There is one dilemma that plagues most people who want to live an intuitive life, ‘how do I know when it is my intuition?’ It’s an important question as there are many factors at play in the human psyche when we make a decision. We can get intuition confused with:
In fact, there are only two forms of intuitive knowing: one you can trust and the other requires a deeper inquiry into its origin – and is the voice of the ego. That’s important knowledge because all of the factors listed above (apart from imagination) come from the ego part of the mind and are not intuition. In the next chapter you will learn about both and how to tell the difference between the two. Unlike other forms of information, intuitive knowing isn’t something you get through effort; you relinquish your barriers and allow the insight to come to you.
Let’s start by taking a look at how we receive intuitive insight. Note I say receive as it’s not possible to ‘go out and get’ intuitive information. Think of it this way: if you stuck an intuition satellite dish to your third eye, you would still have to be tuned into the right station to get a picture. The problem is we are sending out information all the time so we miss what intuition is giving us. It is the same as talking and listening at the same time; it’s very hard to do, unless you are someone’s mother. Mothers and grandmothers seem to be able to do that; at least mine can.
There are four main ways that people who are open can receive intuitive information. To be in balance it is important to have a little of each of the types, or at least to practice the other skills until you do.
A mental intuitive will receive ‘downloads’ of intuitive information into the creative part of their mind and can almost express it without finding the words first. A simple explanation is that the part of the brain most commonly understood to be creative is the right hemisphere (more on that in the next chapter). An upside of being a ‘mental intuitive’ is that you are often sure when you make a decision. A downside is that people will accuse you of thinking too much and, although mental intuitives are great communicators, if they don’t mix their intuition with empathy can sometimes be a bull in a china shop with information.
One of the exercises that my students love is to create postcard paintings with wax and an iron. All the colors splurge together and the wax melts onto the postcard making new colors, textures, and shapes. The students then swap pictures and read them as if the person had just painted a picture of their life onto the card. The exercise allows the right hemisphere of the brain to get to work, which activates the intuitive mind. Most students report feeling that they are just ‘making it up.’ Only when the receiver of the information remarks on the accuracy do they start to believe their insights.
Helen, although not the most confident of students, starts slow then gets into a flow of communication that seems to bypass her logical mind. Her speech speeds up, her facial animation increases, and she loses herself in the flow of consciousness coming from her lips. As the information slows down, she looks back at the card that inspired her to access the download. She then turns a little self-conscious and asks a fellow student stunned at her accuracy: ‘Was any of that right?’. Helen sees pictures in her mind (clairvoyance) and has downloads of information. In her everyday life she is brilliant at analyzing, putting patterns together, and thinking outside the box.
A somatic intuitive feels intuition physically, meaning that their body is a receiver of information. Somatic intuitives feel deeply that they are part of nature. They learn to know what all the subtle sensations mean in their body and can act upon them. An upside of being a somatic intuitive is that you remain grounded. You’re able to react quickly and without panicking in physically threatening situations. A downside is that your body is always ‘talking’ to you and will use all aspects of physicality to explain any emotional discord in you and others. A somatic intuitive might be the person who finds it impossible to hold out to the third date: they want to get to know someone with their body before they get to know their personality.
When I was a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies we learned that there are many ways to complicate things by using words. The course involved one weekend at college every few weeks; the rest of the degree was home study. At the start of each weekend, we took turns to talk about how we were doing with the course and our lives. One overseas student often found trying to communicate in a second language frustrating. Her English was excellent, but she lacked the speed of speaking in her native tongue. Then, one day, while trying to explain, she just got up and danced. The whole room became electric. There was no need for words; we knew and could feel exactly how she felt.
You might have had this experience while watching an actor on stage, a dance piece, live music, or even in the movie theater. You might have experienced it as your hairs standing on end, a feeling in your belly, something ‘put your back up, without reason,’ or as a sensation that comes from nowhere. It could be when you’re driving and your foot comes off the gas without thinking, giving you valuable seconds to react to something up ahead. Being connected to the physical signals of your body is vitally important. It is your body that makes all of your hopes and dreams even possible, and it is communicating with you all the time. When you are busy thinking about how to solve a problem, you might find the answer comes more quickly if you let go and dance.
An emotional intuitive, also known as an ‘empath,’ feels things empathically. They pick up other people’s emotions and sometimes find it hard not to make choices for others rather than for themselves. An upside of being an emotional intuitive is that you are very attractive to people. You understand people on a deeper level than most. The downside is that you find it hard to communicate who you are to people. If love were in measures, your love fills a highball glass and the love of others fills a shot. Everyone loves to his or her capacity, but you can still feel disappointed as your cup overflows and theirs goes down in one gulp.
