“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century Essayist & Poet

So many people have asked me about building their own psychic connections that I thought I would begin an occasional series on techniques that can be used to develop the sixth sense. (No, not that Bruce Willis movie.) This is the human mind-spirit connection.

I call this gift “the Knowing” and it constitutes not only talking to spirits, or knowing the future but also a certainty, an acceptance of what you feel and hear inside of your heart and mind.

These techniques will not be requirements, you do not have to follow these posts in any order. These are simply possible ways to awaken your mind to the possibility of experiencing guidance, knowledge and visions that come from beyond the material world in which we live.

Trusting you own Intuition is a big door-opener for more intense psychic awareness.

Let’s look at “Intuition” in its strict dictionary definition. Oxford English Dictionary defines Intuition as: “immediate insight or understanding without conscious reasoning” it also uses the synonyms “instinct” and “inspiration.”

This is a very good definition indeed and it illustrates what I am going to be saying here.

Intuition is a natural capacity that we all have wired into us. Why? Because a saber-toothed cat can run faster than us. Our only hope of surviving in the environment in which our species lived for so long was to be aware of the presence of a thing before our eyes could see a thing.

Today this sense is dulled and often made into a joke. We have so much external to distract us, shopping and mass-media. What do we need our Intuition for now, knowing which outlet mall will have the designer purse that we want and getting there before the next lady?

In this exercise we are going to train the mind to suspend doubt and insist that the Ego give up the reins once in a while.

I bet that you cannot even count how many times you have heard a little voice in your head saying DON’T do this particular thing or DO do this particular thing.

You don’t know where it comes from, but you hear it anyway. It is irrational, this voice. It’s opinion doesn’t seem to based on any known evidence about the situation at hand. Yet it is insistent.

At least you think that it is insistent, but as soon as you begin to ponder on it you can see that it is just a silly thought. You say to yourself, “I must be crazy.”

How many times have you ignored the crazy voice only to have exactly what it said proven right later? How many times have you kicked yourself over this happening?

What is going on here is that we westerners live in a society where we expect things to be explained TO us.

We are so externalized in our view of self that we try to fit our physique, our language, our personality, even our very thoughts into a widely-accepted societal view of what the good specimen of an individual should look like, should behave like.

We begin to believe the flashy news stories that tell us a sixth sense is a fallacy, un-proven by science and therefore non-existent. The sixth sense is a joke, not real, a conspiracy theory that is only believed in by wackos and acid-dropping, tie-dye wearing hippie-types.

So the first step to development for most people is simply to build a trust in your own Intuition. By doing this you will make its voice become louder. You tend to speak more when you know that someone is listening than you do if it obvious someone is ignoring you. Right?

Now, because each one of us has this pushy, know-it-all, dominant voice inside of us known as the Ego…you know, the one convinced of its own superiority even though it has an extreme tendency to lead us astray into struggle and personal suffering….Well because we have this voice we must begin by:

1. Listening to the record of doubt that our dominant mind-voice plays to us in our head and disallowing it to affect us.

This will allow us to pinpoint and isolate all of the falsehoods that our own day-to-day mind tends to run off of and to stop this record.

We can hear our Ego say: “Oh the world is in a terrible state, so I should be frightened.” We can then stop the record, by not trying to ignore what the Ego says but instead paying attention to it and explaining gently to the Ego all of the ways in which it is wrong. (After a while this can become quite a fun game, especially when you see that the Ego begins to chatter less inside your head and leaves you in peace more often.)

In this case you can explain to the Ego that in your own life you are not suffering, that there are no bombs in your front yard and that you have enough food to eat. You explain to the Ego that the peace you feel inside is not false and that the images on the “news” are not exactly true at all. You can calm the Ego by refusing to give in to ITS irrational fear-mongering.

Now we can begin the listening and allowing part of the exercise. We must hear the little voice of Intuition and allow it to affect us.

