Amy Poehler Recalls a Time Her Intuition May Have Saved Her Life

The following is an excerpt from "Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition," a new book from Amber Tamblyn out on Oct. 18, 2022, which also features personal essays by Ada Limón, America Ferrera, Huma Abedin, Ayanna Pressley and more.

We all remember the famous scene in "Goodfellas": Karen (Lorraine Bracco) visits mobster Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and asks him for help. Her husband, Henry (Ray Liotta), has come upon hard times, and the guys in the mob don’t trust him anymore. Jimmy offers Karen money and some fancy Dior dresses and motions for her to take a walk down the alley and head around the corner. He kisses her and tells her, “Don’t worry.” She starts to walk, passing busted pinball machines and empty industrial storefronts.

She seems confused at first and turns to notice Jimmy watching her intently. She becomes concerned. So do we. Jimmy urges her to continue around the corner, and against her better judgment, she does. Slightly aggravated and buzzing with fear, Karen comes upon two men in a dark and dusty room. They are moving around large boxes. They are large themselves. One of them shushes the other as she approaches. She takes this in.

She looks back at Jimmy, who urges her again to make the turn into the room. Her fear finally runs the show. She lifts up her chin and hustles back to her car. “No, Jimmy, I’m in a hurry,” she says. “My mom’s watching the kids. I gotta get home.” She peels out and drives back to her house, sobbing. Her husband greets her, gun in hand. He asks her what happened. She doesn’t know how to answer. “I just got scared,” she says. “Nothing happened. I just got scared.”

This is what intuition looks and feels like. Small steps down a sketchy alley until your body tells you, "Run."

I was in college in Boston in 1991, walking down a tree-lined street just as the sun had dipped down for the night. I was feeling good. Free. My hands swinging by my side and my face up and open, watching the moonlight stream between the map of trees above me. I had just helped some college kids coax a cat out of a tree, and I was thinking about that cat and those kids when I heard fast footsteps behind me. I didn’t turn around or get scared or even stop my stride. I assumed it was someone out for a jog so I moved to my right to let them pass. Instead, a person came up behind me and slipped their arms under my swinging ones. My arms went up over my head, locked in by a much stronger set of arms. I remember my brain thinking of a half nelson, a wrestling term that describes a specific hold between an opponent’s arms. I might have laughed. I was relaxed. I must know this person and these arms; they must be just playing around. When I turned around, I saw the face of a man I did not know.

I must know this person and these arms; they must be just playing around. When I turned around, I saw the face of a man I did not know.

This is the part in the movie where we pause. Or better yet, we rewind. We watch me walk backward, getting smaller in the frame until all that is left is an empty street. We press play and watch me walk again, this time looking only at my face. We zoom in. We notice I am not noticing. We become aware of how unaware this girl with the swinging arms really is.

I grew up in the 80s, an era when adults were messy in real time, and social media wasn’t there to memorialize your mistakes. We kids let ourselves into our houses when we got home from school and pretended to be adults until the real ones came back. Adults didn’t check our search history or take us to therapy. Nobody was watching, so we watched what we wanted. We watched "Death Wish" and "The Exorcist" and "Behind the Green Door." We saw our friends’ parents drunk. Our teachers passed out in class. Our restaurant managers started fistfights with fry cooks. There was a reason the deeply talented, depressive Charles M. Schulz excluded adults from his Peanuts cartoons. We all knew that most of these people were full of s---. We nodded in unison during the Charlie Brown Christmas specials when the adult voices were portrayed as plaintive trombones. Wha wha wha wha wha. They weren’t saying anything important. Our parents never came to our schools. Even the best ones. The only time they arrived was to deliver bad news or baked goods. Parents went to work, and kids went to school, and we didn’t really share how either was going.

And yet, danger loomed all around us as a mix of kidnappings and devil worship. After-school specials warned us not to hitchhike and kept us up at night with visions of getting into cars with no handles on the inside. We drank from milk cartons with missing kids our age plastered across them. We went from No Nukes to No Means No to Just Say No. At the same time, we were taught to be strong and independent women. Express yourself! Ask for the beef! Wear sneakers during your commute, and don’t let anyone call you cute. Play through the pain. It was this complicated soup of self-sabotage that was served up as a way to listen to one’s inner voice. We were told to get quiet and listen to our heart, but it was hard to do that while we were encouraged to roar.

As a grown-ass woman, I now know how impossible a task it is to hold these two truths at the same time. How hard it is to take up your rightful space while still being hyperaware of how loud you are being. As I’ve gotten wiser over the years, I’ve learned that the quiet space is what we’ve all been overlooking. The very rare moment when our butterfly brain lands on a leaf and we are connected to the present moment for even just a few wing flaps. The quiet space is also the trick, the prize. It helps me read people in a loud room. It helps me understand my son even when he is not speaking. It helps me chip away at the lifelong practice of figuring out what I want first. It feels earned, this quiet. The quiet burns the rest away, and all that is left is the good part. The honest and real part. That’s why it is so hard to access, because one must sit in a fire to get there.

As usual, the Native Americans understood this first, and I often find myself thinking of this Lakota prayer:

Teach me how to trust

My heart,

My mind,

My intuition,

My inner spirit,

The senses of my body,

The blessings of my spirit.

Teach me to trust these things

So that I may enter my Sacred Space

And love beyond my fear,

And thus Walk in Balance

With the passing of each Glorious Sun.

I love this because it reminds me that I have a body, which my brain would like me to forget. And also, let’s get real, I love a list.

I also think of this.

In Sanskrit, there is the concept of maya, which comes from ancient Hindu philosophy. It’s a term that translates to magic, illusion and things not being what they seem. Freeing ourselves from this veil can be our spiritual path and can be done with stillness, concentration and prayer.