In a circle setting I like to ask my students to put an object into a box. The object has to be something they wear or use every day such as a watch, a piece of jewelry, keys, or even a phone. Then I get each student to take out one of the objects, hold it in their hand and, without knowing who the object belongs to, say a few things about that person. We then reveal the owner and return the item. This is known as ‘psychometry’ (and it is a fantastic way of finding out your intuitive type). The object absorbs the energy of the owner and can be intuitively read by someone holding it. I always stress, however, that whatever you feel from the object you must end what you’re saying on a positive note.
One of my students, Carl, is extremely empathic. He took hold of a lady’s watch and proceeded to talk about how the owner was feeling emotionally. He talked about the inner sadness that had followed her since childhood, and how he sensed her reaching out but still feeling very alone. The room started to become heavy and take on the feelings from his words. Carl ended by saying ‘I would go as far as saying the owner of this watch is depressed.’ As the teacher about to reveal the owner of this watch I was cringing. There were two possibilities; she would say ‘yes that’s all true,’ burst into tears, and leave the room never to be seen again; or deny everything and Carl would think he wasn’t very good at psychometry. So I asked Carl to leave his insights on a positive note. He paused and said ‘It’s a nice watch.’
Empaths really do feel other people’s emotions very deeply. Most students of intuition are looking for what they can do to help others; therefore we look for others’ pain rather than the joy in their hearts. What Carl learned later was how to use his intuition to look out for evidence of how the watch-owner had survived and thrived at many other points in her life, and to remind her of who she really was, so that he could end his observation with empowerment.
Connected to a collective consciousness, a spiritual intuitive has a sensitive awareness of the energy system around his or her body – their ‘aura.’ They can’t always put this knowing into words, but if you’re in the desert and in need of water then this is the person to follow. We are all in an energy bubble of constant communication and a spiritual intuitive can access this information. The upside of being a spiritual intuitive is that you have a wonderfully creative imagination. The downside is that you are often ungrounded and seen by others as being flaky.
Have you ever been accused of having your head in the clouds? If so, you might just be a spiritual intuitive. With my students I often talk through ideas then set a task so they can experience for themselves what I’ve said. A spiritual intuitive will always ask me ‘What are we doing?’ It is not just that they weren’t listening; they weren’t even in the room! Often accused of being ungrounded, a spiritual intuitive will have knowing that is beyond the physical world. Many people who are spiritually intuitive are reported to have cried a lot as babies, as if they were having a real sulk about being born.
One of my students, Anisha, has just such a spiritual intuitive global reach. She feels everything from the depletion of the rainforests to the coral decaying in the ocean. She can’t even put meat into her auric field and would rather cross the road than pass by a deli window display. Typically these intuitives are drawn to sacred areas of the world such as Glastonbury in the UK or Sedona in the USA. Anisha senses that everything is alive, from trees and plants to rocks. She also has an awareness of unseen energies and talks about spirits, nature spirits, and angels. She finds it difficult to focus on everyday subjects, but with practice she has developed her other four intuitive disciplines. In doing so, she has found that the physical world is full of love and joy. It isn’t to be missed in favor of being in spirit more than in the physical body.
For the purpose of understanding the types of intuition, that’s really all you need to know. If you are interested in finding out more about the different intuitive types then you might find it helpful to read Discover Your Psychic Type by Sherrie Dillard (Llewellyn Publications, 2008). For now, let’s look in detail at the four types of intuition and how they work…
Your brain is amazing. It can write e-mails and listen to music at the same time. This is because there is a distinct difference between its left and right hemispheres, the two sides functioning independently yet in harmony with each other. It is important to say that the brain is incredible and that we don’t fully understand it. For example, a person who has suffered an injury to the brain may find other parts of the brain developing to compensate for the loss. Now, I am not a neuroscientist – simply an avid brain enthusiast, I think everyone should have one!
The following explanation is simplified, but the left hemisphere is considered dominant, as it is the center of language and logic. The right hemisphere is non-verbal: working outside of time and space, creating mental images, clairvoyance, and is the source of your imagination. The left side perceives information in steps and pieces whereas the right perceives it as a whole.
For example something as simple as buying a motorcycle highlights the differences in how your life is affected, depending on whether you are predominantly a right- or left-brained thinker. A predominantly left-brain thinker appreciates the mechanics and performance of the motorcycle, whereas a right-brained thinker is more influenced by the shape, color, and overall beauty of the machine. The left hemisphere sees the motorcycle in parts; the right brain sees it as a whole.