We are so used to letting the Ego get away with anything and punishing the Intuition for even existing. So when we DO go with what the Intuition says we have a tendency to change our minds several times, back-and-forth. In this exercise we will begin by making a decision, one decision, using our Intuition.

Because the difference between the Ego and the Intuition is that the Intuition is always telling you what will be best for you overall, in the long-run. The Intuition is the “big picture” mind. The Ego is always telling you what it thinks is best for you RIGHT NOW, it is always basing its ideas on limited evidence, the evidence that it deems to be obvious. The Ego is the “pixel by pixel” mind.

The Intuition has the preservation of the whole you in mind while the Ego has the preservation of the conscious you in mind. The Ego is built upon years of accumulated misperception whereas the Intuition is based on the same simple truths with which we are born. Another way to put it is that the Intuition is “nature” and the Ego is “nurture.”

You are free to make either one of these minds into your dominant mind, but as the Nurture has a set of actual voices attached to it and the Nature simply is and has a subtle, universal voice, it becomes easier to listen to the Nurture because it screams louder.

We must train ourselves to hear the subtle voice that is Intuition.

2. Make a decision, big or small, using your intuition. Hear the Ego voice telling you what to do, trying to interject its views into the internal conversation, but then just let it fall away. Calm yourself and ask you heart: What should I have for breakfast? Where should I go to college? Which new house should I buy? I promise that the answer you get will be unlike anything that the Ego would say.

Often the Ego needs to give you examples of why it MUST be right about something. But the Intuition just knows. It often gives no examples, only an answer.

Practice this more and more often. Even when you are just trying to avoid rush-hour traffic. Quiet the conscious mind and ask the Intuition should I take the highway or the back roads?

The challenge is in hearing the answer that seems to come from nowhere and allowing yourself to “go with it,” even though the Ego says “No, no. This is wrong, because we have no proof. What if there is more traffic that way instead of less?”

Well in that case you sit in traffic and you listen to yourself more. Did you get it wrong? What does your intuition know that you don’t? What were you meant to learn in this traffic? What did you avoid by going the intuitive way?

The more you listen to the Intuition, the more that you will understand its ways and why it looks out for the long-term you and not the short-term you.

But don’t be surprised if after sitting in that traffic, you get home and find out that there was an awful accident on that short-cut that the Ego wanted you to take.

Between traffic and death, I’ll take traffic.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition. ”
~Albert Einstein, Physicist, Philosopher and Author

Intuition is the holy grail of the Self-Development movement. There are so many books out there promising to help you find your inner voice, trying to teach you how to trust what your inner self tells you.

But it is not always that simple. It can take years to distinguish what the Quakers call “that still small voice within.” And the hearer can go back-and-forth between believing and not believing that what they are hearing has real value.

We have all experienced flashes of inspiration from time-to-time: A quick knowing that tells us we should slow down while driving, only to come around the corner and happen onto a fresh accident scene. A twinge in our mind that someone is untrustworthy only to find out later that they stole our credit card when we weren’t looking. The little voice that says “Take your umbrella” on a day that was supposed to be sunny, to then find your lunch break smack dab in the middle of a hail storm. These are certainly not mere coincidences.

Our mind and, more importantly, the spirit that powers our mind, are rare gifts and possess abilities that we simply cannot fathom. At the beginning of our journey, when we are trying to focus on building a connection with our own unique gifts and faculties, it is understandable how much emphasis is placed on cultivating a trust in your intuition.
Techniques abound, though I find that the non-imposing information provided in Shakti Gawain‘s work is the best starting point for many people. In her book, The Path of Transformation, she outlines ways to overcome some of the common blockages to inner guidance:

*Don’t make the process a bigger deal than it is. Stop trying to make anything amazing happen.

*Try identifying the different voices inside of you by asking yourself a question and then writing down the different tones of voice in different colors of pen.

*Try not to get caught up in needing an immediate answer. Inner guidance usually just lets us know what we need in the moment. It seldom gives us long-term information.

*Try not to confuse your intuitive feelings with other emotions or impulses.

