Three Wise
Inner Guides
“You are beginning to understand, aren’t you?
That the whole world is inside you:
in your perspectives and in your heart.”
—unknown
In this chapter, we’ll be looking at the three inner guides that influence and inform you. We’ll start with ancient gut instinct. Next, we’ll look at wholehearted intuition, then we’ll get into inspiring insight. Following that, we’ll discover the importance of alignment and flow when living within this kind of self-awareness and how to move into a state of inner harmony with ease.
Guide 1: Instinct
The role of your gut instinct is to keep you safe in every area of your life and to help you avoid what is not aligned with your highest truth. It’s the protective energy in and around your belly that is formed within your unconscious mind, your physical gut, and the primal spirit of this area. Instinct works on such an unseen level and is taken for granted because we rarely consciously access what’s in there. However, when you get to know how your instinct works, you can heal and nourish it to feel grounded and safe.
Evolution of Instinct
Your instinct lives in your gut, which is connected physically and energetically to the reptilian brain. The reptilian brain, located at the central base of the brain, controls the body’s primal and vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature, balance, and self-preserving behavior patterns. This part of the brain is automatic, compulsive, and innate, and it keeps you alive through your well-formed instinct that constantly and unconsciously monitors the environment around you.
Your gut instinct has been part of you since the moment you were conceived, but its roots are ancient. Your instinct contains all the mastery for staying alive that your ancestors have accumulated since the emergence of the human species. In general, every single human being possesses the same general instinctive behaviors, but due to fluctuations along bloodlines—where familial instinct is honed—you will express them in different ways. In other words, your family history shapes your inherited instinct in subtle but powerful ways. If you never feel completely safe, it may be because your ancestors lived through war. If you always feel safe and grounded, you may have come from family who lived simpler lives connected to the land. There’s so much more to it than this, and there are many reasons why your instinct has a particular way of influencing you.
As you can imagine, your childhood also shapes your instinct. Whether you were taught to fear hell or spiders, experienced traumatic or intense situations (and possibly forgot or repressed them), or were taught about how uncertain the world is—all the early beliefs you created have an impact on your instinct.
Everything positive you experienced as a child also makes a difference. Deep feelings of love, worthiness, safety, security, and belonging give your instinct a healthy foundation. Whatever your childhood looked like, it will generously color your impulses, reactions, urges, and beliefs that subtly but powerfully direct your life. The more you heal your past, family line, beliefs, and body, and the more you create ways to feel safe and secure, the more effective and grounded your instinct will be.
When in a healthy state, your instinct is loving, practical, useful, helpful, lifesaving, grounding, and informative. If it’s unbalanced, it may feel like you’re never safe, you don’t belong, life is difficult to process, or you’re not worthy enough. There are many ways to heal these imbalances, which we’ll get to later on.
Unconscious Mind
The mind as a whole is made up of three layers: conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Each works closely with your inner guides. The “mind” is described in many ways: as an unlimited field of information located in and beyond your brain, as the consciousness in each of your cells, or as the center of your experiences and interactions with the world. The brain, heart, and gut are also thought of as being the three “minds” of your being.
However your mind works and wherever it lives, it’s good to at least understand the three layers and how they relate to each of your inner guides. Think of your mind as an iceberg with your unconscious mind—the largest part by far—as the section underwater (under consciousness), while the subconscious is the majority of the ice above the water, and the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg.
The conscious mind is aware of anything you consciously direct your attention to. The subconscious mind holds information that you can easily recall. And the unconscious mind is packed full of life experiences and information that you cannot remember.
The unconscious mind is deeply connected to your instinct. Psychologists have discovered that this part of your mind is the underground warehouse of all your past experiences that have been forgotten or repressed. You can’t consciously access your unconscious mind right now—there’s no way to see what’s in there while in your normal, day-to-day conscious state—but it’s an important and impactful part of your mind. It’s where your automatic responses, deep beliefs, unthinking habits, and instinctive behaviors come from. It’s the foundation of your entire mind, even though you don’t consciously know what’s in there.