The right hemisphere of the brain lacks language, so it communicates by sending a picture to the left hemisphere, which interprets the parts and puts them into words. The right hemisphere also communicates directly with our bodies using physical sensations and emotions. Most intuitive information stems from the right hemisphere of the brain, which then sends it over to the left hemisphere via the corpus callosum to translate and communicate it. This movement from right to left for communication means that some of the information is subject to misinterpretation.
This misunderstanding of information between the right and left hemispheres of the brain can be the reason why tests undertaken by parapsychology researchers are often unsuccessful. Psy information is received in the right hemisphere, but science requires it to be tested in a left-brained manner. You can’t test the right hemisphere with a left-hemisphere approach – it’s… well… illogical. However, for our purposes, it might help you to think of it as ‘my rational, logical mind thinks this way, and my intuitive mind sees it that way.’
In the following table I’ve briefly outlined the different functions of the left and right brain. A quick look at each column will tell you whether you are predominantly a left- or right-brained thinker.
Left brain functions |
Right brain functions |
Uses logic |
Uses feeling |
Detail oriented |
Big-picture oriented |
Facts rule |
Imagination rules |
Words and language |
Symbols and images |
Present and past |
Present and future |
Maths and science |
Philosophy and spirituality/religion |
Can comprehend |
Can ‘get it’ (i.e. meaning) |
Knows |
Believes |
Acknowledges |
Appreciates |
Order/pattern perception |
Spatial perception |
Knows object’s name |
Knows object’s function |
Reality based |
Fantasy based |
Forms strategies |
Presents possibilities |
Practical |
Impetuous |
Safe |
Risk taking |
Our inner knowing has so much information to offer us about who we are and the world around us, but the left hemisphere of our brain is far too busy to allow it to come to our conscious attention. People don’t believe that they are intuitive because they simply cannot put their inner knowing into words while the left hemisphere of their brain is so busy thinking about the past or making plans. As we all have a right hemisphere of the brain, the possibility exists for all of us to change our mode of thinking, listen to our world, and become more intuitive. To get in touch with your intuition you need to move from left-hemisphere thinking, the ‘I’ ego voice, to right-hemisphere, inner-knowing, big-picture thinking.
You are using your right brain if:
If any of these sound like you then you know what it is like to be predominantly a right-brain thinker, although some of these examples will be true of left-brain thinkers, too (because we all need both halves of our brain to operate). However, if you are predominantly a left-brain thinker and want to be more in the right hemisphere, I suggest giving your left hemisphere a vacation by thinking less in words. Enjoy daydreaming, dance, listen to music, sing, get some paint and make patterns with color, visualize your thoughts as if they were pictures running like a mind movie.
You can also use the world around you to help move you into a more right-brain way of being: take note and become curious about the patterns and shapes in cloud formations; allow advertising to bounce a totally different message to you by looking at the picture as a whole, taking note of which parts stand out, and becoming curious as to why; allow the world to become a colorful cartoon-like place that is telling a story beyond getting from A to B in the quickest time. This is how the right brain sees the world and by choosing to play with what we think of as ‘reality’ in this way, you can even become awakened to a different state of awareness.
I was asked a question by a man in the audience when I was giving a talk on mental intuition. He was a teacher of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), and couldn’t understand how after giving a class or lecture he couldn’t do simple tasks, such as disconnecting his laptop from the projector or writing down his name and phone number. This is a classic example of someone who has moved his or her awareness into the right hemisphere of the brain. As we talked he understood that coming up with creative ideas for his students and reaching out for inspiration were all right-brained skills. He realized that it just took a while for him to come back into his usual mode after giving a talk.
You might hear a mental intuitive say ‘I just know; I don’t know how I know, I just know.’ It is a knowing that hasn’t gone through the critical analysis of the left brain; yet the feeling of strength and determination behind the knowing can be just as certain.
At the height of my career in London, as I told you earlier, I just knew that I had to move to San Francisco for a while. On paper this was a crazy decision and many people tried to talk me out of it. As this was a kind of knowing that you can’t explain, you can’t argue with the logic of people who care about your wellbeing. The people who care can get very upset when you won’t listen to logic or reason. Even if they do trust you, they can find it hard to trust the world itself – as if only bad people live beyond your doorstep. It might have been a ‘crazy decision’ but my years in San Francisco fulfilled me in more ways than I knew I was empty. How this knowing that ‘I have to move there’ came to me was like a download of information into my mental hard drive. I knew something was emerging out of me, as the inner knowing would come out in conversation with friends. Every question I needed an answer to in my life was greeted with a clairvoyant vision of the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the songs I heard on the radio had lines about San Francisco. And just how many reruns of Charmed can be shown on TV?
