Honing Your Intuition
to Receive More
Angelic Guidance
Your intuition is the most common way you receive messages from your angels. It’s also the most common way to receive messages from your soul or higher self, your spirit guides, loved ones who have passed on, and Spirit itself.
Intuition is something that every human posseses. Unfortunately most people rarely explore or hone their intuition, and without regular exercise this important muscle will atrophy. The following chapter gives you a chance to reflect upon and examine your own natural intuitive abilities and preferences, as well as offers you exercises to improve them.
Your Individual Intuitive Makeup
Intuition—or sixth sense—is something every human is born with, without exception. However, some people will naturally have a stronger sense of intuition than others, just like some people are natural athletes. Did you know a few kids growing up who seemed to be good at every sport they tried? Basketball, football, hockey, baseball, track, skateboarding, mountain climbing, tennis—sure, these kids probably didn’t participate in all of those activities. But these natural athletes were picked first for every team, because the whole school knew that no matter the rules or the game or the equipment or even their lack of experience with a particular sport, these kids would be exceptional players.
Similarly, you probably knew kids in school who were natural musicians. Or natural scholars. Or natural artists. Or popular kids who were naturally good with people. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us figure out a few things we are just naturally good at (nurturing, organizing, humor, etc.). Some people will find it easy to get regular intuitive information from angels and the spirit world through a variety of ways: clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience, claircognizance, dreams, etc.
I am not a natural athlete—as a child, my family bestowed upon me the sarcastic nickname Grace. I remember when I tried out for the basketball team in junior high. “You’re so tall, Tanya,” one of the coaches told me, “that I think you’d be a natural for basketball.” I got excited, picturing myself racing up and down the court covered in sweat, scoring the winning points just as the final buzzer sounded. The coach was all smiles the day I came to try out. “Okay, just dribble the ball,” she said. I did—pretty much.
“Now, don’t look at it while you dribble.” I couldn’t dribble successfully without always sneaking a peek at the ball. “Try walking around while you dribble,” the coach said wearily. Man, she might as well have asked me to sprout wings and fly to the moon. I showed up for practice for a few weeks, but didn’t improve. Finally the coach told me that I was welcome to join the team, but I probably wouldn’t get to play very often.
Track seemed safest—you didn’t have to deal with a ball or interact with other players. I tried short distances, middle distances, long jumps, high jumps, hurdles. At last I found my event—long distance! I wasn’t the best in my school, but I was second best. And when we went to meets I usually placed and earned a ribbon. I wasn’t a natural athlete, but I could run long distance and hold my own. And I honestly loved running, as well as the camaraderie of being part of a team. Track also taught me how to push myself beyond my known limits—a lesson I still value.
You might be as naturally gifted at intuition as I am at sports. That doesn’t mean you have no intuition, it just means you will have to practice a little harder to find your intuitive niche, or the best way you receive intuitive guidance. In other words you’ll have to find your long-distance race. Maybe feeling or knowing or hearing or seeing guidance is easiest for you, or maybe even two of those feel natural. The best way to discover your intuitive niche is to play with several methods, and this chapter will help you get started.
If you’re naturally very intuitive you’ve probably already figured this out about yourself. I figured it out as a child, when my brother and I started playing an intuition game when I was twelve and he was nine. My brother owned some flash cards that were solid colors. Each card was glossy and either a bright red, blue, yellow, or green. I’d seen a television documentary about a psychic institute where they tested an individual’s psychic abilities with various exercises, and my brother and I came up with a game using his cards to test our intuition.
My brother would turn away from me and I would close my eyes. Then he would pick one of the cards and say, “What color card am I holding now?” I could always guess what color he was holding because that color would flash into my mind within a few seconds of his asking the question. It was uncanny how I could always guess the correct color and my brother and I were both struck by my accuracy. Once I remember being upset because I thought he’d stumped me—or that I was losing my intuitive ability. Several times in a row I could not guess the color of the card he was holding, because I kept seeing two colors in my mind every time he asked the question. “I don’t know,” I told him with my eyes closed. “I keep seeing two colors at once today. Right now I see green and yellow. I see both equally. I can’t make a good guess.”
“Oh my gosh!” my brother said. “I was trying to trick you so I have been holding two cards at once. That time I held both green and yellow at the same time!” My brother was only nine, but he had the emotional maturity to accept that what I was doing wasn’t something weird or bad, but just a natural talent. He was very complimentary to me about this ability and made me feel like it was something cool. My brother could not guess the color of one of those cards to save his life (we tried a lot). However, my brother is a natural athlete. Watching him play football growing up was really a pleasure for me, because it’s always fun to watch a person do something they do really well, and completely naturally. It is then that we are seeing their God-given talents, a glimpse of the divine. We can’t all be good at everything. How boring would that be? Having a few things we do really well can give us clues about our soul purposes, and let’s us contribute to the world by being of unique service to others.
