WAKING UP
TO LIVING INTUITIVELY
To live by intuition and heart-based decisions is to live in freedom. It doesn’t make for a life without pain and disappointments, as life is still made up of other people living through ego, but what it does give is a greater understanding. In the main, the ego will make up a story about other people’s actions, and one that fits its own agenda. Living with intuition is the closest we can get to living with a bit more wisdom. Living intuitively is a work in progress. We have to use our logical mind with intuition; we have little choice in that, but intuitively understanding the world around us and ourselves will lead to a wonderful life based on curiosity and a deepening connection.
Intuitive living starts with intuitively knowing yourself: knowing the influence society has upon you, knowing the influence of your environment, and intuitively being able to hear the universe. We are part of all of these things and need to intuitively feel our connection to everything. The world is changing rapidly, and intuition is one of the major factors in this time of change. If we want to interact from a loving consciousness, we have to change how we understand one another. Intuition is communication without ego.
It’s really useful to know about yourself. You can then understand what limits you, what stimulates you, what will make you happy, what challenges you, and what enables you to grow. You can then also talk about yourself: your life, your past, the decisions you made, your plans for the future. These aspects make up your personality, your values, your boundaries, and your dreams. This is self-awareness.
Thinking about ourselves in a navel-gazing way can only take us so far into knowing who we are. In fact, we decide who we are from the information we discover. If you had no experience of life and the world, and you were in an empty room, how would you know who you were? If something entered the room like a dog, you would see yourself in relation to the dog: ‘The dog is furry and I am not.’ If a child entered the room, it would give you a sense of age and you might find a shift in your emotions and perspective. We know who we are in relation to what we are not. This is one of the many reasons why the people who annoy us the most are often our best teachers. We know about ourselves through our contradiction to and alignment with other people.
Often the reason people feel most alive when they are traveling is because by experiencing other cultures we learn about our own. We know that our environment has created much of who we are. People who live in many different countries may find themselves having personalities that shine differently depending on their environment. All of these personalities are still the real us. Often, when someone dies, we feel a part of us has died with him or her. The person we were when in their company, and the sound we made when we blended our vibration with a person we cared about doesn’t die with them, but lives somewhere inside of us. When we look at photos, we can still hear the tune of the union we had with them. In short, who we are in our personality is ever changing and growing, but how does it start?
We make decisions about who we are from childhood, by information we are given about ourselves: ‘Good child,’ ‘bad child,’ ‘achiever,’ ‘non-achiever’ – it becomes hard to sidestep these roles, as they become the foundation of our personal information. However, once you get adult eyes it is worth looking back and questioning some of the information you were given. Every human being judges another by the perception filter of their experience, including your parents. If you have a mother with low self-esteem, she isn’t going to believe that a child born from her is going to grow up and be a genius. She might even want to protect that child from ridicule and limit the child’s options in life so they aren’t disappointed. No one ever actually thinks anything about you. No thought can ever fully be about you. It is always going to be put through the perception of the ego.
People who like you do so because you fit into their needs or values. People who don’t like you often find that something about you triggers that dislike, which can be jealousy or even seeing something in you that makes them dislike themselves. This means that no one can tell you who you are, but you can learn who you are by witnessing yourself in their presence: how you react to situations and what emotions come up for you.
Your sub-personalities can block some of these emotions by taking the form of a family member or teacher from your younger days. In school reports, I was described as ‘lazy, must try harder.’ I struggled terribly at school and the result of the struggle was that I gave up. I am not at all lazy and I don’t know many people who try as hard as I do; I just didn’t get the support I needed. However, taking this belief about myself into adulthood formed me into a workaholic, strapped between the sub-personalities of the critic and the controller. Intuitive knowing allows us to look at information that has been presented to us and to see if we resonate with it.
When you look at yourself through the curiosity of intuitive eyes, you start to see yourself more authentically. You are able to feel the sound vibration of what you believe you are, from what people have told you in the past; and who you are, based on your actions and how you show up in life. People often talk about what ‘resonates’ with them in something they hear or read. What they are describing is what makes a sound that complements their authentic knowing. Some people feel that resonance often, and some people never feel it. You can resonate with something you know to be true, whether or not you have direct experience of the subject matter. The more you develop intuitively, the more your ability to have an accurate picture of who you are emerges.
