Listen to the audio version below.
If you want to get in touch with your intuition, forget everything you know.
Your mind is an impressive library, filled with facts and knowledge that you’ve gathered along your journey, but it’s no help in understanding the magic of intuition.
In fact, your mind can be a major liability, at least at first. But once you train your mind to allow for the intuition’s wandering style, they can become quite good allies.
Take it from me – a book smart intuitive witch of a thing.
My Intuitive Awakening
When people find out that I’m intuitive, their first question is if I have always been intuitive.
Yes, I tell them, but just like you, I didn’t always know it.
My intuitive expansion began with a psychic in New Orleans. This was 1997, a time when I relied heavily on my intellect to solve my problems. The only visions I saw at that time were of me working toward a PhD.
But then this woman appeared, sitting at a folding table in Jackson Square, wearing a turban and red lipstick and shuffling a deck of tarot cards. I figured I’d spent $20 on worse things and dropped a bill in her box.
That afternoon she dropped the bomb that changed my life. She told me that my grandmother, who had died when I was three, was present with me. She’s protecting you, the psychic told me.
Okay, great, I thought. Anyone can say that.
Then she pinched her eyes shut, listening closely. Her name is Nita, she told me.
My grandmother’s name. Not even her real name but her nickname, what her friends and family called her.
It erased any doubt I had about the possibility of psychic powers.
Psychic Permission
As mind blowing as she was, that New Orleans psychic wasn’t the one who introduced me to my own ability to see energy (more on that later). What she did for me – and what I aim to do for you now – is allow me to believe that intuition exists. She gave my mind the permission to know that some things cannot be seen, but still are true.
Yes, all we need to develop psychic powers is permission to believe they are real.
This permission slip is a little trick for the mind. Just like believing that the wifi that allows you to read this post works in invisible patterned waves that can be detected by certain instruments, we can tell our minds that other invisible waves exist that allow us to sense truth, lies, and names of dead grandmothers.
Visions
My third eye truly opened when I met my first spiritual teacher, Tamara Wells, in 2001. She was a witch and an intuitive (a little on the crazy side, but that was part of the appeal) who had trained my girlfriend.
The day I met her, I sat on a rock along Boulder Creek as she gave me a healing. I didn’t quite understand what she was doing as she waved her hands around, but she said several things about me that were so accurate they caused me to blow past my logical mind and ask if she would teach me.
I had no idea what I was signing up for, but a little voice told me I could not say no to whatever this was.
Voices in Our Heads
That little voice I heard was my intuition. I heard other voices, of course, telling me this was bogus, made up, coincidental, that I needed to get back to my grad school plans. But one voice, patiently persistent, kept coming through.
That patient persistence is the pinnacle of the voice of the intuition.
You have this voice too, but you may not know what it sounds like. So let me share a tip – it doesn’t always sound like an actual voice speaking (though it can). Just like seeing an aura doesn’t always show up as clearly as you can see your hand (though it can). The signals of intuition are often subtle. Like all subtle things, we must be still for long enough to notice they exist.
Be Still and Listen
This is truly the wisdom of intuition – it asks us to slow down and see that we are being guided quite clearly by forces that often remain unacknowledged.
Everyone is capable of developing the tools to read the signals of these forces, but only if we know how to play the game. When we are frantic, bouncing from one shiny object to the next, or convinced that the urgent, demanding voice of the ego is our best guidance, the wisdom of intuition cannot be heard as easily.
Perhaps this is why being still is a prescription in nearly every spiritual practice that has ever existed – a good, long pause will do wonders for your ability to listen and learn from your inner voice.
Your Body, the Oracle
While the thought of intuition often brings about ideas of powerful visions or urgent messages from beyond, the most accessible place to find your intuitive voice is in the body’s felt sense.
Every time life throws something your way, your body responds. These responses – a tightened jaw, a relaxed hand, a visual shift – are intuitive signals of yes or no. Your body’s responses usually require interpretation, which is where a well-trained mind is an ally. Logic and rationale are not your friends in this part of the quest, but discernment and open wonder – staples of what yoga identifies as the buddhi, or higher mind – are.
The buddhi can support the intuition in offering explanations of the signs your body registers. Was the tightened jaw because of actual danger or because that person reminds you of someone who was dangerous to you? Was the yes an actual yes or did you just feel bad saying no?
Don’t expect 100% certainty in either your intuition or your interpretation, because if you’ve read this journal long enough you know that certainty doesn’t exist in anything in life. Instead, aim for greater self-understanding every time you notice a signal, using it as an opportunity to notice your unique triggers.
But when you do read something correctly, remember that the rule of intuition is that the more you recognize its existence, the more it exists, so celebrate yourself without end.
The True Power of Intuition
As you play with giving yourself permission for intuition to appear, I’ll share with you advice I got early on: don’t chase parlor tricks.
Intuition is powerful, but its most extraordinary use is as a divining rod to follow what’s juicy in your life. It’s far less compelling as a form of entertainment (as in, guess what number I’m thinking of). Whether you hone your own skills or ask for another’s guidance, remember that the purpose of the intuition is to shine awareness on who you are, what you want, and what you have to offer the world.
Ask that New Orleans psychic – what she gave me was far greater than my dead grandmother’s name; she opened the door for me to do the work that I am called to do.
I couldn’t have done it without her permission.