The ego comes from your personal instinct. The ego is a culmination of the fear-based voices of the caregivers, elders, teachers, and peers of your childhood. It loves to dominate, control, judge, complain, argue, and enforce the false idea of smallness (the opposite of your Highest Self) and separateness (the opposite of oneness). When you become conscious of your ego from the loving spaciousness of your Soul’s perspective, it loses its power, which wasn’t real anyway. It never disappears, but as you grow into a more peaceful and inclusive way of being, you’re free to live according to love.
With curiosity and devotion to growth, you can nourish your instinct by bringing awareness and healing to your unconscious mind. Automatic writing, journaling, meditation, breathwork, and many forms of movement and exercise can help shift stuck unconscious energy or emotions, thoughts, and beliefs. We’ll take a look at these exercises in the second part of the book.
Once you’ve finished this book, if you still feel like you have parts of your unconscious mind, outdated beliefs, your shadow side, or instincts to heal, I recommend finding a healer who can go deep with you in person. I’ve personally found immeasurable healing from psychologists who practice hypnosis or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), homeopaths who pair counseling with powerfully healing remedies, chiropractors who use neuro-emotional technique (NET), quantum kinesiologists, and shamanic healers who use ancient healing methods to traverse into your underworld and bring light to the shadows within.
When you understand the hidden, unconscious parts of yourself, you’ll discover how you have always been driven by what you cannot see, and how ultimately you can connect deeply within to feel deeper peace and listen with ease to the protective voice of your instinct.
Gut Center
Your gut is the physical core of your instinct, as it (as well as your brain and heart) houses countless neurons (brain cells), which shows that it has a real intelligence. Your gut, brain, and heart actually each have a mind of their own, and they’re all linked to each other by the vagus nerve. This nerve is the longest and most complex cranial nerve that connects the brain with the heart, gut, other organs, and beyond into your blood vessels. It carries information both ways—from the brain down to the lower organs and back up again—in a flash. It’s what I call the parasympathetic scenic route, because when it’s switched on—through meditation, deep breaths, yoga, chanting, or humming—you’re in rest-and-digest mode. You feel at ease, mindful, grounded, and able to connect with a peaceful way of being. When you are calm, your organs, including your gut, are able to send positive, healing messages to your brain, which naturally influence the instructions that the brain gives to the body as a whole.
When you’re stressed, you jump out of this way of being and into what I call the sympathetic highway. When your sympathetic nervous system is switched on, you’re in fight-or-flight mode. Stress, traffic, screens, poor sleep, an unhealthy diet, and many other factors contribute to this survival response in the body. This rushed and frenetic way of doing is not conducive to living mindfully as it throws you deep into your fear-driven thoughts and the chaos and turbulence of the external world. It puts you on edge and prepares you (usually unnecessarily) for danger, which makes it harder, if not impossible, to tune in to your inner world.
As it goes, you’re either in one state or the other. When you actively relax your body, you’re strengthening your connection to your inner wisdom by nourishing your vagus nerve. When you unconsciously or purposefully search out or create stress in your life to get an adrenalin hit, you’re denying and blocking yourself from your own truth that yearns to be heard.
The sensations of your gut instinct can be feeling sick, nauseous, or squeamish, indicating that whatever you’re faced with has the potential to make you unwell, be it outdated food, plane turbulence, or a mouse in the kitchen. Sometimes you’ll feel off or wary, but there won’t be any obvious reason for this. Energetically, this is your instinct working on a subtler realm, informing you of a harmful or misaligned object, person, or situation that you might not be consciously aware of.
Researchers have discovered powerful communication from the gut to the brain that indicates our instinct is strongly linked to the gut.2 In an interesting review of the way the gut communicates with the brain, it was noted that signals along the vagus nerve from the gastrointestinal tract act as a red flag by cutting off the reward systems in the brain so that we’re directed to avoid dangerous situations. In other words, physical feedback from the gut to the brain is protective and encourages us to be cautious whenever anything potentially harmful is near.
This is another reason why it pays to meditate or do yoga regularly. When your vagus nerve is healthy and communicating freely and fluidly, it can easily guide your brain so that you are likely to steer clear of whatever isn’t right for you.
Your instinct also generates automatic and reflexive responses. When you burn your finger, you swiftly remove your hand from the source of heat before your mind is aware of what happened. You might see the shadow of a bird about to swoop and duck your head instinctively. Your foot may hit the brakes of your car before you can see another car pull in front of you without a signal. Your five senses feed your instinct constantly so that you can react instantaneously.
