of wrongdoing at the first sign of discomfort. It means pausing and thinking about what you are feeling, honestly, It means observing patterns rather than isolated incidents.

The cost of not listening is cumulative. It’s the slow erosion of confidence and the mental energy spent replaying conversations and a distraction from your bigger vision because you’re entangled in dynamics that don’t feel right. Over time, it can even narrow your world, making you hesitant to trust future opportunities.

The gift, if you’re willing to take it, is self-trust.

Every time you honour your inner voice, even in small ways, you reinforce the message that your perception matters, your thoughts count, they mean something, even if only to you. You are telling yourself that what you’re picking up is real, even if you can’t yet explain it to anyone else. Most of us don’t lose our way through one big mistake; we lose it through a thousand small moments where we override ourselves to keep the peace or please other people, even the ones you don’t know. You strengthen those neural pathways that say you can rely on yourself. Self-trust is a mighty powerful thing. It sharpens your decision-making and makes your boundaries crystal clear.

When you have certainty of self, you don’t need external validation.

The yogi’s story about the taps on the shoulder makes more sense to me now than it did back then. The universe doesn’t delight in knocking us down. It tries, repeatedly, to get our attention gently. The problem isn’t that the guidance isn’t there. It’s that we’re often too busy justifying, hoping or pleasing to hear it.

Your gut isn’t an inconvenience to be managed. It’s intelligence accumulated over years of lived experience. It’s pattern recognition operating faster than language. It’s your internal early warning system.

Hopefully, we learn from these experiences. Hopefully, next time, it doesn’t take a slap. It only takes a tap. Listening to that tap, really listening, not just with one ear bud in while juggling seven things at once, can save you years of pain, confusion and self-doubt.

Your heart will always be drawn to possibility. That’s human. But your gut reads patterns and notices what your heart wants to ignore. Your gut isn’t trying to ruin your plans. It’s trying to protect you.

The universe will keep tapping. The question is whether you’ll listen before it has to smack.

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