Intuition-Many Ways

 How Intuition Works 

 Examples of Intuition

 Intuition As The Highest Probability

The High Art Of Intuition

Learning Intuitive Hand Analysis

The Spontaneous Voice Approach

 The Gypsy Secret

The Intuitive Imagery Approach

The Intuitive Feeling Approach

Counselling People through Intuition

Becoming An Accomplished Intuitive

Intuition is defined as the ‘immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning – or immediate insight. Most often we think of intuition as knowing something without having gathered information about it through our senses or through previous thought.

In films and fiction the intuitive person has often been depicted as a mysterious stranger who meets someone and can tell them facts about themselves, about their future and past, without any exterior information. The characterisation may portray them as having occult or mysterious powers, or as employing spirits or demonic forces. Such portrayals show us the common conceptions people have of such human abilities as intuition.

Because of the change in peoples perception of this faculty in recent years, many modern films show the intuitive person as being a highly evolved alien from another world, or as someone having developed faculties previously slumbering, or as having used technology to enhance their mind.

From this we can see there are a number of ways intuition is explained. They range through communion with the Devil; the help of disembodied spirits; clairvoyance and telepathy, latent human faculties; using the unconscious mind; trickery; and training the mind to work with its latent faculties.

 

How Intuition Works 

Recently while driving quite fast around a large roundabout a car pulled out in front of me from one of the side roads. The driver gave no signals so I was uncertain if he was going to carry on across my path, or take the next exit off the roundabout. I immediately pulled across to get behind him. This all happened fast and so there was no time to reason at length about what to do.

In this case one could say I acted intuitively – that is without rational thought. In the reference book The Oxford Companion To The Mind, it says of intuition that in fact we are all using intuition all the time, in that we do not often go through the steps of logically examining an argument before making a decision. “In this sense” the book says, “almost all judgements and behaviour are intuitive.”

The writer goes on to say that ‘women’s intuition’ may be largely the result of subtle and almost subliminal cues arising from gestures, snippets of conversation and gathered knowledge of behaviour patterns and motivations in social action.

Returning to the example of the car, the driver who pulled out actually took the next turning off, so I could have driven across his path. The safest bet however, was to follow behind. After the act, with more time, this could all be reasoned out and the decision analysed. At the time however, I needed intuition because of the speed. Intuition in this case was the result of unconscious or subliminal experience of driving gathered over many years, called upon and expressed as automatic or intuitive response.

So from what has already been said, intuition can arise from:

Gathered experience that has not all been made conscious at the time of the intuitive response. This experience might be a special  area of study such as medicine, motor engineering or hand analysis; or it might be general such as the everyday life experience of people and social interactions. This form of intuition can afterwards be examined and with time the sources of it be explained or known.

Cues given us by other people in their behaviour, facial expressions, clothing, speech and speech tones, posture and movements. Study of intuition arising from these show that each of us in fact gather an enormous amount of information about each other within a few seconds of meeting. Such information usually remains unconscious unless we take time to carefully examine and express what our impressions were of the person, and what we have concluded about them.

An overall summary of this mass of gathered information can arise as a hunch, or an ‘intuitive’ feeling of like or dislike, trust or mistrust. If such feeling responses are explored however, details may be made conscious about the person being considered.

Because of the many experiments now proving the quantum theory, we now longer have to wonder how intuition without and feedback can work. Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe. For instance we are only able to see a tiny fraction of the visible spectrum of light and as small amount of audible sound, so we are almost blind and deaf to the world around us.

To quote Gary Zukav from his book the Dancing Wu Li Masters, “The implications of the theorem are enormous. Something can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended. David Bohm, an eminent physicist, goes as far as to say that all things in our observable universe are inextricable linked. Nothing has separate existence.”

Some forms of intuition are explained by this approach, as one person’s mind is said to connect to all others in a quantum manner, in the unconscious. In this way, questions or inquiry about a particular person will draw information pertaining to them from the enormous unconscious.

Examples of Intuition

In our lifetime most of us have personal experiences of at least one of these forms of intuition. The following account is an example of the second form of intuition – cues given us by others.