If you are naturally highly intuitive, you probably have one method of receiving information that is dominant (for me this is clairaudience, hearing intuitive information like a voice in my mind). However, it should be relatively easy for you to improve your intuitive abilities in other areas with practice and intention. Only in the past few years have I started getting regular clairvoyant guidance (receiving mental images), and that relatively new skill is getting stronger by the day. I did not try to gain this skill, but as I focused more upon, trusted, and studied intuition, clairvoyance naturally came on line for me. Now that I have clairvoyance in my bag of tricks, I can honestly say I get regular intuitive guidance and information by all the methods outlined here. Highly intuitive people should avoid whichever way you usually receive information in the exercises below, and concentrate on another method to increase and balance your overall intuition. You’ll enjoy the novelty of getting information in a new way!
If you aren’t naturally highly intuitive, all the following exercises will be powerful for you. However, you should pick one method of receiving intuitive information and concentrate on that one for a while before moving on to another. As a way to practice honing your intuition, let your gut instinct guide you to the method you will concentrate on first. Which one sounds most interesting or exciting to you? Which one are you drawn to when you read through the exercises? That is the method that will probably come most naturally to you. Once you commit to trusting and utilizing your sixth sense, you will probably be amazed at just how intuitive you are!
Asking the angels for guidance doesn’t usually work well when you ask for something specific or on a timetable (for example, asking to see a white feather this Saturday afternoon). So with each of these exercises below, it’s best that you practice every day by simply staying open to receiving intuitive messages of all kinds at any time. It can be very powerful to start a journal that is entirely devoted to recording intuitive guidance you receive from your angels. This will increase your sense of commitment to these intuitive exercises and increase their sense of importance to you.
Angel Affirmation: Just like my soul, my intuitive abilities are unique. Everyone has a sixth sense, and with study and practice I can hone and increase my intuition.
Clairaudience Exercise
Clairaudience means hearing intuitive messages. We all have voices in our heads, and often it’s the ego talking. But there can be other voices too, voices that speak in calm tones and offer unexpected insight into our lives. This is one way the angels will contact you. You’ll know you are getting intuitive information from the world of Spirit if the voice sounds like it is not your own, speaks in brief, concise sentences, and says something that doesn’t feel like a thought you’ve had running around your head before. The information will be a surprise or remarkably insightful.
I had a fun clairaudient moment when I was preparing to shoot the author photo for this book. Jewelry is an obsession of mine, and I wanted just the right necklace to wear in my picture. I looked through my jewelry, picked out several necklaces, but could never decide on one. I knew it was silly to overthink it so much but I wanted to choose a necklace that would send the right message, one that captured the energy of the angel realm. Even if the picture was too small to really show the necklace, the right piece of jewelry would give me good energy for the photo, energy potential readers could feel when they looked at my picture.
Finally I gave up, and one evening while I was out of town for the weekend, I went for a walk. As I admired the brick buildings and cobblestone streets of the place I was visiting, in the dusk light I noticed a little boutique’s pretty window display. I’ll just go look at their jewelry for fun, I thought. Half-moon pendants, colorful crystal rings, bronze feather bracelets—this was really my kind of jewelry! Just then Chrissie Hynde’s song “I’ll Stand by You” started playing over the store’s sound system. I smiled—it’s my personal guardian angel song, and I’d been hearing it a lot since I started working on this book (see chapter 6 to find your own guardian angel song). I started examining each piece of jewelry closely and gasped when I saw a sweet gold heart pendant with a little moonstone. The necklace automatically reminded me of my aunt Kristen. Kris collects hearts, and her gentle, loving energy completely matches that of the angels. I looked at my phone and realized it was almost seven o’clock. “I’m sorry,” I told the clerk, “are you about to close?”
“No,” he said. “Keep looking. I’m just trying to figure out this music. I want to change the station but the system won’t let me.”
I smiled. I knew who would not let him change the station! My guardian angels. I left and told the clerk I might be back in the morning for the heart necklace.
When I got back to my hotel I couldn’t decide if I should buy the little heart necklace or not. Then, as I was sitting on the bed thinking it over, a voice in my head said, “It was made for you.” I remembered how my guardian angel song started playing right after I walked in the shop. I thought it was just a reminder from my angels that they were with me. Had it really been a sign about the necklace? I thought. Then a voice in my head said, “What more sign do you need?” I knew it was my angels speaking, and I’m so glad I got the necklace, which I am wearing in my author picture.
If you are good at public speaking or writing, are naturally chatty or articulate, or have a love for the written word and are an avid reader, you might lean toward clairaudience.
Every morning when you wake up, ask, “Dear guardian angels, please send me messages as thoughts spoken inside my head. Let these messages give me insight into my life, inspire me, and comfort me.” As you move through your days, try to keep your mind still and quiet as much as possible. This will help you hear your angels better, as they won’t be fighting to get a word in between your own thoughts—many of which are the same thought running over and over on a loop in your mind. Quieting your mind will help you recognize an angel’s voice as it will stand out more.