It is worth having a spring clean of the ideas you have about yourself that are based upon what other people have told you. You can do this by listening intuitively to yourself every time you get triggered into a negative emotion. Current emotions resonate sharply; old emotions are dull. You might compare this to the pain experienced when having a massage – old, tight muscles or injury have a dull pain and new pain is sharp. Intuitively hearing your resonance means that you will know if someone in the current moment has hurt your feelings or if this old pain, which is causing you to react. If it’s old pain, it is worth checking in intuitively with how you really feel before reacting from an old space. From a very early age, we were trained to shut down our original responses to the stimuli of life. For example, statements such as, ‘What’s wrong?’ when we show an emotion that is not seen to be positive, or ‘Don’t be scared’ or ‘You’re being silly.’ We are talked out of our feelings and when we are young we take in this entire information. We make it part of our life map of the way we must behave in society.
One of the saddest things we can do is to medicate our emotions, not allowing ourselves to feel authentically whatever we are feeling. This is especially true when children are medicated because an adult can’t cope with the child’s energy. I am not saying that all medication isn’t needed; I’m not a medical doctor. However, I have seen too many people put on medication when what they actually needed was to find a space to be in touch with their feelings. When the Earth goes into winter we don’t think there is something wrong and it should be in spring and summer all the time. Like winter, being sad and reflective is when we nurture the seeds of our renewal. In the same way, it is okay to be thoroughly miserable from time to time.
When we intuitively know ourselves authentically, we act and react differently. This can burst abusive or unloving relationships, allowing us to find authentic, deep love and to build firm foundations in our business/career communication. Knowing yourself by what you intuitively resonate with means that you know yourself from your heart. Knowing from your head is based in past ‘learning’ and not the ‘knowing’ of ‘you’ in the present. By doing this, we also start to change our story. It is never about what has happened to us that is important; it is about what we made those events mean that affects our future the most. As, in order to be right about our perceptions, we replay them in the drama of our life, gaining more evidence that our limiting beliefs are correct. When we know if we resonate with the story in this present moment, it means we can move through its holding pattern.
Intuitive living starts with showing up to life from your authentic self. It takes some intuitive awareness and mindfulness, but the blessing is the feeling of being set free to choose from the heart and not just the head. The responsibility of intuitive knowing isn’t just using what you know, but adapting how you communicate with others. When you see past someone’s fear into the root cause of why they are afraid, you can acknowledge it and do nothing about it or you can choose to help undo the tightness of the knot around their story, by not playing a character. You can respond from a loving place, inspiring the person to do the same. Of course, I am not saying be taken advantage of, but occupy the higher ground toward love, which can transform fear. When you move past a fear in this lifetime, it never presents itself in another life. You have mastered that part of ego and moved on from it as a lesson point. Isn’t that a great gift to give others? One by one it shifts humanity.
Our body is a wonderful indicator of the world around us. Intuition is the way to reawaken your natural and authentic responses to the energy of other people and the world. As we have discussed, everything that exists vibrates, therefore everything that exists makes a sound. Your body and its energy system are sensitive to these sounds. The trick is to be able to interpret the sounds into information. The sound vibration information may be interpreted as emotions, pictures, feelings, symbols, etc. This level of understanding might be enough to ‘know’ without the words. However, if you need to communicate what you know then the left hemisphere of the brain will have to turn the information into words.
One way of accessing what the body knows is to allow your body to work through your imagination. We don’t often think of the body itself being inspired, but the body can be inspired – this is what happens when we dance. The body is constantly moving without the brain making conscious decisions to tell it to move, like blinking our eyes for example. Anyone who has had to learn a dance routine will know that if you think about the steps your feet have to make, you will find it difficult; but once you know the steps, the best thing to do is let the body move and stop thinking about them. You also find that when a musician plays music you can see the energy running through them. So, next time someone catches you dancing in the living room when you thought you were alone, grab them by both hands and swing them round the room.
Shamans have used drumming for thousands of years as a way to bring forward information for the tribe. Music can induce all kinds of trance-like states, which allow the right hemisphere of the brain to see useful images. Letting the body move in a space or interpret the sound through the imagination can be very powerful.
There are two ways in which music can help you develop your intuition. One is to allow the right hemisphere of the brain to open and have downloads of information. (You may remember that language functions are located in the left brain, but music lives over on the right side of the brain.) The other way is to open the body and its energy systems to bring forward somatic knowing. In this way, we can also unlock emotions held in the physical body, which might be holding us back in our past; they might be an aspect of the pain-body and not allow us to flow into happiness in our present moment.