Physical and emotional gut-centered healing has endless benefits that go beyond healthy digestive function. If the physical gut is out of balance, your instinct may be overly fearful, unnaturally sensitive, or stuck in past issues or trauma, which may numb or fragment its power, alertness, and ability to keep you grounded and feeling safe. Looking at it from a different angle, when healing fears or past traumas, you’re strengthening the gut function and related instinctive communication.
Take care of your gut. Eat intuitively. Breathe deeply. Nourish yourself.
Primal Spirit
You are your Soul, the watcher, the oldest and wisest part of you. At your core, you are the eternal energetic presence of love and light, the nonphysical being that transcends time and space.
Your Soul is the spiritual guidance center that works with your mind, body, and spirit. Your enduring spirit is the energetic expression of your Soul that influences your mind and body. Your spirit is part of the unseen energetic matrix. We often describe energy as something we have rather than something we are. We are all energetic beings, as is everything around us. Everything. Everything that looks alive, solid, or empty is all energy. Anything that is alive—people, animals, trees, plants, flowers, crystals, rocks, earth, water, food—has an energetic presence emanating from its Soul called its spirit.
Your thoughts, emotions, speech, and activities all have their own energy and will affect how your spirit as a whole vibrates and, therefore, how you feel energetically. When your spirit is light and sparkly or dense and murky, it’s no accident; you caused it to be that way. And it will without a doubt affect everything within and around you.
What we’re learning now through science is what the intuitive teachers and mystics have always taught about energy: we live in an energetic matrix where our inner experience affects the waves of energy all around us, and the waves of energy around us have the potential to affect our inner experience as well. Everything is connected, and everything we think, believe, say, or do matters and makes a difference.
There is a sacred essence to your instinct, a swirling of energy that is out of your conscious reach. The effect you have on others, the way you manifest in your life, the blocks that are in the way of happiness, and the repetitive nature of your relationships, habits, complaints, and blessings are all directed by the energy created from your unconscious mind.
To heal your unconscious beliefs and programs is to heal the energy that charges your instinct. This opens you up to your unlimited potential; without the ego’s commentary and the shadows of survival tripping your every step, you are liberated in your pursuit of purpose, abundance, satisfaction, and love.
The scientific understanding of your energy focuses on the electromagnetic field (EMF) around your body. Each organ, including the stomach, has an EMF. The EMF around your gut extends out into the lower vibrations of your environment to discern if you’re safe, and, if not, what is interfering with your safety. This could be anything from an unsafe dark street to an ill-intentioned animal, an unsteady bridge, a storm brewing, an energy vampire amongst your friends, or a misaligned career move.
Your mysterious and age-old instinct is a master teacher in your life. As you heal the deepest parts of you, it will guide you ever more powerfully.
• Practice •
Let’s take a look at your incredible gut instinct. There are so many wild and wondrous ways it wants to guide and protect you. As you journal with these (if you don’t have a pen and paper, simply take a languid moment to contemplate them), let yourself be patient, honest, and raw. If you edit or hold back, you may not get to the gold of your instinct’s hidden wisdom.
What does your gut feel like when it’s telling you to stay away from a person, place, situation, or idea? Is it tight, restrictive, nauseous, or otherwise unsettled? If you ask your gut to show you directly what “no” or “keep clear” feels like, how does it respond?
How does your physical gut need healing, and what will you do to nourish it? If it feels tight from stress, you could look for ways to actively bring peace or closure to the root cause of your tension. If it feels unhappy from particular foods, you might enjoy lighter or different foods for a while. If it feels ignored, try connecting with it gently to soothe and understand it better. If it feels uneasy, is there a message for you to look into?
What unconscious beliefs do you think might be driving your everyday actions? You may not know consciously or precisely what they are, but you can use your gut sensations to guide you as you work through these questions. What were you taught as a child about money, success, friendships, relationships, sex, religion, nature, exercise, your body, food, and health? How have these beliefs stayed with you in subtle or strong ways? Even noticing this can have a restorative ripple effect. Don’t judge what comes up—just witness it, and if you don’t like what you notice, set an intention to let it go and replace it with a more empowering belief.