While teaching in Japan I was staying for a few days with a family in which the wife was Japanese and the husband American. I was asked to act as counsellor to the wife, who was experiencing psychosomatic pain in the chest, and general anxiety. The way I work is to have the person allow their body and voice free expression so innate tensions can be released. The woman quickly began to cough and choke and express signs of emotional and physical struggle, but without being able to say what emotions the choking was connected to. I felt rather lost as I had not known the woman for long, and she gave no other information. So I used my intuitive faculty, asking for help.

Immediately a powerful series of images and feelings arose. They outlined a cultural and personal conflict regarding relationship. The woman was pregnant, and my intuition suggested she was terrified that once she had given birth, her husband would find another woman. I said to her, “Is this about your husband and the baby?” She immediately cried out “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” Tears and sobbing about being left followed.

Amazed at this very direct insight into what was troubling the woman I later wondered how my unconscious had known this, because consciously I had not suspected the fear she expressed. I asked my unconscious where it had got this information. Straightaway a memory arose of an event two days prior to the counselling session. I had been teaching the woman how to make bread. During this I had remarked that I thought her baby would be beautiful as it would be a mixture of East and West. Her reply in a slightly subdued voice was “I suppose so”. My unconscious had put this together with other bits of information picked up regarding the culture and couple, and extrapolated its intuition of her conflict.

The intuitive insight described above shows clearly  how our unconscious not only absorbs the minutiae of daily experience, but also how it examines these in connection with the other bits of information gathered, and extracts possible meaning from them. If we used such a faculty often, we would make conscious a mass of realisations that otherwise might not easily break through the threshold between conscious and unconscious to become known.

In connection with hand analysis here is an example of how this can work. It was experience by one of the authors.

I had been talking at a communal dinner table to some of the people around me about hand analysis. Some of them had asked me to look at their hands. In quite a light hearted manner I had done so. Afterwards a woman I had not made any real connection with previously came to me and asked if I would look at her hands and tell her what I could see. As we were both in a hurry at that point I said I would try to do so within the next few days.

It was about two days later I sat down with her and told her what I could by examining the lines on her hands. This seemed rather dry so I said if she didn’t mind I would see what I could get from an intuitive reading. She agreed and I closed my eyes and decided to try to use the image approach. From this two strong pictures arose, describing two different situations. In the first the woman was shown being forced to change her life because an event had pushed her into the change. I described this to her as a big change that had occurred in her life, but it was not at all what she had wanted. I felt she was now living the results of this event, and still trying to find her own place in it.

The second picture showed her in a quiet receptive situation, reading, but with an invisible presence trying to support her with its love. I described this to her as a man who cared for her but had died, and was now, according to the impression, trying to support her and make his love known to her.

The woman identified with the first statement immediately. Her husband, after a marriage of many years, left her to live with another woman. This had forced unwanted changes into her life which were still influencing her. We talked this over for a while then I asked her what place if any did the pictured dead person have in her life. She immediately started sobbing, and told me that after her husband left her, a good friend of his became her lover. This man had made her feel wanted and cared for in a way she had not known before. He never left his wife, and their relationship remained a secret. He had died six weeks ago and she was still mourning his death. So the image telling of his support brought a lot of emotion, and meant a great deal to her.

This is not a perfect example of intuition, but the author was deeply impressed at the time. If it had been stated that the first event causing changes had been a divorce, and the second man had been a lover, this would have been detailed enough to be undeniably a direct perception of the woman’s life experience, without previously knowing her history. Even so it is still a good example of how intuition can be used in hand analysis and counselling people.

Because the woman was met at a place frequented by many single women, some of what was said could have been inferred or extrapolated. Even so, this does not depreciate the value of intuition. It can focus attention and draw conclusions from scattered impressions and unconscious information.

Intuition As The Highest Probability

 One of the factors I have noticed in watching people use intuitive faculties, is how the mind functions when we ask ourselves a question. One day my daughter came to me from another room in our house with her hands behind her back. Playfully she asked me what she was holding. At that moment I was for some reason in a mode of deep self perception, and could observe some of what was taking place at lightning speed in my mind. A mental scan was occurring which presented likely objects. There was also a filter acting to drop out of the selection those objects that did not meet a whole list of criteria such as – What was in the other rooms and not this? What might my daughter temperamentally choose? What topics of conversation  had preceded the event? What did her action tell me, and so on?