To experience who you are at your deepest essence is to know yourself without words, to know that part of you which is without form. For example, you can’t know God with words. To know who you are with words is to limit you. The part of you that is the unformed, beyond comparison being – probably you can’t even think about it because the mind cannot conceive it. The only connection you have with it is that of inner knowing. To know yourself with intuitive eyes is to recognize a timeless and formless consciousness. You might know it in a second and lose the connection; you might feel it for a while and wish that you could keep it. Intuitively knowing this part of you is easy to do in a room alone but much harder to keep connected in the community, when people bring you back to your ego.
Yet, when you know it – when you have felt the real you – it is a place that you can remind yourself is there, and it makes it easier to let go of the importance that ego places on life. This inner knowing is breathing as one with the breath of life and death and knowing that we are energy. We are one and connected; at that level of knowing, none of the everyday matters we concern ourselves with are truly important. I don’t wish to trivialize how painful and difficult life can be, but it is our perception that makes it hard. Going with the flow is like dancing on breath; the ego can’t hold you, and your spirit is free.
I have no words to share with you. It is an impossible thing to connect with through words, as it has no words. I can’t tell you how to find it, as this will force you more deeply into ego. Life gives you the pointer to find it. Other teachers can give you pointers to find it but ultimately, when we stop looking at the finger for direction, we feel it: it, the finger, the heart, the breath, and, at the same time, none of these things at all.
Part of the problem we can have with tuning in to our knowing is that we are not ourselves and ‘sedate’ ourselves to what is going on around us. Call your therapist, call your sister, call a cab, call who you want, I’ll give you your number so you can call yourself, – the chances are you do have an addiction. Now, where’s my coffee?
Addiction is a huge problem that is holding humanity back from making change. Living intuitively means we can wake up to our addictions in the search for happiness. Addiction isn’t solely about being dependent on drugs or alcohol; we are also held back from our spiritual evolution through addiction. The main reason is that most addictions keep us sedated or in a cycle of dependence, which keeps us in a holding pattern. It is possible for us to become addicted to anything that makes us feel better. Addictions can range from a basic sugar rush or buying something new, to not letting go of a relationship, right the way through to social standing, power, and control. We can even become addicted to our spiritual beliefs, making us believe that we are living a better and more righteous life than others. When we become hooked on something, no matter how loud our intuitive knowing, it can’t break through to help us make a decision to change.
I was once what I call a ‘cappuccino woman.’ I’d buy a coffee, luxury skinny latte or a cappuccino and make my way onto the subway. Overtaking tourists and doing a do-si-do around fellow commuters I would rush. Coming up on the far side, clearing the first ticket barrier, it’s cappuccino woman in the lead, one more furlong to go before the tricky escalators. Is she walking? Yes she is, it’s cappuccino woman walking up the escalators. She WINS… cappuccino woman has won the commuter race, not a drop of coffee spilt. It is what’s known as ‘hurry up and wait’ as I am usually early for everything. The rush made me feel as if I was important. Why I didn’t get a coffee when I got where I was going, I have no idea. I was too busy being important for common sense! This is addiction to self-importance… and coffee.
We unknowingly fall in and out of addictions throughout our lifetime. Some are harmless and some can become hooks that make it hard for us to follow our intuition. We feel safe when we live in patterns; these patterns in themselves can become addictive. Sometimes we believe we are heading in the right direction only to find that we are going round in circles. The cause of this ‘need’ for addiction comes from the different experiences of our day-to-day lives. An individual isn’t always fully responsible for their addictive behavior. It can also be the mass consciousness of the environment that holds them locked into a pattern of being. Take a walk through any train station in any city and you will have instructions barked at you over the public-address system: ‘Mind the gap’ and ‘Do not leave bags unattended.’ None of us really like being told what to do. You then see the faces of your fellow commuters, but never their eyes, some with their noses deep in a free newspaper that’s giving them more things to worry about and more instructions.
Then, from the corner of your eye, you catch a smiling face – she’s holding a bottle of perfume, she has perfect hair and perfect make-up; another poster letting you know that happiness depends on what you own and not who you are. The TV tells you how to lead a perfect life while the media brings down anyone who falls off the pedestal, into his or her shadow, or is photographed falling out of a taxi while drunk. In cities across Europe and the USA, you see men and women, coffee in hand, making their way into work – coffee, their necessary prop for looking successful and busy.