How has your instinct protected you? Where has it asked you to change direction? Can you recall a time recently when you cancelled an appointment, changed your plans, or drove a different route? Was that decision from an inner feeling? If so, describe the moment in detail; this will provide you with a precious understanding of how your personal instinct works.
What ancestors are you particularly grateful for when it comes to laying a secure foundation for your instinct? Are there any ancestors whose legacy you would like to forgive and heal? If you don’t know much about your ancestors, ask family members for their stories and get to know how they lived. You can also look up your ancestors online to find out more about who they were or where they came from, or connect to a recommended psychic medium.
Guide 2: Intuition
Your powerful intuition is a unique blend of energetic feedback, physical awareness, memories and experience, and messages from Spirit. It’s so much more than a good guess. It’s real and not as elusive as you might think. It works by tuning in to the awareness and feedback from your physical heart and energetic heartspace, your subconscious mind, and your spirit, which all inform you without the need for conscious reasoning. It’s the wholehearted knowing that has been guiding you your whole life, and now you get to open up to it more intimately.
Development of Intuition
The limbic brain, located above the reptilian brain and surrounded by the neocortex, is related to intuition and was the second part of our brain to develop as a species. The limbic brain is important for many reasons—mainly that it remembers behaviors that either feel good or bad—and it’s responsible for your subconscious emotions, memories, and physical senses. All these elements are crucial to the development and expression of your intuition.
While the instinct guides by restriction, your intuition guides by expansion. Intuition is based on love instead of fear, connection over competition, creativity instead of predictability, and consideration rather than reflexes.
The voice of your intuition will bring a sense of calm, clarity, truth, and relief. It can be counterlogical, so it may not make complete sense in the moment, but the less you reason with or resist it, the easier it will be to tune in to the guidance.
Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is a rich and substantial source of intuitive wisdom. It’s a vast resource that stores your daily behaviors, habits, and moods. It’s where your short-term memories live—the ones that are easily accessible by the conscious mind at any time, such as your address, your birth date, and what you ate for dinner last night.
Your subconscious mind is always switched on and aware of your surroundings (even while you sleep) through your five physical senses. It filters a boundless amount of incoming information from your senses and sends only the important information to the conscious mind—because you simply cannot be conscious of everything in your environment. The subconscious is in control when you do things without conscious thinking—like driving a familiar route or making a cup of tea—because of an accumulation of past experiences that makes it easier to do things without full, conscious attention. This is part of intuitive living; we all have these habits.
Your subconscious mind is strongly connected to the conscious and unconscious minds, and it works independently. It obeys conscious thoughts, so the more you hold positive or negative thoughts, the more they will be real, all the way down to your unconscious mind. The subconscious mind communicates what is needed to the conscious mind through emotions, sensations, images, and dreams, but it doesn’t use words. This is why your intuition doesn’t use words when it’s guiding you.
What comes into your life will either feel aligned with your true nature or it won’t. There’s no discussion or dissertation required. When there’s a conversation about the feeling, you know you’re reasoning with your intuitive guidance from your conscious mind. There’s no harm in thinking through a decision so long as you clearly trust and honor what you receive from your intuitive, wholehearted self.
Physical Senses
Your five physical senses of touch, hearing, sight, smell, and taste are constantly giving you impressions, information, and feedback. They are always in the present moment and only ever tuned in to what is real. As they consistently help you navigate your way through life, your brain may misinterpret what your senses detect (like when a stick poking into your ankle feels like a snake), but the raw information from your senses is always accurate.
Many teachers, guides, and writers downplay the physical senses in favor of the inner psychic senses when it comes to living intuitively, but from my experience and research, the physical senses feed your intuition, while the inner senses supply information to insight (more on this soon).
All the information you receive from your five senses goes straight into your subconscious mind; from there, there isn’t much that makes it into the conscious mind. You only ever have one or two senses in focus while you’re engaged in a task; the others fade when not consciously required. Most of the time, you simply take your senses for granted, so you’re most likely to be consciously aware of your senses when something in your environment stands out from the rest—like a spider on a wall, burning toast, a rock in your shoe, or the moment when you bite into something unexpectedly hot—or when you actively tune in to your senses.
Your intuitive understanding of life is developed through experience. If your experience tells you what your bedroom looks like, then intuitively you’ll know when something is different and perhaps putting you in danger, like a spider on a wall. Intuitively, you know there’s something different. Instinctively, you’re prepared to do something about it … quickly.