This all happened very fast and it is difficult to particularise, but it was obvious that what my computing function of mind was doing was to look for the highest probability within its points of reference and filtering. What I said within seconds was “Banana” because this is what I arrived at as the highest probability. My daughter was amazed and asked me how I did it. It had appeared magical, yet it was based on basic mental functioning and being able to let the mind scan freely, and critically appraise its scan results – i.e. filter out the negative hits.

If we learn to appreciate and use some of such processes, we can begin to ‘think’ in a radically new way.

It is important to realise that if we start to use these dormant faculties, we will almost certainly start to approach them with traditional values, unless we have carefully re-evaluated the subject. The characterisations in drama mentioned above are examples of these general conceptions of intuition. If we were asked to find the hidden secrets of a person’s character without conversing with them or using detective work, we might well revert to using a Ouija board in a spiritualistic seance.

These factors  of traditional values may lead many people who use an intuitive faculty do so in a sort of mental vacuum, or in a hermetically sealed belief system. Because the mind works better when we relax, such belief systems may be useful in giving the person confidence. But such systems often have enormous limitations, in that one would have to remain within the belief system for the faculty to work. If the subject of intuition is understood in a general sense outside of such belief systems however, I believe such understanding can help the faculty of intuition flower.

The High Art Of Intuition

The highest form of intuitive response to another person is the one described above as accessing the collective unconscious. When this occurs it does not have the signs of extrapolation, or unconsciously taking in the cues from people through their gestures, clothes, voice, and so on. It jumps beyond what information one has received personally, and presents direct perception of things beyond ones knowing. This is comparatively rare. It might be compared with the sort of connections we make daily on the telephone. Usually they are local, or individual calls. Only certain people have massive computer and telephone connections world-wide to access information beyond their personal or work domain. When this occurs, information about almost anybody might be accessed. This is like accessing the collective unconscious. In fact the massive growth of communication technology is giving us a material example of what can apparently take place naturally in the human mind.

Learning Intuitive Hand Analysis

 There are several ways of using the intuitive ability we each have. Your own most effective approach will no doubt depend upon your character. If you are a person who looks at life mostly through your feelings, then using these would be quicker than using the imagery or scanning approach. If you use your intellect most of the time, the scanning technique might be best. Or if you are imaginative and use imagery a great deal this approach would suit you.

To flex and develop your ability however, there are several techniques you need to practice. These should be used frequently until you feel at ease using them and gain a reasonably clear response each time. At the very start use them in an experimental way. They often work best when you are talking to another person, so you need a friend or friends to practice with. Tell them you are learning the technique and want to see if it will work with them. They can even try it with you, and tell you their impressions.

The Spontaneous Voice Approach

A middle aged Gypsy woman rang my doorbell one day selling heather. She immediately began to tell me things about myself which it seemed to me it was unlikely she knew from other people. She told me I had started a couple of businesses which had not been a success; a near member of family had just had an injury; my son had recently gone into a uniformed service, and I was worried about him. It was correct about the businesses, but that information was not impressive. My brother in law had just had a nail go right through his foot at work. My son had just joined the RAF and her words brought tears to my eyes, much to my surprise.

As she told me these things, prior to each statement she said, “Now I am going to tell you something true”. These words were said ritualistically, almost like a prayer, then she would say things which I had the impression she had not thought about. I was not able to question her about this as she was a difficult woman to have an easy conversation with. She gave me the Gypsy’s curse because I wouldn’t pay her the money she demanded. This amused me as, having an Italian background, and having explored the unconscious workings of the mind for many years, I well understood the nature of curses and their attempt to mobilise unconscious fears of such things as illness. worrying events and accident.

The technique this episode illustrates can be called spontaneous voice. To use it one must learn to speak without ones thoughts constantly editing and criticising what is being said. Or at least, one must learn to direct the scanning and editing functions of ones mind.

The intuitive impressions one has, the information one has gathered unconsciously from whatever source, do not usually rise into clear conscious awareness. Thinking about what we do not already know is not possible. We only think with the information we already have, or is easily available. Creative leaps are a jump beyond what is known. So to access what is intuitively understood but not yet consciously recognised, we must use something different than conscious thought.

Focusing on another person and allowing oneself to speak without forethought, is a way of doing this. The unconscious functions which support the action of speech are already well established in fast searching for memories and information connected with whatever is being spoken about. Associated ideas, feelings, memories, along with the words to express, are all quickly accessed in the process of speech. The difference is that instead of presenting the process of speech with an outline of what needs to be said, you present it with a blank sheet, with only the name of the person at the top.

