Body & Soul with Gail Harris

Health and Hunches:
Medical Intuitive, Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz

Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D. knows all about brains. She has a Ph.D. in neuroanatomy. And when she's not attending to her practice as a physician in Yarmouth, Maine, she is working as a medical intuitive, doing telephone consultations for clients she has not met and knows nothing of, save for their names and age. She has been doing such consultations for the past 10 years.
Schulz says she discovered, and then developed, her own intuitive powers as a student at Brown University as she struggled to cope with a sleeping disorder whose severity tended to closely track the ups and downs of her emotional life. She talked with Body & Soul's Gail Harris about intuition.
"Intuition is a sense all of us have. It's a capacity to make a correct decision with insufficient rational information.
"A study at the University of Iowa showed that a certain area in the brain, in the limbic system, is exquisitely important for intuition, and that intuition is an important sense to make reasonable, balanced decisions. When most people approach the word intuition, they think of some unusual, peculiar power. It really isn't. Intuition is something normal. It's a normal physiological process that's not just in our brain but in our body and in our sleep at night.
"If you don't use your intuition, you're actually at a disadvantage from people who do. You're disadvantaged to make correct decisions, and you're actually disadvantaged to see potential opportunities in your life.
"When we develop as children, the area [in the brain] for intuition is very well developed. It's the temporal lobe and a small area above it. However, there's an area in the frontal lobe that doesn't come on board until later on in life, after puberty. So as children, we have more access to our intuition, because the area in our frontal lobe that doubts our intuition, the area that tells us you can't possibly know this--the rule area in our brain--isn't on board yet. So as children we have unbridled intuition.
"As adults, the problem is that sometimes we fall in line, we want to be socially appropriate, so we do what we think we ought to do, rather than what our body senses. As a result, as we get older, sometimes intuition is harder to access.
"Men and women process intuition differently; one is not more intuitive than the other. It's true that women are wired for cyclical intuition. Think of the right brain as the more intuitive part and the left brain as the more intellectual, rational part. Women in the first part of their cycle are mostly in their left brain, in the intellectual, rational world. Once you hit ovulation, you go more into your right brain, so women are more intuitive in their premenstrual world.
"For most traditional men, their brains are compartmentalized. When they're in their left brains, they're in their left brains. When they're in their right brain, they're in their right brain. The departments in their brain are more segregated. And women go all over the brain to do tasks.
"When I work as an intuitive now, I try to immediately teach people how to listen to their intuition and their own body. That is, I'm teaching them to wake up to the signals in their body that are telling them through illness that something in their life needs to change."
Program Description
Belleruth Naparstek
Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz
Healing:Another Path
Tell Me More
Body & Soul is currently airing Monday-Friday at 7:00pm and 8:30pm on PBS YOU.

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