Intuition Is Your Birthright

A ​random Google search on, “How to become more intuitive” is an exercise in strange advice. To clarify, I use intuition instead of clairvoyance because I feel they are on a continuum. It can be difficult to asses what is intuitive information and extra-sensory information. For the purposes of my talk here, I use both words nearly interchangeably because to me, they work so close together they might as well be.

The most common advice via Google for increasing intuition is as follows: meditation, pay attention to your dreams, journal, pay attention to your 5 senses, avoid fluoride, get your chakra (reiki, etc.) energy in balance, eat clean, and avoid alcohol.If this list were in the least bit accurate, by all rights I should be totally and completely lacking any intuitive abilities. I eat nachos, drink bourbon, gargle with fluoride, haphazardly meditate and forget my dreams as much as anyone else. Nor have I used any of these suggestions to increase my ability.

Just like eyesight, hearing and touch, intuition is as natural and reliable (okay maybe not 5 bourbons in). Your intuitive sense is robust. You do not need to be a yogi on the mountain, or a champion meditation guru, or a vegetarian with balanced chakras. Intuition is a gift like all the other gifts we have as bodies, it is innate within you. 

There is no need to shroud this inexplicable sense anymore than it already is. Just like eyesight, hearing and touch, intuition is as natural and reliable (okay maybe not 5 bourbons in). Your intuitive sense is robust. You do not need to be a yogi on the mountain, or a champion meditation guru, or a vegetarian with balanced chakras. Intuition is a gift like all the other gifts we have as bodies, it is innate within you. There is no need to shroud this inexplicable sense anymore than it already is.

​Intuition is easily observed in children. Most children have an innate sense that at some point begins to fall off. This usually coincides with the start of school. School does not train us for listening to this sense and I would argue, actively dismantles it. We live in a society that does not honor, nor recognize intuition. 

​In that vacuum what was natural talent atrophies in many. We can see further evidence for the lack our society has for intuition just by the dearth of words to adequately explain this perceptive sense. When our language lacks the words to describe what we are experiencing then it is hard to understand that what we sense is real.

​How could you possibly ever communicate your experience to a society that has decided that thing you are describing is not real?

E​nglish (in my opinion) is not verbose when it comes to describing inner states and complex emotions. There has been a recent spate of research around how words of a thing change and shape how we feel and what we sense. There has also been research on the use of words and the perception of things like time and color perception. Namely, the language you use to perceive changes what you are perceiving.
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Ifind it hard to explain the process of intuition because I am grasping at words (inaccurate, clumsy substitutions) that are not up to the task of my perception. The closest analogy I can think of is trying to live as a person with sight in a blind world. That blind world telling the rarer sighted individuals that the color red is a delusion of their weak mind. How could you possibly ever describe the color red if there were no words for it? How could you possibly ever communicate your experience to a society that has decided that thing you are describing is not real?

T​his is the first in a series of conversations I would like to have regarding intuition/extra-perception. This first piece sets up the conversation I wish to have with you later. If the advice we get about enhancing perception is mostly off-base, then what works? How can we create language that will help us identify what is going on inside and later explain it? How has a society that eschews this sense affect your intuition and your relationship to it?
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As an intuitive who makes her living by using this sense. I aim to question the advice that I have seen so often in fly by night articles (yes, I do see the irony). I also endeavor to replace them with methods that I use and know work. But, caveat here, what I may offer will not work for everyone. Merely, I offer a different way of viewing what ‘this’ is and how to enhance it.

​I hope to help you train your sense of your sense, namely, to be able to isolate what is intuition and what is not.

I will ​offer a three-part series: The first is learning what intuition feels like. Gaining a lexicon that might be useful. Many things that I hear people call perception is often just suggestion. I’ve read bad advice where suggestion and subconscious to conscious conversations were labeled as extra-sensory. I want to clear up the difference so that you can easily recognize when it appears. I hope to help you train your sense of your sense, namely, to be able to isolate what is intuition and what is not. Half the battle here is just to be able to recognize it.

Once we have a clear idea of how and when our active intuitive state is present, we have to learn to listen to it, to trust it, and to turn up the volume so we can hear it better. I have some pretty novel ideas regarding how to do this that greatly increases our ability to catch the impression.
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Finally, upon identifying what the sense is like, and training our minds to hear it, we then can learn how to call it on command. Like tuning into a distance conversation we can train our ‘ears’ to pick up on the information from the ambient noise. We can easily put ourselves into a listening state that helps us catch what we need to sense.