In reality it is a lot more formulated than that. Here are the steps helpful in using this approach.

1.Hold in mind clearly what you are about to do – this is most important the first dozen or so times you do it, after that you can simply remember the previous times the function was used.  In other words decide to stop your conscious attempts to find information, or use ready made answers to the question you are going to ask. Imagine your body, mind and feelings as like keys on a piano, poised ready top respond, but not to your conscious efforts. Hold the picture of yourself standing aside – the part of you that has learnt to be concerned about what comes out of your mouth, whether it makes sense, what people are going to think about it, and so on – and you are going to let your sleeping dream self respond.

1 –        Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything make it slower and fuller.  When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.

Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.

Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.

	This can be very entertaining because the voice is an incredible instrument, so enjoy yourself with the instrument you have played since babyhood. If words find their way into what you are doing let them – but see what range of feelings you can express with them. For example try making animal sounds, and when well into it set your voice free to do what  IT not what YOU want.

When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.

2.Make the decision that you are going to use your voice as a way of expressing what you already intuitively know. The first times you practice it will be best to do so by yourself, or with a friend you are completely relaxed with and who knows you are trying to develop your intuitive ability.

3.Now hold in mind that you are asking for helpful information about the person you are considering. It is actually of great value if the person – perhaps the friend you are practising with – actually asks you to tell them what your impressions of them are. As you ask for information remember to see the information you seek as existing unconsciously within yourself. In this way clarify the need for you to hold your conscious mind in an open receptive condition.

4.You can develop the receptive condition of mind and feelings by taking on a feeling of patient listening or waiting. If you have enjoyed a massage at some time, it is rather like the feeling of letting someone else make the effort while you relax. That is just what you need to do. Don’t struggle. Relax and let your voice be moved from within.

5.The next step is to begin to doodle with your voice. For the very first practice sessions it will help if you sit in the receptive condition, perhaps with eyes closed, and gently make a humming sound. Take hold of the subject’s hand, and in the back of your mind hold the realisation you are waiting for information about this person. As you do so let the humming sound move wherever your voice want to take it. Let your voice doodle, rather as your hand might with a pencil as you were thinking about something else.

6.To start with you might find you have an urge to make mumbling, struggling sounds as your voice is getting used to being moved by a level of your mind other than conscious thought or emotion. This is normal and will gradually go as your voice responds more readily and capably to your unconscious intuitions. Eventually you will be able to use this technique without the person in front of you knowing you were not speaking from conscious thought.

7.The step from ‘normal’ speaking and this speaking from the intuitive awareness may at first seem a big one. It is only habit and ideas of what you can and can’t do you are overcoming though. The way to gain this remarkably useful tool is to practice, and then practice, and practice again, just as you did when you learnt to speak in the first place – practice and play at it.

The Gypsy Secret

What the Gypsy woman was doing that is worth understanding was to use a short ritual to jump-start her spontaneous speaking. Through practice she had learnt that every time she said the words “Now I will tell you something true”, she called on her intuition to produce a result relevant to the person she was confronting.

Such a ritual need not be made obvious, but if it is, it makes it more powerful. The reason being that one puts oneself on the spot. Crisis is one of the best stimulants to wake the powers of the unconscious into expression. The fact that someone else knows you are going to address them from something other than a ‘normal’ state of mind will make them give you their full attention. Their attention helps to pull a powerful response from you.

The Intuitive Imagery Approach

 All the ways one might call on intuition are based on the way we call on our memory and experience to respond in everyday life. When someone asks us what our name or telephone number is, we do not have to struggle to find the answer. The question itself provokes the response. We witness the response and tell it to the questioner.

This is precisely the same action we perform when using intuition – except we may need to look in a slightly different direction within ourselves for where or how the response appears.

If you give a little consideration to how memory responses occur, you will realise that it might come in various ways. Many of our most frequently used memories, such as our name, address or telephone number, have long been coded into words. Some things we store as an image, and only express in words when describing. Thirdly our memories may be stored as emotions or feeling tones.