It’s the same reason why you’re so physically alert with your senses when you’re walking through a country you’ve never been in before. Everything is so new and interesting. When you’re at home or in a familiar place, you don’t take time to tune in to your senses as much. This sense of familiarity plays an important role in living intuitively. If you’ve held the same job for many years, your intuition will grow stronger with experience. And if you take time to listen to and honor it, you’ll make wholehearted, creative, and beneficial decisions faster at work without relying on your logical mind all the time.
Your incredible senses aren’t just your practical connection to your world; they’re also your access to living pleasurably. Consciously diving into your senses to explore life is one of the most beautiful ways of feeling truly alive and awake. It doesn’t mean overwhelming your being by striving to be in tune with everything all at once, it means slowing down to a more pleasurable pace so that you’re able to mindfully experience your world as you wish rather than by accident.
Sensory walks are a healing and gently stimulating way of connecting to your senses. Intuitively strolling through nature while using all five of your senses to explore the luscious environment around you will help you tune in to your senses in everyday moments. This is one way of creating space for your intuition to come alive.
Your senses heighten your awareness of the world around you. When you consciously tune in to your senses, you will notice what pleases you. As you come to embrace what feels good to your whole self, I encourage you to ask yourself, “What is it that pleases me the most in this moment?” What pleases you is not to be ignored, dismissed, or belittled; it is your truth, and all that your intuition is asking you to do is to honor your truth. Learn to decipher the pleasures of your ego (false or fear-based pining) from the pleasures of your Soul (healthy, sacred yearnings). Your ego comes from fear and craves stifling stability, while your Soul speaks of love and welcomes conscious change. Your ego is not interested in your highest good; your Soul only cares for what serves your Highest Self. Your ego is obsessed with physical pleasure; your Soul delights in it without attachment.
Sensual pleasures bring the experience of being human to life. Think of the last juicy peach you ate, the last sunset you witnessed, the last hug from a close friend, the last time you lit your favorite candle, or the last time you heard a treasured song. Your whole being was lifted higher, your vibration rose, and you may have experienced bliss, healing, or contentment. Pleasure feels good, relaxes the body, and opens us up to a deeper intuitive connection.
Your intuition wants you to be content and truly happy. It may also save your life when it works powerfully with your instinct. Let me illustrate this with a fascinating story from a professor who led a study on intuition. He tells the example of a Formula One driver who stopped suddenly during a race as he approached a hairpin bend. What he couldn’t see was a pileup of cars on the other side of the bend; and yet, he stopped in time.
After the race when he was asked why he stopped, he simply said it was an intuitive feeling that he acknowledged. Curious researchers spent time with him, playing the race from different angles until he was able to identify what information had fed his intuitive nudge. As the professor explained, “In hindsight (the driver) realized that the crowd, which would have normally been cheering him on, wasn’t looking at him coming up to the bend but was looking the other way in a static, frozen way. That was the cue. He didn’t consciously process this, but he knew something was wrong and stopped in time.”3 It turns out it was his intuitive connection to his subconscious mind—through his five senses—that alerted him to an apparent danger around the bend, and the instinctive response from his body—foot to the brake—saved him. There are so many other ways in which our senses guide us and enrich our lives. In Chapter 6, I’ll discuss this further.
When you’re tuned in to your physical sense of self, you’re in a state of presence rather than a state of analysis. Instead of rationalizing, reasoning with, or judging the moment, you’re simply being with it and experiencing life. That’s when intuition flourishes beyond what you can imagine with your mind, because the rational mind, although a great companion, is how you live logically, not intuitively.
Heart Center
Your heart is the strongest physical organ and the energetic center of your intuitive being. Physically, it expands with every beat it makes (as does the ribcage with every breath); energetically, it has the most far-reaching EMF of any part of your body; and emotionally, it’s an expansive place of love where all emotions feel safe.
Your amazing heart, the first organ created in utero, actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. Research at the HeartMath Institute (a nonprofit organization that helps people find alignment with their intuition) has shown that “the heart communicates to the brain in four major ways: neurologically (through the transmission of nerve impulses), biochemically (via hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (through pressure waves), and energetically (via electromagnetic field interactions).”4 Your heart uses all of these richly intertwined systems to tell your brain what is needed and to listen to the brain’s response.