All the energy that drives our needs and wants is masculine energy. Masculine and feminine – or male and female energy – has little to do with being a man or a woman. The masculine energy is in line with the logic of the left brain. It brings a vibration linked with ‘doing, fixing, sorting, and achieving.’ The feminine energy brings a vibration of ‘receptive, stillness, reserving, and being.’ When we feel as if we are lacking in our life, we turn to the masculine energy; we feel there is something that needs to be fixed, something outside of who we are. If we feel that we are not enough, so we look for something to make us feel better. The ego also resonates better with the masculine energy. The ego allows us to put ourselves first, so that we make sure we have safety, food, and shelter. Happiness found outside of you is only temporary; inner happiness is permanent, but it kills off part of the ego self. The ego fools you into believing that happiness is only outside of you, so that the ego false self can continue to exist. Your intuition can let you know the difference between listening to your head and the information you are led to believe is true, as opposed to what your heart knows is true. Your heart knows you have enough of everything you need; your ego will always tell you that you will be happy sometime in the future when you have the things you want. This leads to more wanting and addiction, the chasing of which keeps you from the things that really matter.
Let’s take a look at drug addiction. Addicts are often very sensitive people. They’ve fallen down a gap between reality and our common perception of it, unsurprisingly feeling that they don’t fit in with the world. Their drug of choice will also represent the imbalance in their masculine and feminine energy. Looking at recreational drugs, we see they are linked to the ‘uppers,’ which make you feel high, happy and able or ‘downers,’ which make you feel numb or distant.
Hash, heroin, ketamine, and diazepam are all downer drugs, but also feminine energy (receptive, stillness, reserving, and being). Cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, and crack are upper drugs, but also masculine energy (doing, fixing, sorting and achieving). Rebalancing the energy that is lacking or finding other ways to bring the energy in can really help fight addiction.
A friend smoked hash every day because he didn’t like himself when he was aggressive or male dominant. He smoked pot as it brought out his feminine side, which he much preferred. He was an artist and he felt that the creative energy of the right, female side of the brain was helping him. Sadly, however, the feminine energy of ‘receptive, stillness, and being’ meant that he didn’t have the necessary male drive to get any work done. His relationships failed and he wasn’t marketing his artwork, which he needed to do in order to generate income. A better method would have been to allow the feminine within him to emerge without the drugs – perhaps through meditation, which in itself is ‘receptive, stillness, and being.’ Another friend who was a crack and heroin addict had to mix the two to balance the male and female essence of the drugs, also known as the upper and downer.
Even food has an addictive quality. When I gave up gluten I went through withdrawal. My emotions crashed and I felt really depressed for about two weeks. It wasn’t simply due to lack of cheesecake. I knew what was happening so I could go along with it. However, you can see why changing diet is so hard for people. Foods with carbs and sugar are addictive, and giving them up will make you feel lousy for a while. But if you’re intolerant of those foods, they will weigh your energy down. Getting the right diet can make you feel like you’re flying, once you get it right.
When breaking any addiction, you must understand that you are not ‘your thoughts.’ You are the thinker of your thoughts. Many people feel that they are linked to their addiction because they can hardly think of anything else except the things that they crave most. The thinker has the ability to control those thoughts. The key to an addiction-free life is to balance your male and female energy, have a tamed ego and try to face all fear head on. That way fear never becomes the theme by which you resonate. This means that you can keep a loving consciousness when all around you might be resonating with fear.
There is another aspect of us that can never be addicted: our awareness or ‘observer’ – the part of us that is also devoid of emotions. When you are panicking, the awareness isn’t panicked. When you become angry you are aware that you are angry, but the awareness is calm. This is also true when it comes to alcohol or drugs. You can be very drunk, even slurring your words, yet the awareness is sober. With this being the case, the awareness can’t be present within your body or mind, as it would be affected by alcohol. Your awareness is an observer who oversees everything, but has no judgment or connection to it.
Love-based intuition has a strong connection with this part of you. People who study meditation often connect with the ‘awareness’ self. Once you have found it, you will want to be in that space all the time. Just knowing it is there, and that it is always still and calm, brings a serenity to even the hardest situations. The awareness is never addicted, judgmental or disappointed; the awareness simply ‘is.’ Some people relate ‘being in a state of awareness’ to ‘being in the moment’ (out of the ego), which would make sense, as addiction is the opposite of awakening. Addiction is being sedated. Actor Jim Carrey talked about his feeling of awakening, which was inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s work:
‘Who is it that is aware that I am thinking? And suddenly I was thrown into this expansive, amazing, feeling of freedom, from myself, from my problems. I saw that I was bigger than what I do, I was bigger than my body, and I was everything and everyone. I was no longer a fragment of the universe, I was the universe, and ever since that day, I have been trying to get back there.’
I couldn’t put it better myself. It comes and goes. It’s like riding a wave, sometimes I am on, sometimes I am off, but at least I know where I want to go, and I want to take as many people with me as I possibly can because the feeling is ‘amazing.’