I love this because it reminds me that going inward is the best path. And also, let’s get real, I love a map.

So you get the point. We have to be quiet. And listen. Go slow. Keep checking in with that quiet space inside us and what comes from it.

So let’s return. Press Play and we’re back to the scene with the tree-lined street, back to my arms locked up high above my head by a man I do not know. And my body does what my brain refuses to do. It reacts. It bucks and tries to get away, and I stumble and fall. My body is the one that says, "Run, run, run." Not my brain, which hangs out in the lab like some computer nerd trying to figure out what equation they got wrong while the zombies are breaking down the door. It is my body that is the hero. The star. It releases adrenaline as I fall on my face and then scramble to my feet. It is my body that makes me turn around and see the man. A white man with brown hair who has eyes that seem much too big and much too open. It is my body that feels he must be on something. I increase my heart rate and pump my legs. I get up my stairs, up to my apartment, up to my bedroom where I sit for hours talking to roommates in an attempt to flatten it all out. I file all the hard lessons into small folders in my mind. Never walk that open and carefree again, I tell myself. Never trust the sound of running behind you. Never save cats.

As a culture, we are drawn to people who have listened to their gut and come out the winner because of it. The woman who has a bad feeling and doesn’t get on the plane. The mother who knows something is wrong with her child. The CEO who gambles with their company while everyone tells them they are crazy. What part of these decisions are luck or just timing? Or is it just God’s Great Big Plan? What part is instinct, and what part is intuition? Do we even know the difference between the two? Where intuition is the ability to know and understand something without conscious thought, instinct is far more primal, a fixed pattern of behavior that happens in any animal when prompted to do so. Intuition depends on instinct plus time, and feelings plus experience, like what happened to me that day I got away from a bad stranger.

It was a combination of many things that got me home safely that night. But what would’ve happened if my body had chosen not to listen to itself that night? What do you do if you dip inside your own head and hear nothing? What if you dig deep and all you find in the quiet space is an empty room? What if you ask yourself what to do and all that comes back is the sound of a dog barking nearby? Dead air and static. The wrong kind of quiet space. The dull nothing where little is felt and less is known. What then? How can you learn to listen?

It’s been 30 years since that night on the street with the stranger, and I am driving in Los Angeles, a city I am frankly still surprised I live in. I am more practiced at the quiet. Better at the listening. And many decades later, aware of how surprising people can be. Wary of new people but even more suspicious of nice ones. My Irish grandmother used to say, “Strangers should be a little strange.” I understand this better now. I used to take great pride in my ability to intuit a person or a behavior, but now I know that I am a bent weather vane. Sometimes my North points a little West, and the shadows it casts make it difficult for me to see when I am moving in the wrong direction and making the wrong assumptions.

I drive past a young woman on the median holding a sign. I can’t see what it says, but I clock a few things fast. She is young and slight and trying to get past a man. He has a wide-legged stance and seems to be blocking her way. It’s hot outside, that white, bright California light that makes everything feel like an operating room. This man is young, like her. He has his eyes closed, and his hands are open and faced up to the sky. It looks like he is waiting to catch something. A break, perhaps? Next to him is a sign and what looks like flowers. Perhaps that is what he is selling, but I can’t tell if they are together or if he is bothering her. I drive past them in five seconds, and my mind is whirling with questions. Are they in love? Does she need help? What is my voice telling me?

I decide to circle around, to give this voice and my brain and my eyes time to interpret — to understand. This time I see more clues. Context clues. She is pregnant. They are talking, interacting. She seems irritated or maybe nervous. They don’t see me.

I pull over and roll down my window. Immediately the cars behind me start to honk, and the self-righteous indignation I feel gives me the signal that I think I am doing a good thing. I clock this. I motion the woman to come toward my car. I ask her if she is OK. I ask her if the man is bothering her. Her answers are vague and detached, like she isn’t in her own body. She has soft brown eyes and holds her belly while she talks about being evicted from her apartment. I ask her if she is living on the streets or in a shelter, and then the conversation turns to her family, who doesn’t help her and never has. The beeping behind me is loud and incessant. I look again at him and at her. I try to see if they are a unit. I try to see if this is a bad thing or a good thing, knowing it is probably a complicated mix of both. I give her money. I drive away. I pull over a few blocks later and try to dig deep and understand what I am feeling. Let the quiet space take over so I can see what to take away from this interaction. I’m agitated. Numb. Savior-like. Ashamed of my assumptions. All of the things.

There is no easy answer here, and my intuition mixed with my quiet gives me no clear sense of what I saw. The feeling is an itch I can’t reach. Sometimes we don’t get the whole story, and we are left with the uncomfortable middle mess. The nauseous feeling of something missed. We are like Karen in "Goodfellas." We know something felt wrong, but the discomfort comes from not being able to figure it out.

Each day in the movie of my own life, I get better at knowing what the main character is going to do, even if the doing has an outcome I did not expect. Let’s just say I prepare to be surprised. I have a saying I use often: Good for you, not for me. It’s a way of saying I’m happy for other people’s choices, but I am very clear about which ones do not suit me at all. The main character in my life has an idea of who she is and what she likes. She will cook for the people she loves. She will not go to haunted houses. She will stand up for her friends. She will keep her head down when rowdy teens get on the subway. She will pick her battles and always watch carefully.

She is a mess of contradictions. She would never walk down a street at night swinging her arms. She will never let them take the swing out of her arms. She would never follow a guy down an alley for a free coat. She will follow a guy for less. She will do it wrong and do it right in a thousand different ways. Over and over. All the while, she will listen for the little sounds deep down inside her. The space that holds a small humming music box with a twirling ballerina inside, just waiting to be opened. Its quiet tinkling the softest messages that our girl can hear if she’ll only pause to listen.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com