Usually we allow our inner responses to the demands we make occur with hardly any awareness. We barely notice what happens when we use our resources of skill or memory. In developing access to our intuition however, we may at first need to use our faculties a bit more consciously. If we do not do this, our old habits of simply accessing memory and the already known information will probably assert itself instead of the intuition. Habits are very powerful, and until we get our intuition well grounded, we need to consciously direct the process. This is not a great task however.

The imagery approach asks the unconscious to present information about the person in the form of a picture, a symbol, or a moving tableau. This is easy for the unconscious. It naturally forms imagery around inner material that has not been put into words or been formally thought about. It does this every time we dream. As the unconscious is a master of this technique we do not need to develop this aspect of it. What we do need to learn is to observe the imagery produced when we use the technique.

The steps to learning and using this technique are as follows:

1.First it is necessary to turn your attention away from usual exterior impressions or trains of thought and clear a quiet space within yourself. This is like having a busy telephone line on which you are always telephoning friends, so there is no space for an incoming call. You must create a comparatively empty space. An easy way to do this is to learn how to watch the screen of your consciousness and observe what is happening on it.

To learn this sit comfortably alone, or preferably with a friend you can practice with. Close your eyes and notice what you are feeling in your body, whether it is comfortable, tense, warm, cold etc. Whatever you notice report it to your partner, or speak it quietly to yourself. Do not develop a conversation with your partner, simply report your observations in a few words.

Go on to observe what is happening with your feelings. Notice whether you feel sad, calm, irritated, jubilant, etc. This might be a new thing for you, but see if you can put into words what you observe.

Notice next what thoughts and mental images float into consciousness. Catch these fleeting impressions by speaking them to yourself or friend. Continue with an overall view of what is happening within you for about ten to fifteen minutes. In other words notice physical, emotional and mental experience and report it.

This first step needs to be practised enough times to make you feel easy with it. It is so important you could use it for months and still gain from it. At times you might find emotions arising strongly. Do not be afraid of this. Observe and allow them to be felt. They will gradually fade away, perhaps having led to personal insights. Unless your emotions are free enough to be felt in this way, they are not available to be used as senses in responding to other people.

2.To take self-observation and description into intuitive appreciation of another person, you set the process going in a slightly different way. As you relax prior to self-observation, mentally say to yourself “I now want my unconscious to present in picture form any intuitions it has of the person before me (or I am asking about)”.

3.After this close your eyes and self-observe just as was done in the previous exercise. Hold the idea that you are particularly looking for mental images. Accept that your unconscious will immediately present a mental picture relating to what you have asked. If you are relaxed and not throwing up masses of self doubts, or conscious attempts to think of answers to your question, a picture will emerge.

Take whatever emerges as relevant to the person you are inquiring about. The picture may not be like a painting in which all the characters are still. It may come as moving scenes. For some people it comes with accompanying emotions and subtle feelings a part of the information.

4.Observe until you feel you have got a sense of the scene. This may mean that you see the picture but you have no idea of what it means. You may be able to ask your unconscious to help you understand what it represents, and this can bring clarity. If this does not occur report what you have seen to the person concerned and ask them if what is described means anything to them. If so ask them to explain. If they want to know more you can then ask for further images to explore the direction more.

The unconscious can be questioned just as a friend can. Remember that the original response was from a question – what is intuited regarding this person? So to explore whatever the issue in the person’s life is more deeply presents no problem. In fact it is always helpful to ask the person if they have further questions about what has been said.

5.When you first start practice this with people you feel at ease with. When you have gained confidence and experience you will feel ready to meet and express your intuitions to strangers.

The Intuitive Feeling Approach

 Using the sensitivity of your feelings instead of images or speech is only a difference of approach than technique. Most of what had been said above about the image and speech methods is valid. The practice of self-observation is necessary prior to using the feelings for intuition. Then instead of asking for images to explain what is intuited, you ask for shifts in your own inner feelings to explain your intuitions.

The reason for explaining these different paths to the same goal is because of people’s basic differences. Some people already unconsciously watch their feeling reaction in relationships. They already have expertise and perhaps only need to channel it. Others are more used to imagining situations, playing them through in their mind rather like a drama. Others function through words very fluently.

No matter how you see yourself however, whether verbal, visual or feeling, do not be put off trying the other approaches. Occasionally switching from one to another with the same person can provide different results if you get stuck.