Your heart is the physical part of you that is most deeply connected to your Soul. Although your Soul isn’t limited to one area of your body, you can access it intentionally through your heartspace in the center of your chest, the middle of the whole. Your heart has an intimate attachment to the Soul, making it your all-knowing, all-seeing visceral guide that can lead you along the path that your Soul has planned for you. Being unlimited in knowledge and power, your heart energy knows your past, present, and future, a knowing that has been seen through the eyes of science.5
The heart’s energy field is eternally wise. As I touched on previously, the brain, heart, and stomach all have their own EMFs around them. So does every other organ, but these three are the most significant. Up until recently, experts assumed that the brain had the strongest, but research from the HeartMath Institute has shown that the electric and magnetic energy waves coming from the heart are substantially more powerful than those from the brain. In fact, the heart’s electrical field is up to one hundred times stronger than the brain’s, while the heart’s magnetic field is around five thousand times stronger than the brain’s.6
The pulsating, spirited, and robust EMF of your heart is continuously making waves in your mind, body, and surroundings. Your heart’s energy is also affected by other living beings, the energy of the earth, and electronic devices.
Always remember, your habits have a deep impact on your heart. The way you breathe, the emotions you hold on to or release, the thoughts you select—these are all critical to how fluidly the energy of your heart flows and how fluently it communicates.
The heart is physically, energetically, and spiritually your strongest guiding force. When your heart is in charge and you are in flow, the ingenious intuitive influx never ceases to create miracles and magic, abundance and alignment, contentment and connection.
Energetic Spirit
Your spirit is your palpable energy, the unseen lifeforce of your magnificent being. The amazing thing about energy, as Einstein famously noted, is that it cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another. You can’t build or burn it, only transmute or transform it.
Each of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions, and words holds a particular energetic vibration. So does the food you eat, the objects in your house, the clothes you wear, the phone you use, the paper you write on, the people you meet, everything in nature, every room you walk into, every home, every building, every town, and every country.
When you meet someone else, you’re sensing their energy and they’re tuning in to yours, whether you’re both conscious of it or not. If you trust and honor what you feel, you will know on a subconscious level—before your rational thought kicks in—if they are an energetic match for you. This is the energetic dance that takes place when people meet. Some days you have a deep impact on others, and some days they influence you. Some people you meet feel like an easy, compatible, energetic fit; other people feel abrasive or at odds with your energy.
Think of an emotion you’d like to hold in your heart. It could be self-acceptance, delight, unconditional love, freedom, amusement, bliss, satisfaction, or devotion. Feel it deeply. Hold it there for as long you need to. No one can take it away from you. If a lower emotion comes along to cloud over it, simply witness and feel it, then let it go. The more you tune in to your own energy and create what you wish to experience, the more you will be able to tune in to the energy of other people, objects, ideas, and situations that you wish to understand on an intuitive level. This is how you color your life and navigate the world intuitively.
• Practice •
Heart-Led Intuition Soul Prompts
Let’s take a loving look at the greatest force within your being: your intuition. Sit with these questions with an open mind and a willing heart. Feel into the answers in meditation or your notebook without the need to be right or perfect.
If your heart doesn’t use words, how does intuition feel to you? What does expansion feel like in your body? How does your energetic being light up at the thought of something that’s aligned with your deepest truth?
How has your intuition led you lovingly toward your Soul’s purpose? Have you ever followed an unexpected nudge toward a person or job that turned out to be wholeheartedly life-changing? Have you ever left a job simply because it didn’t feel right? Do you share acts of kindness in your community according to your inner guidance and intuitive understanding of your community’s needs?
How conscious are you of your physical senses? How does it feel to tune in to them and live life pleasurably through them? What can you do today to feel into your world more? Can you play music that elevates your energy? Can you eat mindfully? Can you look at nature in wordless wonder? Can you create with your hands? Are there natural fragrances you could surround yourself with?
What emotions are you able to intentionally generate to raise your vibration? Take a deep breath and invite the emotion in, then let all blocks to it be released with the out breath.
Spend time this week noticing the energetic field around your heart and come back to your journal to write about how it feels, how it dances with other energetic fields, and how it wants to be nourished and heard.