Of course, for the really big stuff, such as moving to another country, intuitive knowing is relatively easy – it is following it up with action that’s more difficult. For smaller, but often equally as important, decisions the intuition may seem lighter and therefore more easily overlooked. Taking two minutes out of your day to silence the left hemisphere of the brain allows you to hear the download. Hence the expression to ‘sleep on it’ because when the left hemisphere is shut down for the evening the right hemisphere is still downloading. Once the download is complete, we might then see it as a clairvoyant vision. Of course, meditation (focus on the breath), walking, running, or anything that requires the left brain to focus on something that is repetitive will allow the right brain to come forward more. Even something as simple as washing the dishes means that while the left brain is in action, the right brain is in expansion. You might remember in the movie Karate Kid when the kung fu master got his apprentice to polish cars by putting ‘wax on’ and ‘wax off’ in a circle motion; focusing the mind on a seemingly ‘meaningless’ task helps open the right hemisphere of the mind.
Clairvoyance means ‘clear seeing’ but has come to mean ‘seeing the future.’ In this book, I am using it in its original sense. However, it is not often as clear as we would like. You might see an image of something from your life and discount it as your imagination. You only have the filing cabinet of your experience from which your intuition can draw images, but your imagination can create images from parts of things it has experienced and merge them together. Our imagination is not some childish fancy that has no meaning. Everything manmade you see around you started in someone’s imagination. The imagination is how we create things. Imagination is the movie screen that clairvoyance plays upon. Even if you can’t tell if something is imagination or intuition, don’t give the imagination less importance than your intuition. Imagination is without logic and yet it can solve problems, or in the words of Albert Einstein:
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.’
Clairvoyance through the imagination is a way to put the intuitive download into focus, without putting it through the doubting Thomas of your ego, which we will move on to later.
Clairaudience (clear hearing) is when we have formed the download into words, which means it won’t be as ‘pure’ as knowing without words, but we must still engage with this intuitive knowing. It might be that we need to look for some backup information. We might find this by recognizing coincidences in the world, or use other intuitive methods to be sure of what we know.
Some people believe that clairaudience is their guide talking to them, some that it is their higher consciousness. If it has words, then the information has been parsed by the left hemisphere of your brain and therefore is less trustworthy. However, if you’ve ever had a situation where you say something and then wonder where that information came from (because you didn’t think it first) then that can happen when you access a download. You can have intuitive downloads for other people in conversation, too. You can be talking and hearing yourself ‘talk think’ and might say ‘That’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of that?’ You can also find that in talking through one of your own issues with someone else, you suddenly come up with the solution to your problem. You say it aloud and, upon hearing yourself say it, understand it without having thought it before saying it. It is a remarkable way to be a reflective mirror and a great help to other people and yourself.
The most important idea to understand from all of this is to know that we don’t use the whole of our brain’s capacity, yet we seem stuck in the belief that the only answers worth having are those we go out and find by logic. Actually, the answers often lie somewhere beyond thinking: perhaps in a part of our consciousness that we are just beginning to connect with – our naked self, which isn’t disguised by our ego. We’ll get onto this in more detail in later chapters, but for now start thinking about giving your ‘intuitive knowing’ some space away from the thoughts in your head and allowing it to simply emerge and be heard.
When we are children we are praised for performing mental skills, such as remembering multiplication tables or solving logic problems. These are skills that can be measured by tests, exams, and money in better careers. Unfortunately, there isn’t an exam in common sense because it is not something you can measure. That is until you employ someone with no common sense and then you can measure its absence in financial loss and chaos.
It is also true that intuition can’t be measured. Yet some of the most successful businesses started with a hunch or an intuitive insight for an idea or investment. At school we are taught a narrow band of knowledge that requires specific answers to specific questions, and we are rewarded for figuring out the correct solution. We aren’t encouraged to value our gut instincts, as they simply don’t reap the same rewards in attention and praise from teachers. In addition, if you can do mathematics by seeing patterns in numbers or you can talk about emotional reasons behind an author’s words, you are more likely to cause alarm in the classroom than be rewarded for your skillful insights.