Our addiction to ‘stuff’ is just another indication that for many people Western society simply isn’t working and they are just looking for ways to ‘get out of it’ while staying ‘in it.’ This was perhaps most clearly illustrated by the riots in the UK in 2011 and the LA riots in 1992. It is easy to blame politics but the simple fact is that capitalism places people at the top and people at the bottom. It’s the job of the people at the bottom to try and make it to the top. It is the job of the people at the top to stay there. Someone is always losing and the truth is that in the end everyone loses. We simply can’t continue to run business the way we have been doing. Large corporations have more power over governments than we would care to believe.
We know what the problems are – we see them and often live them every day. When you look at society with ‘awareness,’ it looks like everyone has been drinking water from the well of madness and the person with awareness is the only one left who is normal. Every human has this awareness and knows inside what needs to happen to make the changes we need, but fear often stops us from making those decisions. We feel trapped because unless we all change together at once, the individual finds it too overwhelming to be the only one playing the game without any ego-based rules. Rules don’t work; it’s only values that can guide behavior and overturn rules for the greater good. Think about some of the famous civil rights activists such as Rosa Banks or leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi who upheld their values, and in so doing overturned the rules.
We have lost our collective values as humans and value power over love because of fear. When we can escape from a society based on fear, we’ll have freedom. But you, as an individual, can be free from fear. Intuition is the key. Trust your intuition and you never have to trust another living soul. You will be able to see where other people are coming from. Watching news interviews becomes very different when we watch with intuitive knowing. We are so used to being fed information that we have lost the ability to discern the true facts. Many people feel that they don’t understand the information they are being given, so thinking about it doesn’t help. Often the information is deliberately confusing. If we really understood it, we might rise up and say ‘NO.’
Most of us live in a state of overwork and overwhelm, so it is likely we would understand information fed to us if we only had the energy or the time to put into it. Many people don’t vote because they haven’t got the opportunity to look into the policies, and they also feel it’s pointless because whatever political party gets into power, the plan goes out of the window anyway. Intuition takes seconds to make a decision. I intuitively know if something in the news isn’t true or if a politician comes from the same sense of values as myself, but it doesn’t go deeply enough into the whole picture. For example, I can hear on the news if someone is telling a lie, but it doesn’t mean I know what the truth is behind the lie. However, it is a step in the right direction and better than being in a state of apathy due to having too many other things to deal with in life.
Who we are as people can fluctuate depending upon the circumstances we live in. This might seem an obvious point, but it is often overlooked in its importance when it comes to judging other people and the power of the sub-personality. We simply don’t know who we can become when the circumstances of life change. The Stanford prison experiment in Berkeley, California, is a prime example.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. In 1971, a team of researchers at Stanford University selected students to play the roles of guards or prisoners and live in a mock prison housed in the Stanford psychology building. The results were shocking; participants playing guards adapted to their authoritarian roles and made prison life uncomfortable for the prisoners. The prisoners, even knowing this wasn’t a real prison and they could leave, stayed and allowed themselves to be mistreated by fake prison officers.
What we learned from this experiment, and others that followed, was that if you give a person a task, job, role, or position of responsibility the ego can act without any empathy and, in many cases, with extreme cruelty. Tragically, we see these offences against ‘other’ humans again and again in history and every day in the newsfeed: against women, children, social groups, and people of all creeds and ethnic origin. We tend to dehumanize the perpetrators but in truth, we all have an ego capable of these actions with the right justification.
You might also believe that if you were in a life-and-death situation that you would help others. In fact, you might turn and run. The truth is that we don’t fully know who we are. The only thing we can know is that, given the right set of circumstances, we have the capacity to be anyone. That doesn’t mean we all have the ‘X factor’ and people who can’t sing can be singers. But if your joy is to share love, through singing, and no one likes your singing, find a new way to share love.
We are all one, but we are not the same. What causes us to be different is the life we were born into and what we have made it mean from one moment to the next. Our ego is happy to play a role when faced with having to be an authority or to respond to authority. We allow authority to shape our lives. This is truer in some countries than in others. Our intuitive knowing gives us the opportunity to seek out the beating drum that we are being told to dance to and to start to see the deeper effects in a situation. In other words, know where your reactions are coming from.
