Practical Intuition: How Carolyn Ulitsky Learned to Listen to the Body and Why It Changes Everything

She was in a corporate office managing mergers and acquisitions, with thirteen people reporting to her, when she walked into a church near the office and sat down. Not for a service. Not for prayer in any formal sense. Just to sit somewhere quiet enough to hear the baptismal font running water.

It took nearly an hour before she could hear it.

That moment told Carolyn Ulitsky something she has spent thirty years turning into a practice: the quieter she could get, the more she could hear. And what the body has to say, when you are finally still enough to listen, is always more than you expected.

Carolyn is the founder of Soma Wise Muscle Therapy, a Body Mind Practitioner, Certified Master Body Mind Coach, and author. Her work sits at the intersection of hands-on muscle therapy, somatic awareness, practical intuition, and the kind of honest, unhurried conversation that allows the body to say what it has been trying to say for years. She works with people navigating physical pain, life transitions, grief, and the uncomfortable space between who they have been and who they are becoming.

It began, like most things that last, with her own experience of being in a body that needed to be heard.

From corporate to the table

Carolyn did not plan to go into this work. She came from a family with a medical background, her mother a retired nurse and her father a retired respiratory therapist, and the expectation as a Filipino daughter was clear: nursing, if not the corporate path she was already on.

She spent years in corporate, eventually working in mergers and acquisitions from an HR perspective. It was high pressure, high volume work, and she was getting regular massages to try to manage the stress without getting a great deal of relief. But she noticed something when she was on the table. She liked watching what was happening. She felt a pull toward it that she did not yet have language for.

When the uncertainty and pace of mergers and acquisitions became incompatible with life as a mother of three small children, she needed to find something completely different. Massage school offered it.

The moment she took her first class, she says, she got lit up. That is when her intuition took flight.

Things dropping in

Carolyn’s experience of intuition is not dramatic in the way popular culture tends to portray it. She does not describe visions or clear voices. She talks about things dropping in.

In her early training, she would be working with a classmate at the table and simply know something. You are feeling sad right now. How do you know that? I can feel it. Can not you? Some of her classmates could not. She found that unsettling for a while, wondering why the experience was not universal. Over time she understood: this is her way. Not the only way. Just hers.

The other senses fill in the gaps, she says, when she is not too stressed to let them. When she was first starting out and working hard to find answers for clients, trying to make things happen, the information would not come. It was only when she learned to relax, to stop pushing, that the intuitive knowing could arrive. Making it happen, she discovered, does not work. The harder you push, the less you can feel.

For Carolyn, grounding is the prerequisite for all of it. She is a Capricorn, she notes with a smile, so being grounded is always number one. Before she can perceive anything useful for a client, she needs to feel her own feet. She needs to be fully in her own body, occupying it completely, before she can be present to someone else’s. When she is playing golf and hits a bad shot, she knows immediately: she is not here. She has not been present to the ball. The game is her body’s way of telling her to reground.

Where the pain is coming from

The idea at the centre of Carolyn’s practice is deceptively simple. Where you are feeling the pain is not where it is coming from.

She works backwards. She asks: when did this start? What was happening in your life when this came on? How are you standing? What are you thinking? And then she traces backwards from the symptom to the root, trusting that the body is pointing somewhere that the mind has not yet followed.

Soma means inner body. Wise is wisdom. The name she chose for her practice reflects the belief that the body is not a problem to be fixed but a source of intelligence to be understood. Most people find her after they have tried everything else: physical therapy, acupuncture, talk therapy, standard massage. And it’s not enough. So they go looking for something that meets the body at a different level.

One client had been managing jaw pain, neck pain, and constant, increasing migraines. She was highly intellectual, highly capable, and came to sessions with an extremely thorough account of everything that had been happening. When Carolyn noticed that the woman was telling her story without pausing to breathe, she pointed it out. The client was genuinely surprised. She had not noticed. When she took a breath, her neck and jaw began to soften.

Carolyn’s question to her: what are the top three things that really need to be completed today? Because you are not a machine. How much can you actually get done? And taking a thirty-minute break does not mean standing up and going to the water cooler. It means getting up, stretching, taking the deep breath you have not been taking.

By the time they moved to the table, the conversation had already started the work. The physical release followed the mental one. The client left understanding that her migraines were not a measure of how much inner work she had or had not done. They might simply be on their way out, the final intensity of a body trying to set something down.

Practical intuition

The word practical in Carolyn’s approach is not an accident.

For clients who live primarily in their minds, the word intuition can feel too abstract, too ungrounded, too difficult to act on. Adding practical makes it accessible. It gives the cognitive mind something to hold onto while the body does its work.

Practical intuition, in her practice, means being present to what is actually here right now, without imposing a story or rushing toward an answer. It means asking a question and waiting. It means trusting that the information is already in the body, and that creating enough stillness allows it to surface.

She does not always know where a question comes from. She will be working with someone and a question will arrive, something like: what was happening ten years ago? And the client will look surprised, and then slowly begin to remember something. An injury. A period of unusual stress. Something that happened not in the spot that hurts now but somewhere else entirely. The body has been holding it, waiting for someone to ask.

MIAA and the wedding flowers

Carolyn’s MIAA framework, mindful, intuitive, aligned action, is easier to understand through example than through definition. She offers the best one imaginable: her recent wedding.

She got caught trying to source particular flowers that were not in season. She was going far out into the future, planning and forcing and calculating costs. She was not present to what was actually available, or to what the day was actually about. When she came back to the present moment, the question became much simpler. What is available right now, in August, at the local farmers market? The answer was beautiful. The flowers were right there. They matched the colours. They were affordable. Nothing needed to be forced.

That is the framework in practice. Notice when you are pushing and why. Get real about what is actually aligned for this moment, not the imagined future one. Access the intuitive truth underneath the overthinking. And then take the action that is genuinely available right now.

She also danced the hula at the wedding, quietly, for her family, while wearing a dress she was slipping around in. Nobody noticed she was doing it. And it did not matter at all.

You have to be in the equation

One of the threads that runs consistently through Carolyn’s work is the cost of leaving yourself out of your own life.

She describes clients who are booking massages, booking appointments, filling their calendars, but not actually showing up for themselves when they get there, not putting the phone down, not being present, not adding themselves into the equation. Whether it is work, the children, the partner, the dinner, everyone and everything is accounted for. The person doing all the accounting is not.

She is clear that there are seasons of life where this is simply the reality, particularly when children are young and you are operating in deficit, and that is okay. But over time it is not the way to operate. The body will find a way to say so. She knows this personally: a severe rash across her face and hands appeared when she was adding new elements to her practice and not slowing down enough to let them settle. The more she tried to manage it and keep working, the worse it got. When she finally gave herself space and asked what it was trying to tell her, the answer was clear: slow down. And when she sat with that long enough, the rash began to recede.

The body is always talking. The only question is whether we have created enough quiet to hear it.

Not pushing

When asked for the one truth she wishes she had known earlier, Carolyn did not hesitate.

Not pushing.

If she had learned to listen better instead of pushing, she says, she might have got there a little sooner. Spared herself some of the stress and agony of trying to impose the answer when the answer was already available, waiting for her to pause long enough to receive it.

Thirty years of doing this work, and the lesson is still the same one. Stop. Breathe. Be here. Ask. And wait for what drops in.

To connect with Carolyn Ulitsky and explore Soma Wise Muscle Therapy, the MIAA framework, in-home workshops, and the Body Mind Italy trip, visit her website and subscribe for updates. https://somawisemt.co/