When I was a child, my mathematics teacher asked to see my ‘workings out’ at the side of the page. When I explained that I could see the patterns in the numbers, as they turned white and jumped up from the page, he seemed alarmed. He insisted that I must have ‘workings out,’ so he could see how I came to my answers. I got annoyed and insisted ‘I am telling you how I find my answers.’ He got even more annoyed and said ‘That’s NOT POSSIBLE!’ So for the next few years I cheated and copied my friend’s work, and failed my maths exam. That was until I studied ‘mathematical archetypes of nature, art, and science’ as part of my degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Then the patterns came back and this time I fell in love with the subject and understood the point of it.
People learn in different ways, but if you don’t fit the conventional mold, then your intuitive knowing will be shut down by disapproval. Luckily mine wasn’t, I just became introverted at school, while keeping all of my intuition open.
Most people these days have a basic awareness of their anatomy, physiology, and how to look after themselves with a healthy diet and exercise. Most also understand that there are many overlapping physical systems in operation within the body. Assuming full health and ability, you also have a complex sensory system – sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste – which takes in information from the world around you, and is as important as your physical system. The nervous system controls and monitors all these systems, all wired up to a central computer – the brain, which works to maintain and preserve life. It therefore automatically oversees all the body’s many functions and organizes everything at a cellular and energetic level. It is self-repairing and self-maintaining, leaving you free to get on with whatever it is you choose to do with your life. As you can see, you are quite amazing and the body is more than a tool by which we move through life, it is intelligent!
Much of what goes on around us the brain filters out because it believes it isn’t important or useful. Of course, if we didn’t have a filtering mechanism we would be constantly bombarded by millions of bits of information, so it is how our filtering system works that becomes the issue here.
I was shown different photos of the inside of my stomach during a hospital exam. Not having a clue what I was looking at, I was able to see the different personalities or sound vibrations of each part of my stomach. I pointed at one photo and said to the doctor ‘that one isn’t happy.’ He was surprised I could identify the one that had a problem as all the others were normal.
To some extent you are your body and your body is you. Yet all the different parts of your body have their own ‘selves.’ They all make their own unique sound. You are a biochemical and electromagnetic energy system. In fact you are a system of systems working together. All these systems are interdependent and can affect each other greatly. You also have subtler bodies, which exist in the same space as the physical body, but at different levels of vibration. You are a Russian doll made up of different levels within one another, each one reflecting and corresponding with the levels above and below it in the overall structure. These subtle bodies cannot be seen because they are composed of energy vibrating at frequencies outside of our normal range of perception.
Your energy centers and auric field are sensitive to the sounds of the world’s energy all around you. Some of this information is useful to us; some of it is commonplace as it is part of our natural environment. We are surrounded by information. The physical body acts as a storehouse, holding information such as our DNA in its cells. It also holds information about the country we come from, the food we eat, and the family into which we were born. All of these various parts of information go together to make each ‘you’ have its own sound, which collectively becomes your unique theme tune and can be read intuitively by others and understood by you.
Your body is a walking radio capable of picking up intuitive information. The body in many different ways is both the receiver and processor of intuition. So your mental, emotional, and spiritual intuition may all be played out somatically. Those messages not understood by you (or filtered out by your perceptions as being not ‘useful’) can be stored in the body.
The body also stores emotional memories; echoes of things we didn’t allow ourselves to feel or deal with at the time. All of this also has a sound quality to it. You might not be able to hear it, but you can feel it when you are not in harmony with yourself. As part of the human condition, we spend most of the time in the functional left hemisphere of the brain. In so doing we fail to acknowledge intuitive information received by the right hemisphere, which when ignored is stored in the body. When I treat clients, I can perceive/hear these hidden feelings or issues by touching or tuning in to a person’s physical ailment. For example, a persistent problem with a tight muscle may originate in an ignored emotional issue or event that is causing the muscle to behave in this manner.
To unlock the intuitive messages stored in the body you might like to dance, have a massage, swim, or take part in any exercise or physical activity that doesn’t require mental concentration, enabling you to release intuitive information to your body.
The starting point in somatic intuition is to know what your body usually feels like. This doesn’t mean that you have to run your hands over all of your lumps and bumps, but just to take note of what it feels like to be you. For example, when you are moving around the house doing some odd jobs, you will feel one way. Put some music on and it will change the sound of your body. It might mean you move differently around the house. It might change your emotions even, but the focus here is the body. Now let’s change the circumstance – you’re watching TV and a disturbing image flashes on the screen; your body goes tense. These are all ways to simply acknowledge how your body acts to outside stimuli. Now if you get some intuitive information, the body will respond accordingly, but without the outside influence. You might not notice the change, but the more you know your body the more aware you will become of its state.