By the same token, when we are faced with people in authority, just like the student prisoners in the Stanford Prison experiment, we often lose our common sense. For example, doctors in the USA have been encouraging families that have relatives suffering with Alzheimer’s disease to have them micro-chipped. With society’s fear of child abduction, is it only a matter of time before someone suggests that children are chipped in the same way? Good role models are needed from the top down in order for people to give respect to authority. Authority needs to give leadership that empowers others to lead in their community by first being a positive role model.
When I got my dog, she was a small, very cute puppy. The vet told me horror stories about puppies being stolen and taken out of the country. She convinced me to get my dog micro-chipped. In that moment I allowed a large chip to be placed between my dog’s ears, so that if she was stolen I had some chance of tracking her and getting her back. My dog squealed with pain as the blood seeped onto her white fur. To be honest, no risk of losing her was worth it. I did it because my ego was triggered by fear. I didn’t take any other knowing into account. This was the vet and the vet knew better than I did.
Working with intuition means that you can never be controlled through your fear. It means that you can never be bought or sold in your choices for you or your family. It is a step up, to view a vantage point beyond your ego triggers, to put you back in fearless control over your life.
We have mostly talked about intuition for knowing yourself, others, your community, and society but you can also use intuition for reading the natural world around you. Everything that exists has energy and a sound vibration.
In order to learn, we are used to going out and getting information, like collecting data about the world. When we talk of tuning in to anything – be it a person, a blade of grass, or a fish – it is hard for us not to think of it in terms of action. Intuition involves no action; it is to be open to receive and hear what is out there to be heard. If you wanted to intuitively know a fish, you would first enter into a mind state of curiosity about the fish, which forms a questioning energy, ‘How can I know you?’ Through your curiosity you shift your consciousness toward loving the fish. Your body then opens and starts to form a resonance with the fish. You may feel energy changes in your body; your body starts to know what it is to be a fish.
Okay, so this might sound a little nuts and I deliberately used a fish because we don’t tend to feel like we have any resonance to something that lives in water. To help you with this shift of perspective, remember that you are not just a body; you are energy, too. The body is a wonderful receiver of information about what your energy is telling you. Energy knows the fish as energy. All things can know the energy/sound that is in all things. Allowing the knowing to come and avoiding analyzing the knowing is the key. Back to the fish. Your body will start to feel emotions, knowing and sensations that don’t feel like your own. You will also note how the fish becomes curious about you. I did this once in the London Aquarium. I ended up with a crowd of people around me as the fish just looked at me and didn’t move from the side of the tank, right in front of me. Seriously I do this stuff for fun!
Telepathy is feeling at a distance. What I was feeling from the fish was a sense of taste that the fish has through its scales – because the fish has an awareness of the water, which holds memory. Tuning in I knew that the fish was aware of what it was like to live in an ocean, even though it had only ever lived in captivity. Contrary to my belief that the fish would rather live in the ocean, the fish actually conveyed that it had an understanding of the two lives and felt it was better off in this place. It simply wasn’t fond of some of the chemicals in the water it had to swim through, as they didn’t taste nice. The fish was making a sound; everything is making sound. Tune in – like a radio – to that sound, and then enable it to enter and change you, in the same way that music can move you and change your emotions.
Animals have an awareness of which humans mean them harm and which don’t. I only need to watch my dog. She is totally aware of a person who may want to pet her. I have a very friendly dog, but her instincts about people are never wrong. She won’t go up to just anyone or allow anyone to touch her. Animals live on their intuition, as we humans did once.
All humans once knew the land; they understood the animals and were part of nature. Intuition was an integral part of human survival. As we drove on in our evolution we forgot the very thing that sustained us – the Earth. We are now at such a point of disconnect with the Earth that we might very well die out as a species, as well as taking many other life forms with us. There are many reasons why we have reached this point but it is now the solutions that must become most important to us. I can’t teach you how to hunt, fish, or thrive in a world where the living conditions are now more or less extinct. But I can teach you how to reconnect to the inner knowing that you have forgotten, but not lost. It is one of the most useful survival techniques you can ever know.
For city life it is a case of being very streetwise. It helps you find work and understand the nature of a town or city, or even a building. Intuition allows you to connect with history more fully. For nature, you understand plants, water, animals, and insects with a different level of knowing. It is at this point that the world changes color. You become connected to the physical world and its vibration, as you become a part of the whole; rather than feeling you are on the Earth, you have the chance to be with the Earth.
This is important for right now, but it is also vital for our future survival. We know that our current way of life isn’t sustainable, and we are unsure of what will happen in the future. Intuitive knowing of plants and animals could once again be as vital as it is for the few remaining indigenous tribes who live on intuition for their survival. If you want to kill a fish with a spear you can’t simply aim at the fish, you need to aim at the next move of the fish. The fish could be a metaphor for all the moves we make in life – don’t aim for what you know; aim for what is possible.