*If you feel blocked for a really long time you may need to do some emotional healing work. It can be difficult to contact our intuitive feelings when we are holding our emotions inside us.

*Remember that developing inner guidance is a lifelong process that goes in cycles of flows and lulls. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

The more that we listen for our the voice of our intuition, the louder that we will hear it. That is simple truth. But what about the other voices in our heads? (No, not the schizophrenic type of voices.) What about the ego? What about the inner child? How can we distinguish exactly which voice we are listening to?

This very problem arose when I was counseling a woman just beginning her self-development journey. She was recently divorced, had left her job and moved several states away from where she had lived. It was her first time away from family and the very first time in her life that she had been alone with her own thoughts for more than a couple of hours.

On the surface, she knew that her marriage had been painful, that it was not leading where she wanted her life to go and that her ex-husband had been lazy and abusive. But she kept contacting me with worries and loneliness, kept reaffirming to her friends and family that she missed the past, that she missed the dream of that marriage. It is fine to feel hurt and lonely after a break-up. It is fine to feel confused about the future. But this was something more.

She was letting her discontentment with who she was in the present moment color her version of the past. We all have done this, at one time or another.

But, rather than trying to see this process as simply that, a process, and viewing it as an observer to her own growth, she kept on doubting whether or not she had made the right decisions in leaving her ex-husband and striking out on her own. (They say that the devil you know is better than the devil that you don’t.)

In order to validate the feelings that she was having, she convinced herself that it was her intuition that kept plaguing her with the wrongness of her decision. “My gut keeps telling me that there was something in that relationship for me and that I was too blind to see it.”

She would call me and tell me that she should go back to him. She felt that she knew it was the right thing, because she kept coming to that decision over-and-over again in her mind. Since it was so persistent, it must be her intuition.

But the intuition is subtle, much more fluid than that. It is not a force that knocks hard against a brick wall, it simply looks for another way around.

The only way to gauge for ourselves whether or not we are talking to our inner guidance, whether or not we are making our decisions based on our true intent and our true inner knowing is to ask. More specifically it is to question. By constantly questioning ourselves, by constantly holding ourselves and our motives to our own highest and best intentions, we begin to build an inner compass. As this questioning of our own motives becomes more automatic we can begin to sense whether or not the choices we make seem true to us intuitively.

This in itself is a process. We begin by simply asking ourselves what is the right path for us to take and listening or feeling for the answer in our gut. Intuition does not usually go through many long thought processes to explain and justify the decision that it chooses, it simply flashes the answer at you with seemingly no grounds whatsoever.

In this woman’s case I simply asked her, “What does this voice that you are currently hearing say to you?”

She replied in a very emotional manner, “It says that I am suffering now because I made the wrong choice. It says that things with him really weren’t all that bad and that now that I have left him I will never get to have children. It says that I should go back and try to rekindle the flame with him.”

To me it was obvious that this was a voice that spoke out of fear rather than truth or possibility. Then I asked her, “Well, is there another voice? Do you sometimes hear a gentler voice, one that doesn’t seem to have any fears?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And what does that one say?” I asked, “Does it say something along the lines of ‘I know that I have been brought here for a reason. I know that I can make a go of it in this new location and that I can create anything I want for my future. I feel free to be myself for the first time in my life and, since there is a reason for everything, I know that I am moving in the right direction?’”

“Well, yes,” she finished, “That is almost exactly what the other voice says.”

“That voice,” I explained, “is your intuition. It has nothing to base its beliefs on, it just knows.”

So, what was going on here? Was she developing split personalities? Not at all, she was as sane as anyone else. But it can sometimes be so easy to get caught up in the feelings of the moment. To desire an answer so strongly that we mistake the voice of Self Doubt for the voice of Intuition.

To discern the difference we need only ask ourselves if this is truly our intuition, and we will usually sense the answer. Intuition is a gentle force. The voices of the ego and friends are much more forceful. These other voices want you to come around to their way of thinking, whereas the voice of intuition would be happy if you’d just hear it.