When walking with a friend I have been known to direct them to cross the street with me, when we are already on the right side of the road for our destination. My friend starts to tell me we were on the right side already when a car takes the corner too sharply and would probably have hit us on the bend. When you work with somatic intuition, your body just moves. Not only out of danger, but toward the places and people that will give you the most benefit.
UK psychic Billy Roberts has a great exercise for seeing how energy can work. He says that if you were to take pips from an apple and leave them to dry overnight, then cut open a fresh apple and remove the pips, then place both sets of pips about an inch apart on white paper and relax your eyes, you would see two remarkable things: a ring of white energy around the fresh apple pips, and a line of energy form between the dry pips and the fresh pips. The fresh pips are reaching out and giving energy to the dry pips.
I believe that all living things are biologically programmed to heal other living things that are the same as themselves. On an energetic level we are all one and somehow we know this inside our energy system. There is a common occurrence that illustrates the gift of energy transference. If you have ever had a conversation with someone who is feeling sad or depressed, you may find yourself feeling tired while he or she may feel better. People say things like, ‘I always feel so much better after talking to you.’ Likewise, if you have ever gone to visit a friend in hospital, you might also have a feeling of being drained. This is because we automatically send energy to people who need it; empaths do this more than most.
Often people say that they feel drained around certain types of emotionally needy people. Those people can inspire us to move back from them as we feel this kind of tug in ourselves, a conflict of not wanting to ‘give’ but feeling that we might be forced to. These people can be described as being energy ‘vampires’ or people who are ‘dark.’ The truth is no one takes anything from us that we don’t choose to give. We might not know that we are choosing to give it, but – just like the apple pips – we give and keep on giving until we set an intention not to any more.
Many of the disciplines that inspire people to put up walls of protection, using practices such as bathing in white light or visualizing psychic mirrors, don’t work in my opinion; they are approaches that often create more negative energy than protect the person from their perception of an energy leech. How? For the simple reason that focusing on negative energy means you give it your attention rather than radiating positive energy toward other more positive things, which deserve your attention.
Love is the great protector: you choose to love yourself more than the person who is draining your energy; or you choose how much energy you wish to give them. The power of intention is remarkable, so to intend simply not to give out your energy helps. This is how many of the ‘psychic protection’ tools work. It is the intention that works, not the naked dancing. I’m sorry to inform you but you might be drawing symbols, dancing naked in the moonlight, turning round three times, and spitting, which all seem like a lot of hassle when setting out a clear intention is enough.
In my experience this is how many talismans and even curses work. You have to believe in them for them to work. These practices tap into the power of your intention, which is directly linked to the ‘law of attraction,’ otherwise known as manifestation.
I once heard a lady tell an audience to print and laminate a yin-yang symbol then cut it out, put it on their chair at work, and sit on it. This would block negative energy from a work colleague. Apart from making you look like a raving lunatic and therefore likely to give the person who doesn’t like you cause not to like you, it also doesn’t work.
Self-love and acceptance are your greatest tools for protection. If someone’s view of you doesn’t resonate with your own, it simply becomes an opinion. I spent too long trying to please other people and never feeling like I was enough, only to find when I stopped, I made them happy just by being me.
What happens to an emotional intuitive is not just that they give out an abundance of energy, but they absorb that energy, too. Empaths pick up energy from other people and the world around them. Often they find themselves overwhelmed by feelings, which they have no logical reason for having. These emotions may come from reading their environment or from a person with whom they’re physically close. Picking up energy like this can have a negative effect on their health as they may feel as if they are on an emotional rollercoaster. This overwhelming emotional state doesn’t happen with all emotional intuitives, but there are some causes that allow this to take place.
The first cause is the solar plexus chakra being overactive. The solar plexus is located four fingers below your belly button and can scan a person to see if they are any danger to you. It brings back emotional information to this area and people describe this as having a ‘gut’ instinct. The problem comes when the solar plexus is scanning everyone and everything for danger. It can even give a feeling of déjà vu as it jumps forward in time to check nothing nasty is around the next corner. A person who doesn’t feel safe in the world can end up having an overactive solar plexus. They may have experienced trauma or been taught from an early age that the world is an unsafe place. The solar plexus then adds to this problem by only bringing back negative information, thus continuing a cycle of mistrust. The emotional intuitive may then block their intuition in order not to hear any more bad news.