This is how we need to restructure the way we work together. When we have to join together in community to survive, or when you have to make decisions where you have no knowledge to rely upon, your inner knowing could be the one thing that saves your life.
Everything is made of vibration, so everything is made of sound, including plants, buildings, water, and the ground itself. You might not be able to hear it with your ears, but you can ‘know’ it with the whole of you. This knowing is a form of blending your resonance with whatever you are tuning in to and listening to. As everything is made of sound, so nothing is truly physical, which means that you are able to intuitively tune in to everything that exists. As the observer, you can know everything around you and you can even tune in at a distance to everything. Everything that exists is part of one vibration, singing as one. Being part of this immense sound, you can tune in to it as a whole and into individual parts.
The Earth sings. The sound is different during the changing seasons; it is different from one country to the next. Having spent a few years working on cruise ships I have even found that the ocean sings a different song at night than during day. You can feel it; it’s tangible. I believe this is how fishermen once understood the sea before technology came along. Everything is made of sound and when you open up your being to intuitively receive, you can hear the Earth in all of its aspects. It isn’t more difficult tuning in to the Earth just because it is bigger. Your personal energy is at one with everything else. So this is just a case of plugging into what is already part of you. The same concept applies.
You can’t ‘know’ nature in a conventional sense. You can read guidebooks that will tell you all about a particular building, just as you can get information about a tree or a plant, but the only way to really know something is through your intuitive practice of knowing – inner knowing that is without words. Without this you only conceptualize, draw conclusions, and create limits. Only through your internal experience of it can you know really know the nature of what it is, the very sound and energy of its being.
You might feel a little uncertain about connecting with the planet, as you may worry that you will become overwhelmed with her hardship and pain. However, you are likely to find the opposite to be true. Don’t decide in advance what you will feel, allow yourself to feel what you feel. We know that talking to plants makes them grow, and I don’t think it is because we breathe out what they breathe in, as my science teacher tried to tell me. It is easy to develop a preconceived idea about what other people are thinking, let alone a plant and, of course, that gives room for the ego to fill in the blanks, before intuition is received.
I find nighttime is the best time to connect with the Earth, or just after rain when everything is reaching out for the water. Intuition isn’t just a gift to be able to hear other humans fully, it is also a way to bring back skills that we once had and have now lost – the ability to hear and know plants and animals. At this time, intuition is a vital aspect of human and world survival. When you understand what something needs and the energy behind all things, you become as one. This form of intuitive blending can cause a very intense feeling of oneness. You can totally lose a sense of yourself and feel a state of bliss. I can’t promise you will feel this, but intuitive practice can lead to many levels of awakened consciousness.
But don’t fear, you won’t be alone in using your newfound skills; your new way of being. And I don’t mean if you start communing with nature in public that you’ll attract a crowd – although this could happen. No, you won’t be alone because if you look around it is easy to find evidence of another world of people rousing themselves and using their intuition. In 2011, Steve Jobs, the ‘Apple’ chairman and former CEO – who made personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital animation mass-market products – died. Soon after his death, many of his quotes were published in social media. One from his now very famous 2005 Stanford Commencement address read:
‘Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.’
And Steve Jobs is not the only successful entrepreneur to see the true value of intuition, as the UK business magnate and chairman of Virgin, Sir Richard Branson, was reported as saying, ‘I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics,’ and Bill Gates, the Microsoft legend who now devotes most of his time to humanitarian causes, said, ‘Often you have to rely on intuition.’
I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it and, at the same time, I am also very annoyed! How come when intuition was all about female intuition it was disregarded as hogwash but when men in business admit they’ve been making money from their intuition for years and years, now everyone is saying what I’ve been saying for… well… years and years. Still I can’t complain because it might be the reason why you have this book in your hands.
The word ‘intuitive’ has now become a buzzword in technology. People now make requirements of software designers for the ‘program to be intuitive:’ ‘We need an intuitive design,’ ‘Why isn’t the interface intuitive?’ User Interface Engineering put it perfectly in one of their blogs:
‘To those who police the English language, interfaces can’t be intuitive, since they are the behavior side of programs and programs can’t intuit anything. When someone is asking for an intuitive interface, what they are really asking for is an interface that they, themselves, can intuit easily. They are really saying, “I want something I find intuitive.”’