Guide 3: Insight
Insight is the most recent development in human evolution as far as self-awareness goes. It’s essentially when you receive new information that merges with what you already know to provide a new understanding or a fresh perspective.
Recognizing Insight
Insights are conscious recognition and cosmic creativity. They’re stimulating ideas and information that come from the earthly plane, perhaps while reading a book, having a conversation, watching a video, or otherwise connecting with new knowledge. They also come out of “nowhere,” often while walking through nature, meditating, drifting off to sleep, taking a shower, enjoying a massage, praying—anytime you’re relaxed and open-minded. Insights that pop into your mind out of the blue may come from various sources, including Spirit (Great Spirit, Spirit Guides, Loved Ones, or Archangels). The deeper you’re connected to Spirit, the more insights you’ll receive from the higher dimensions. However, insights don’t only come through to psychics or seers; anyone can receive insights from an endless range of sources.
As you read this book, you’ll experience the gift of insight. When a fresh idea resonates with your own truth, you’ll uncover a new layer of self-awareness in a way that stirs you from your reading leisure and awakens the wisdom within.
Insights are related to the neocortex part of the brain, the most modern part to evolve. The two large cerebral hemispheres that make up this part of the brain are responsible for the development of human language, abstract thought, imagination, and consciousness. The neocortex is two to three million years old—quite young compared to the limbic system (one hundred fifty million years old) and reptilian brain (five hundred million years old).
Logic, reason, and language are enormously important, but when you rely on guidance from your logical mind over your intuitive heart, you place emphasis on a life of expectations and regulations, limits and judgments, rights and wrongs, and exact reasoning. You leave no space for creativity, emotions, feelings, and flow. In order to fulfill your highest potential, you need to live from the empowered combination of your wise brain and your wild heart within the grounded roots of your belly.
Conscious Mind
Your conscious mind is where insights land. In spiritual terms, conscious means aware of self and others and awake to a higher truth, a divinity that transcends the physical realm. Living consciously means living in a way that honors the self and others and acknowledges the role and presence of Spirit in all beings.
Being physically unconscious means being in a comatose state. Being spiritually unconscious means living without any real awareness of yourself or how you relate to others and anything outside of the physical realm. If you’re not tuned in to the universe outside of the material plane, it’s difficult to receive information from Spirit. Insights—spiritual or earthly—readily drop into the minds of the conscious and curious ones who listen to others with an open mind, even if they don’t agree with everything they hear.
Psychologically, your conscious mind consists of all that you are aware of in this present moment. It’s the conscious mind that directs your attention and awareness and communicates to your outer and inner worlds through speech, pictures, writing, movement, and thought. Your conscious mind is open to insights and can imagine anything new and unique. It’s unlimited; it’s the eternal spring from which your aha moments flow.
As you dwell in conscious presence without your ego stealing your peace, you can intentionally open to receive insights.
Brain Connection
Your brain is where insights are received and organized. Your brain, specifically the neocortex, is your focus mechanism; it’s the savvy instrument that discovers new possibilities and information and either acts on them or files them away for later. Your brain is an incredible, inimitable, influential processor. However, it’s not meant to lead you, only to inspire you and stimulate the body. When the heart leads, the brain’s powers flourish because it thinks and causes action in alignment with love and potential.
Neuroscientists have noted that insights can be cultivated when people are in a happy and relaxed mood.7 As you may imagine, it’s difficult to force your mind to discover insights under pressure. There must be an act of letting go, relaxing your overthinking mind, and calming your body’s systems to create space for insights. Create moments of quiet in your day—make time to daydream, reflect, journal, and be at peace to open your life to more regular inspiration. As you do this, you will awaken to a more exciting, adventurous, and spirited way of living. Your brain is so eternally capable, so endlessly imaginative, that when it is put to good use, it raises the bar, and life becomes fertile and an inspiration to others, too.
Spiritual Energy
Your spiritual energy is the bridge between insight and you. If you’re spiritual, if you believe in a divinity of sorts, then you’re likely open to insights dropping into your mind from the universe as divine guidance. Insights from Spirit could come from any of your Spirit Guides, Archangels, Loved Ones, or directly from the voice of your Soul. The more you trust in Spirit, the more you’ll find that insights land in your lap just as you need them—without an obvious source.
