Before You Saw It Coming, Something You Already Knew

It is a quiet afternoon in a forest, and a teenager named Jon Young is doing something that looks, from the outside, like nothing at all.

He isn’t hiking. He isn’t collecting data or identifying species. He’s just sitting — fully present, senses open, letting the life around him come forward on its own terms. A naturalist named Tom Brown Jr. had suggested this, not as a lesson but as a practice: show up, stay long enough, let the forest stop treating you like an intrusion.

At first, Jon notices very little. The forest seems quiet, uneventful, still. But slowly, over many visits, something begins to shift — not in the forest, but in Jon. Sound arrives before sight does. In his debriefs with Tom, he comes to realize there are juncos near his sit-spot — small ground-feeding birds he can hear long before he can see them. He begins tracking where they move through the canopy, recognizing their sounds, learning the texture of their presence.

And then his awareness deepens into something else entirely. Sometimes the birds spread out, loose and relaxed. Sometimes they draw together, go quiet, become alert. And when they do, something else is always happening nearby — a hawk overhead, a fox moving through the undergrowth. The birds had already sensed it. Before Jon saw anything at all, the flock had read the change.

He wasn’t watching individual birds. He was reading the whole system.

I think about Jon and those juncos often, because what he was learning in that forest is exactly what the best intuitive practitioners I know have been quietly developing all along — and rarely get credit for.

You Already Know How to Read the Field

You’ve walked into a client session and known, before a word was spoken, that something was different today. Not because of anything visible. Because the field around them had shifted.

You’ve sensed mid-session that the real conversation hadn’t started yet — that what was being said wasn’t what needed to be said. You’ve felt a hesitation, a held breath, a quality of silence that told you more than the words did.

I’ve experienced this in my own work too. Sometimes it’s not even during a client session. It’s when I sit quietly with my own practice that I realize something has already shifted. The questions people are asking change. The dreams I have change. The conversations that arrive unexpectedly change. By the time I notice it consciously, my practice has often been moving in a new direction for weeks.

That’s not intuition as a gift you either have or you don’t. That’s relational intelligence — the capacity to read a living system, to notice when something has shifted before it announces itself. Jon developed it by returning to his sit-spot nearly every day for years. You’ve developed it by showing up for client after client, session after session, staying present long enough to know what normal looks and feels like — so you can sense when it changes.

Most institutions are not built for this kind of knowing. They run on agendas, measurable outcomes, information exchanged and decisions made. They move too fast to notice the juncos. They schedule the meeting, complete the agenda, and move on — while the quiet signals go unread until what was missed becomes impossible to ignore.

Your practice is built differently. This is one of the things that makes it matter.

What Changes When You Stay Long Enough

Here’s what Jon discovered, and it’s the part most people miss: it wasn’t only that he learned to read the system. Something changed in him.

The longer he sat in that forest — the more he showed up, stayed quiet, let himself be included — the more his perception itself shifted. He began to sense things he couldn’t have sensed before, not because he had gathered more information, but because he had become a different kind of participant. The forest hadn’t changed. Jon had changed. And that change made a whole new order of perception available to him, one that no amount of study from the outside could have produced.

Some forms of knowing are participation-dependent. They don’t become available by standing outside a living system and analyzing it. They emerge only after you’ve participated long enough for the relationship itself to begin teaching you.

This is what sustained presence in your practice actually does for you.

Every client who surprises you. Every session that goes somewhere unexpected. Every moment you sit with not-knowing long enough for something to clarify — these aren’t just experiences you’re accumulating. They’re changing what you’re capable of seeing. You’re not just getting better at your work. You are becoming a different kind of perceiver.

That’s not a small thing. That’s where the adventure really begins.

When the Business Feels Like It’s Not Working, Check the Field

One of the hardest moments in building a practice is when things get quiet in a way that doesn’t feel like peace — when clients aren’t flowing in, when your work feels flat, when the momentum you had six months ago seems to have gone somewhere without leaving a note.

Most of the advice you’ll find tells you to do more: post more, market more, try a different offer, change your messaging. And sometimes that’s right.

But sometimes what’s actually happening is that the field has shifted, and you haven’t sat still long enough to read it yet.

Jon didn’t learn what the juncos knew by moving faster through the forest. He learned it by staying. By resisting the urge to do something, anything, to fill the quiet. By trusting that presence itself was the work — and that perception would follow.

When your practice goes through a hard season, one of the most productive things you can do is become very, very still. Not passive. Not checked out. Still in the way Jon was still — fully present, fully attending, noticing what the system is actually telling you rather than what you’re afraid it means.

The birds knew something was coming long before it arrived. Not because they had better information. Because they were fully inside the field — responsive to its smallest shifts, perceiving what can only be perceived from the inside.

Your practice isn’t just something you manage. It’s a living relationship you’re participating in. It’s always sending signals. The question isn’t only whether you’re willing to watch carefully enough to read them. It’s whether you’re willing to stay present long enough to become the kind of perceiver who can see what they’re actually saying.

What Becomes Possible

There’s a moment Jon describes — and it’s the moment I find most useful for practitioners — when the flock tightens and he feels it before he sees it. Not a thought. Not an analysis. A felt sense, arriving ahead of the evidence.

That’s where sustained practice takes you, eventually. Not to certainty — the birds don’t guarantee the hawk won’t come. But to a relationship with your work that is alive and responsive rather than effortful and managed. To a business built less on pushing for outcomes and more on being genuinely present to what is actually unfolding.

That’s the adventure nobody tells you about when you’re setting up a practice. The strategy matters. The offer matters. The messaging matters. And underneath all of it, something else is growing — something that can only grow from the inside out, through presence, through practice, through showing up again and again until the system starts to trust you enough to show you how it actually works.

The juncos knew something was coming. Jon learned to know it too.

So will you.

Tomorrow, before you write another post, redesign your website, or worry about attracting clients, spend ten quiet minutes simply asking: What is my practice already trying to show me? Don’t rush to answer. Listen the way Jon listened to the juncos. You may discover the conversation has already begun.

Jan Anderson
Your Healing Business
Jan@YourHealingBusiness.com

P.S. What has your practice been quietly trying to tell you lately? I’d genuinely love to hear. Leave a comment below—or, if you’re curious what your own “juncos” might already be noticing, let’s explore it together. Click here, Let’s Chat.