Counselling People through Intuition

In actually using intuition with a person who seeks your advice, there are things to apply just as in any other practice or skill. One of the first things to remember is that you are often dealing with very intimate and personal aspects of the person’s life. Therefore if you are going to develop this skill to the point where people will want to seek you out, you must learn the first principle of counselling – confidentiality. What you reveal to yourself and the person before you is to remain confidential and not spoken to others.

Never speak as if you are seeing the future as it will be. Make sure what is said is spoken of as possibilities arising out of the person’s current attitudes and choices. This keeps their mind free of depression arising from feeling trapped in an unavoidable future.

Realise that what you are seeing is most likely representing the situation the person is in at the moment and how they feel about it. I once visited a very intuitive woman who told me events that had happened in my life and many things about myself. She went on to say that from what she could see everything I tried in the future would lead nowhere. There appeared to be no success in relationships, and every avenue in work and endeavour seemed a dead end also.

What she failed to tell me, and had perhaps not understood about her own gift, was that the picture she painted was of my mood and fears at the time. I had recently been through divorce, felt terribly torn about what had happened, and from my pain saw all my future as grey and a continuance of my present despair. Her failure to point this out to me, to help me see how my dejection was creating a view of life that stopped me moving forward confidently, was a black mark on her otherwise great skill. I felt terrible for a day after her words, then realised for myself that she was merely reflecting my mood, and went forward to create my own future. If you can remain aware of this, you can be of great help to people, who constantly need reminding how their inner moods are creative powers for ill or good.

If you are going to use this ability often, learn some basic counselling skills such as those offered by the Samaritans or Co-Counselling. Both of them are offered at minimum cost, and are of great importance. If you cannot meet human emotions or pain without trying to repress it or make it better by trite advice, do not set yourself up as someone who can counsel others using the hand. Tell people openly that you are doing it for amusement and nothing more.

Counselling skills are not connected with huge amounts of technical information and diagnosis of other people’s condition. They are mainly to do with learning how to keep quiet, not giving other people advice, and how to help someone realise their own problem solving capacity.

One of the greatest of human tendencies is to feel that because we have managed to survive in life in what ever degree we have, we are an expert on relationships, in business, in the spiritual secrets of life. Because we have learnt to use our intuition does not make us great sages or wise in the ways of life. Present your information and help the person find their own decisions.

Another powerful urge in many psychics I have watched, and of course in most of us not skilled in meeting human emotions, is to try to ‘make things okay’ for the person who cries in our presence, or shows anger about some life situation. People often need to release emotions, especially if you reveal a side of themselves they have not exposed publicly. In most cases you do not have to ‘do’ anything about this beside being with the person supportingly and sympathetically. If you have not set yourself up as a therapist, you need not get into that role. In fact keep out of it, lest you encourage the person to move into a dependent relationship with you.

The person can of course ask questions, and all you need do is to respond from your intuition or from what can be seen in the person’s hand. This giving of information is of great help, and need not be pushed into advice giving or coercion to live in a particular way that is the expression of your own horizons, restraints, fears and hopes. It is important to clarify the difference between advice and information.

Becoming An Accomplished Intuitive

A great deal of healing and problem solving can occur if you can find doorways into a persons hurts, strengths and difficulties through your intuition. But unfortunately most psychics are awful counsellors, and this is why it has been suggested that some level of counselling skill be learnt.

As you gain experience, aim to be skilled in what you do. Learn to communicate with your own unconscious, ask questions of it, doubt and explore until you find better performance and clarity. It is important for you to be clear about what you are doing when using intuition. Recognise honestly that just like any other faculty, such as reasoning, intuition has its limitations. Test your own ability to find out its level of accuracy. Give this a percentage mark if you can, so you can look your client in the eye and say something like – I have tried to ascertain the accuracy of my intuitive ability, and I find it is about 60%.

The more fully you understand that your unconscious is already an everyday part of your life, constantly providing background information, words in speech, habitual skills such as walking and writing, the easier you will feel about using its other faculties. Also, understanding how readily it responds to daily requests – for instance we may not have ridden a bicycle for years, yet can get on a bike and ride off – helps us to see how we can organise our use of it. Instead of simply asking what you intuitively perceive of a person, for instance, you could set up a series of questions so an all round response could be given them. You could start with physical health and work through, giving them a very full life-reading, covering work, relationships, and spiritual life. See Using Your Intuition