While intuitive information comes through outer physical senses, insights come from inner psychic senses. You may receive visions (clairvoyance), hear messages (clairaudience), feel things (clairsentience), or simply know information (claircognizance). As a psychic myself, I mostly see and hear information, but I’m open to receiving insights however they are meant to come to me. These inner senses become more perceptive and accurate as you allow and trust in them and grow spiritually.
Clairvoyance, meaning clear vision, is when you visually perceive messages from Spirit with your third eye. It’s similar to daydreaming visually with your eyes open or closed. Clairvoyants use their inner sight to see mental images—which may be literal or symbolic, subtle or clear.
Clairaudience, meaning clear audio, is when you are conscious of sounds, words, music, or other noise coming into your inner ear from Spirit. Occasionally it will come through the outer ear, but it’s almost always heard within. Clairaudience is the gift that most—but not all—channelers use as they bring through messages from Spirit.
Claircognizance, meaning clear knowing, is the ability to know things directly through Spirit that you could have no other way of knowing.
Clairsentience, meaning clear sensation, is when you receive information from a feeling within the whole body or particular areas of the body that goes beyond physical feelings and cannot be explained logically.
Clairempathy, meaning clear emotions, is the gift of an empath, a person who is highly sensitive to the emotions of people, animals, and places. It’s used to sense the emotion or physical condition of another.
Other lesser-known gifts that are just as powerful are clairscent, meaning clear smelling; clairtangency, or psychometry, meaning clear touching; and clairgustance, meaning clear tasting.
I regularly have deeply spiritual and practical insights come to me during a reading, healing, or mentoring session with a client. Almost all my daily meditations come with an insight from a guide in Spirit, from nature, or simply from my Highest Self. Sometimes they even appear out of thin air, like a thought or a whisper from beyond. I can also go after insights myself as I don’t believe they’re only spontaneous accidents ready to land in the lap of the fortunate. I often dive into a meditation with a question and readily expect that Spirit will deliver an answer that feels complete (as long as I trust divine timing and let go of expectations). This is how you open your third eye and psychic abilities, by asking, diving, seeing, hearing, trusting, and acknowledging with gratitude.
I’ve had brilliant insights in the bath and shower (and you bet I didn’t have a notepad nearby to write them down), while driving, in the middle of a delicious date with my husband, and just before falling asleep. When my energy is relaxed and happy, I’m open to receiving all I need and desire in a way that is best for me. The same is happening to you right now as you read this book; each page is an opening for you to access insights.
• Practice •
I believe in the unlimited power of the mind. By getting to know the process of receiving insights, my world has opened up to new potentials and fortuitous happenings. I want to encourage you to let go of any thought that feels limiting or any story that paints you as unworthy of earthly or spiritual insights. You are a miracle. Anything is possible. Take some time now to journal or meditate your way through these questions.
When was the last time you experienced a profound insight? What were you doing and how were you feeling? When did you last watch a documentary and what did you learn? Have you had an interesting conversation lately that has opened your mind to new possibilities? What is the most exciting insight you’ve learned so far from this book that has changed the way you see or experience your world?
What inner senses do you believe are your strongest? How do you experience a guided meditation—visually, audibly, emotionally, or another way? Do you consciously use your inner senses to understand your world or receive guidance from Spirit?
Have you experienced insights from Spirit? Was it a surprise or did you ask to receive? Who do you connect with—or who would you like to connect with—to receive spiritual insight, and for what purpose? Are you open to receiving insights as a natural part of conscious living?
What does the term Great Spirit (or God) mean to you? How does Great Spirit show up in your life? How open are you to the voice of your Soul? If you’re not familiar with the voice of your Soul, take a moment to open to it, the real you, and experience the vast light and love within. Take your time with this; try it every day for a week and see how it unfolds.
2. Maniscalco and Rinaman, “Vagal Interoceptive Modulation of Motivated Behavior,” 151–167.
3. Hodgkinson, Langan-Fox, and Sadler-Smith, “Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences,” 1–27.
4. McCraty, Science of the Heart, 3.
5. McCraty, Atkinson, and Bradley, “Electrophysiological Evidence of Intuition,” 133–143.
6. McCraty, The Energetic Heart, 1.
7. Kounios and Beeman, “The Aha! Moment,” 210–216.