This is what we look for in our phones, cars, computers, TVs, or any other techy toys. We want easy-to-use technology and we don’t want to read the instruction manual. We want to be able to pick it up and it intuitively make sense to us.
However it came about, it still makes me happy that we are now using these words, changing business, and starting to see the importance of honesty and transparency. And while intuition is vital on a global scale, being intuitive each and every day also makes your life easier and means that you’ll never be sold a dud car from a used car salesman.
I was shopping with my mother in one of those megastores, the kind of place I don’t usually shop. In the pet department I found an expensive pet food product that I normally buy, discounted to 80 percent of the usual retail price! I am so excited I nearly do an arm sweep across the shelf into the cart. Calming down I take three of one kind and one of another. At the checkout I have braced myself for a more expensive shop than usual but, just as I’m paying, I have a sick feeling in my stomach – something just feels off. When I get home, I check my receipt and discover that only one of the pet products I’d picked up had been reduced. I didn’t feel it when I was looking at the shelf of products – I was too busy being excited about my bargain. It’s easy to put logic down in your excitement, but don’t ignore feelings of unease or curiosity. Look a little deeper and you’ll usually see the problem. Just think how useful your intuition might be for those really big purchases, such as buying a house. In fact, I recently pulled out of a house I was buying with my very understanding friend Sam and, at the time, I couldn’t fully explain in any logical way why. Only in the months to follow did information unfold in both of our lives that meant this house would have trapped our future growth. Following your intuition at times isn’t for wimps, but it makes your life easier in the long run.
So right now, you might be noticing that your life has started to change. It can be tough being awake in a sleeping world. It becomes all too tempting to want to beat a loud drum and wake up others, yet there are many ways in which your increasing lightness of being can help and inspire others, without you breaking into a sweat.
You might also feel like a bit of a space alien, out of connection with other humans. As you remove more blocks, you are changing your dense vibrational energy to one of light; and up the balloon goes. When you are talking to people who are more solid, it is easy to blend your energy with theirs, and have a kind of yo-yo effect. Our default is always the vibration we are most familiar with. As pack animals we want to fit in and not be left out in the cold. Being a person who is conscious on a different level to the rest of humanity can be daunting. Who do you hang out with? Connecting with people on a day-to-day level is tough; authentic connection is even more difficult.
Being a vibrational mismatch to the majority of humanity is hard. But doesn’t it feel better? Isn’t it what you signed up for, before you were even a glint in your father’s eye? If you stick to your lightness of being, often people around you will tune more into you than try to drag you down to their level. It takes practice and an attitude of mindfulness when you do find yourself slipping. Most people who attain enlightenment do it on the side of a mountain, alone, but anyone can be an angel when their feathers are not being ruffled. What is being asked of you is to do it in community. It’s not the fastest road, but it is the most sustainable.
Living in a capitalist society, we are governed to think in an egotistical way in order to survive. Your job might demand it of you. Who you have to interact with on a day-to-day basis may demand it of you. The more awake you become, the more you are aware of the people around you who are sleeping. It can sometimes make you feel angry, sad, and disheartened, as if it’s all hopeless – and, of course, this is your ego trying to put you back to sleep.
In the movie The Matrix the lead character, Neo, has a choice of living life in the dream or choosing to wake up. This is a perfect metaphor for the ego’s view of life. You can live life believing the stories the ego tells you are real or you can wake up to the ‘real you’ and live with intuition. Deep inside you wanted to change; deep inside, it wasn’t enough for you to live without being authentically alive – because deep inside you knew that there was more to you and much more to life. For you, it’s simply never enough. The downside of being awake in a sleeping world is that you are likely to feel more disconnect with the lies that go on around you. Everyone else seems happy with the lie, so you can’t wake them up by conversation and that can be frustrating. It can cause pressure on relationships and family; it can make you think that perhaps you’re the one who’s crazy while the rest of the world ‘gets it.’ Yet, in contrast to all of that, when you do have connection, it is the most authentic experience you can have, and brings with it the most joy.
There is a Native American parable about a grandfather who says, ‘I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful and angry; the other is loving and compassionate.’ When asked which wolf will win the fight in his heart, the old man replies, ‘The one I feed.’
The more you feed the ego, the more it wins. The more others try and tip your hand to feed your ego, the more you need to feed the other wolf. How you feed that wolf is up to you. Likeminded friends are a great way to feed the right wolf. When in the presence of people who are not likeminded, sometimes it’s just better not to enter into a discussion that will force you into feeding the wrong wolf. It doesn’t mean that you agree with what’s being said, it just means that you are still and quiet in your authenticity.