In reality, however, the world is full of love and an emotional intuitive has an amazing gift to be able to tune in to that world, and have the capacity to point out love to everyone who looks into the face of fear every day of their lives. Often those emotional intuitives who are trained to see love everywhere are dismissed and derided by those with an attitude of, ‘life just isn’t like that.’ Openhearted emotional intuitives are hard to find; in fact, I think I have only met one. She worked as a dancer on a cruise ship. At the end of the contract she had hundreds of passenger e-mails; people she had adopted as friends. She wore bright colors and never let anything get her down. Her dancing was a joy to watch, but sadly the rest of the company found her joie de vivre more nauseating then the movement of the ship and often bullied her.
All an emotional intuitive needs is a sense of balance, self-belief, and grounding. These three things will turn what can be a curse into a unique blessing. Often an emotional intuitive is great at reading energy from objects using psychometry. They can also feel more beauty in people and have the vantage point of seeing past a person’s ego into their loving soul. It is all a matter of perception and choosing what you tune in to. Allow love to be your driving force.
We often use words that describe emotions in order to describe intuitive knowing, for example, ‘I had a gut feeling’ could be a good or a bad feeling. Yet we also use emotions to identify and describe how we are feeling at a given moment. We can make the distinction between the emotion and the feelings themselves – the literal sensations within the body, which we associate with particular emotional states. When we detect and identify the feeling, it becomes an emotion: an identified feeling. What has happened energetically is that the perception of an outside event causes an energetic response in the emotional body. When this response is powerful enough, it will be experienced as a sensation in the physical body due to the law of resonance (more on this in chapter 8). The body then produces chemical signals that correspond to the emotion, and these chemical signals carry the emotional energy into every cell in the body.
There are many things that can trigger an emotional response. Primarily, our mood will be determined not so much by what happens to us, as by the way we perceive what happens to us (i.e. our thoughts and what we tell ourselves about our situation). The body itself will also affect our mood. Emotions are experienced in the body: fear may manifest as a nauseous feeling in the pit of the stomach; sadness may be felt around the heart center and around the eyes; and anger in the arms and legs. This means that sometimes we can change how we are feeling simply by adjusting our breathing and posture.
Emotions are messages. They are a communication between our body and our spirit, with our mind as the mediator. Emotions may arise directly from the body, from past experiences, from our beliefs, or from deep within what we call the subconscious – which causes a problem when it comes to using emotions as an intuitive messenger. Your emotions are more likely to come from past experience than from your intuition. For example, you might have a negative feeling about a person because they remind you of someone from your past who acted badly toward you. Often adult education teachers come across this from students. The student will take a dislike to the teacher with no justifiable cause. This might make the teacher react by drawing away from that student or even disliking them. If the student is reacting from old pain experienced in childhood, the teacher will accidentally become an actor in the student’s story about ‘mean teachers.’ If the teacher can see intuitively where the actions of the student are coming from, they have the chance to break the pattern and even heal the pain of the past. The student is reacting to the teacher as part of a system, nothing to do with the teacher as a person.
However, it’s an amazing gift to be able to change someone’s perspective. You can only do this if you can put your feelings to one side long enough to become curious about why the person is attacking you. When we understand a person’s driving force, we can then change the situation’s perspective with our actions. However, I would never suggest telling the person your intuitive insights, as they are unlikely to be conscious of acting negatively in the first place. All you can do is love them more fully and strongly. It can be a little exhausting but when it works, the rewards are far greater for both you and the other person. Only with intuitive loving and listening can we make these transformations.
So you can’t trust your negative emotions as intuitive guides. In fact, intuition really only works well with the emotion of love; good feelings make better intuitive messengers than bad ones. So next time you have a bad feeling about something, become intuitively curious about it – see if you can intuitively identify a psychological cause rather than an intuitive warning.
As the white feather floats down from the sky, the spiritual intuitive has their answer, but has forgotten the question. Spiritual intuition isn’t based in the physical world. You might even wonder if it is based on this planet, as people who are deeply intuitive through their spiritual self can find communicating difficult. They often conform to the image of the new-age hippy; they find beauty in everything, but find being human difficult. They will often confess to communication with angels or ascended masters.
A spiritual intuitive who lives more in energy than in the body often finds everyday living a challenge. They may suffer feelings of being homesick even when they are home. Their intuitive skill is being able to see the big picture, but they can’t always link it with a physical world of action. Their level of spirituality means that they just can’t comprehend the human ego and are often hurt by the ego in others. They have strong links to other energy beings, the collective consciousness, and the Earth itself. They would have so much to teach those of us who are more grounded, if only they could make connections with the physical world. A spiritual intuitive will sense the world rather than feel it. The ability to sense comes from the aura and the chakras.