At the end of each day, sit down for ten minutes and record any message you believe you heard from your angels in a journal. Keep doing this every day for a month, and at the end of each week make note of how this exercise is changing for you, any observations you’ve made, if you acted on any of this clair-audient guidance, which guidance was especially helpful, and if you are receiving more messages as the weeks go on.
Clairvoyance Exercise
This exercise will help you increase your ability to see angelic guidance. Angels can give you information in the form of pictures. These pictures can be straightforward, or they can be a metaphor. When I wrote the section of this book about fear (see chapter 10), I tried to think of a way to describe how angels are actually more present in our lives in times of crisis, and I got a flash of a firefighter grabbing equipment and racing down a pole. The angels told me, through pictures, that when we are terrified, it’s like an alarm sounding in the angel realm, and all our angels go on red alert and kick into high gear. As you get more comfortable with images as angelic guidance, you will get better at interpreting the pictures angels send you.
If you are a visual person who enjoys art, film, photography, and design, if beauty and fashion are important to you, or if you are a visual artist or are good at drawing, you might naturally lean toward clairvoyance.
Every morning when you wake up, ask, “Dear angels, please give me insight into my life today through images. Let these images be fully formed and colorful and intriguing. Let them catch the attention of my mind’s eye and help me understand their meaning.”
Then every evening in your journal record any intuitive images you received that day. Explain them in words, but it can also be fun to draw them in your journal too—especially if you were blessed with the ability to draw well. (I’m a stick figure gal.) Record all the details and colors and people in these images. Spend some time jotting down a few theories about what the angels might be trying to communicate through this image, and then decide which theory resonates most with you. Repeat this exercise every day for a month. At the end of each week, evaluate how the images change. Are they getting more simple or complex? Are they in color or black and white? Do they come more often? Do they contain motion, like mini movies? Are you getting better at interpreting their meanings?
Angel Exercise:
Receive Dreams as Angelic Guidance
Angels can come to us while we sleep, and send dreams that act as premonitions, perhaps giving us a glimpse into the future of our career or romantic relationship. Angels can also give us powerful guidance through dreams, offering detailed information that our own minds could have never known. I once had an angelic guidance dream that was very simple—just the word “chromium” in big letters. I wasn’t familiar with this word, and had to look it up online. Turns out it is a mineral that, in some folks, can help stabilize blood sugar, something I needed help with then. Yet another dream gave me information about a friend. She’d recently had a baby, and in my dream there was something seriously wrong with the child (in my waking life, to the best of my knowledge, the child was perfectly healthy). In the dream I kept telling my friend there was something very wrong with the child, but that it could be easily fixed if she just went to the doctor. “Take the baby to the hospital now,” I told her in the dream. “They can help. But you must go—it’s serious.” In the dream it felt very urgent. When I woke up I was afraid to call my friend, a new mother, and tell her this information. I didn’t want to frighten her unnecessarily. Even though I felt this dream was a premonition, I tried to convince myself that this was probably something that would happen in the future, when the child was older, and that I could share the dream with my friend when she was recovered from the delivery and was feeling more confident as a mom. After all, I’d spoken to her several times on the phone and the baby was fine. About two weeks later my friend called. “Turns out the baby was in serious trouble, but no one realized it,” she told me. A quick trip to the hospital solved the problem, just as my dream predicted.
If you often have vivid dreams, often remember your dreams, have had dead loved ones visit you in dreams, have experienced premonition dreams, find it easy to get lost in daydreams, or have an active imagination, receiving angelic guidance through dreams might come naturally to you.
Every night before you go to bed, ask, “Dear angels, please send me intuitive guidance through my dreams. Help me remember these dreams when I wake up, and give me the courage to share these dreams with loved ones if I feel there is a message in the dream for them—even if the message may be hard for them to hear.”
As soon as you wake up each morning, record any dreams you feel may have been guidance from your angels—this way you won’t forget or alter any of the details over the course of the day. Guidance dreams will usually be ones you remember vividly, sense are very important, give you specific information, give you specific dates, offer insight into a loved ones’ problems, give information that comes as a shock to you, or information you could not explain how you received other than via an angel.
Some Final Notes on Intuition
If you feel that something is angelic guidance, trust that feeling. The more you pay attention to and act on intuitive guidance, the more you will receive it. Again, always run any potential angelic guidance through your own common-sense filter and gut instincts. Intuition is a sense that every human possesses. Like a muscle, your intuition will increase and strengthen the more you exercise it, whether you are naturally intuitive or not. The better you take care of yourself (food, shelter, physical and emotional health) the better your intuition will become. If none of these exercises resonate with you, try playing with some of the other intuitive methods of receiving angelic guidance described in the previous chapter.