We have already touched upon the subject of the body’s energy, but let’s look at it a little more closely. Sometimes people claim that they can see the aura; however, the aura cannot ordinarily be seen with your eyes. What we physically see is possibly light as it bounces off solid objects; the aura is energy and not solid. In fact, your eyes see the world as if it were upside down. The image formed on the retina in our eye is an inverted one and our remarkable brain turns the image around for us to make sense of it, in much the same way that we have two eyes, but don’t see two images.
People who can see the aura are probably in fact sensing it so strongly that the brain has added the missing details into the person’s sight. In other words, the brain decides what we see. Right now, sitting in front of you, there might be a little green man from the planet Zog. If your brain cannot conceive of that little green man, however, your brain will simply take him out of the picture you have in your mind.
It was reported by Captain Cook and many of the other early sailors who visited remote islands in large ships, that the people on the islands couldn’t see the ships. Their minds couldn’t conceive of something so large sailing on water, and so blocked it out. This could also be why some people see the spirit of a dead person; their perception is so strong that it puts that image in place. This might be because they sense the dead person so strongly that the brain generates the clairvoyant image to match it. What you then have is a medium who will state, ‘Your grandmother is standing beside you.’ A wonderful gift if you are truly sensing a spirit. A not so wonderful one if you are picking up psychic information from the person you are talking to about their dead grandmother, and using that to allow the brain to fill in the blanks and not the grandmother at all. Personally, I believe it is really important to know all the possible variables before we make a fixed decision on something. Intuitive curiosity rather than purely believing what we are told is the best way to really understand the world.
With this in mind, become curious about your aura. You don’t need to ‘understand’ the aura; you simply need to know it. Know what it feels like to be in your energy on a good day; know how it feels on a bad day. The aura has an abundance of energy and so, even if you can’t see it, you can still sense and feel it. Enjoy it, play with it, know it is a valuable tool to give you intuitive information, and then forget about it. The aura looks after itself. As long as you look after your body, your aura will be fine.
We can’t have a conversation about the energy of the aura without mentioning the chakras. The chakras are centers of energy, located on the midline of the body. They supply much of the color and energy of the aura. The word chakra comes from Sanskrit and means ‘wheel.’ There are seven main chakras and each has a color and tone associated with it.
There is also an eighth chakra, which is coming more to attention now as it is waking up more of our human potential. Its connections are to unconditional trust, intuitive knowing, and insight. The eighth chakra is the transpersonal point, which is becoming stronger as humanity realizes that it can’t go on into the future with the same model of thinking as in the past.
As well as the seven main chakras, there are numerous minor chakras, such as those on the hands and feet. Invisible energy lines known as energy meridians run throughout the body, and connect all the chakras. When the subtle energy levels of the chakras are in harmony, the physical body maintains equilibrium and a positive relationship with the mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies.
I have encountered many people who worry about closed chakras, unbalanced auras, psychic attack, energy draining, and the attachment of entities to the point where they can even stop getting on with their lives because of their anxiety about it. I worked with intuition and energy my whole life before these people alerted me to the potential dangers. I was perfectly fine until I knew all these dangers and then I suffered every single one of them. Why? Because my happy-go-lucky got lost! Fear brings you into vibrational alignment with the thing you fear, thus creating it. Love, joy, wonder, and curiosity are the greatest healing tools. When you feel yourself to be out of alignment, the only thing you are out of alignment with is love. The more you worry and try to fix it, the less love you are creating and the bigger the problem becomes. A bad thing happening to a good person is a part of reality. What makes it ‘bad’ is the definition and not the situation.
Your aura and energy system is extraordinary, too; it tells you all the time how aligned you are with love. When we intuitively hear our energy in terms of sound, we can hear if we are out of balance and we can then adjust our lifestyle accordingly. But the best way to make the adjustment is to do something fun: watch a comedy, go dancing, phone a friend, get a massage, play with a dog, eat a bag of chips. I honestly don’t think it matters how you have a good time, but bring yourself out of worry by being as silly as you can. My favorite is musicals therapy: I put on a song and give my neighbors a reason to believe that The X Factor is quality TV. I sing my little heart out and no one swings round on a chair and says ‘I want you.’ I feel much better after. However, if you want to try this at home avoid singing anything from Les Misérables; at the end of the day, they always die.
Your body is a finely tuned instrument and the aura and chakras are a part of that fantastic and wondrous being that is you. A spiritual intuitive, over time, can learn to use their energy and become in tune with the energy of the world.