- What is intuition, anyway?
- Where do people who call themselves intuitives, get their information from?
- If I pay for the services of an intuitive, how do I know if I am being scammed?
Intuition, from what I have learned about it over the years, is a innate sense of 'knowing' about something--usually it is about something that is currently happening or that will happen very soon. It is not just a flash of insight or a meaningless gut feeling. It may require our imagination but it is not made up.
It comes from the combination of our life experiences (possibly more than one lifetime's worth), our emotional sensitivity, and our spiritual dimension (soul). It may also connect us to a collective consciousness grid, where everything that has and will ever happen and all knowledge is stored. From that connection, most often established through prayer or meditation, we access--sometimes without realizing it--intuition.
People who are in the profession of offering intuitive advice or counselling have found that they have an unusually high level of accurate intuition. They sometimes use a variety of methods to tap into a larger pool of understanding about the people they read for. Some of these may include colour analysis, numerology, astrology, automatic writing, dreams, and spontaneous artistic creations. Intuitive consultants work hard to keep their own bias and emotions out of the way of the intuitive messages they need to channel. If they are genuinely intuitive, they are in their line of work to serve the highest good of the persons they read for.
The best way for intuitives to work is to have very little information about the clients, to begin with. In contrast, a scamming person who pretends to be an intuitive will likely talk to the person at length before the reading, research the person's background (which is easy to do with the Internet as a resource), and possibly not finish the reading for many days or weeks after the first contact.
The information one can get from a person who merely pretends to use intuition but really uses a lot of readily available information, may be decent advice that is worth paying for. On the other hand, such persons may also offer bogus advice that leads you the wrong direction or a reading that just uses the client's own statements as clues to what to conclude about him or her. These are the risks of using self-proclaimed intuitives. For me, the risks are too high.
With as many self-employed intuitive coaches as there are to choose from, it is easy to get scammed. Make sure that you look for one who has a certification of training with a very reputable instructor or school, who has client statements that support his or her intuitive abilities and who doesn't want to talk to you beforehand.
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| Photos from Sue Frederick's in-person intuitive coach training course. |
I recently trained with Master Intuitive, Sue Frederick, a well-established coach and author. I learned of her through friends that I trust, and considered it an honour to study with her and to be awarded my Intuitive Career Coach certification by her. Her coaches' training courses are extensive, intense and incredibly challenging but they are well structured and spiritually uplifting. She is an excellent role model and extremely well-proven intuitive, often booked up for readings for months in advance. I could not have found her without my own intuition guiding me, nudging me toward finding out whether my own prophetic dreams and visions were legitimate.
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Beautiful Sue Frederick,
author of 'I See Your Dream Job' |
What I value in Sue Frederick (left) as a mentor is her sunny personality, strong spiritual values, encouragement of others and sincere desire to help as many people as she can. Through her, hundreds of people have found their highest soul paths, soul mates and loved ones who are beyond the curtain of death. I will eventually gain these other two areas of expertise. In the meantime, I will continue to study Sue's books and be amazed and excited about the ideas and methods she shares.
What happens when you finally open the door to your own intuitive side?
Extremely accurate information starts to find its way to you, when your intentions are pure and you are spiritually open. Sometimes the information seems far -fetched or bizarrely unconnected to the person you are reading for, but it always is connected and almost always helps the person realize something important. Sometimes, what he or she realizes is that intuition is actually a valid 'thing', a tool to help guide us through life, a tool that we are given as beautiful creations in order to help ourselves and others. Sometimes, what a client realizes can be life changing, too.
That is the greatest reward any sincere intuitive can have.
FURTHER READING:
Excerpt from the British Psychological Society journal article: "Intuition is Not Pseudoscience, Say Researchers"
(March 6, 2008)
From an anecdotal perspective, nearly everyone has as some point in their life felt compelled to do something for a reason they couldn’t quite define that turned out to be a smart move. Sometimes it’s even an instantaneous response to something that wouldn’t normally elicit such a reaction, but ends up being a good thing. Maybe you just get a bad feeling about someone without knowing why and find out later that they’ve got a violent temper. Or maybe you make a snap judgment about working with a particular individual because there’s just “something” about them that makes you think they’ll be successful. You could write it off as a lucky guess, since not every intuition turns out to be true. But whatever the case may be, researchers at Leeds say these “feelings” are likely as real and valuable as our logical deductions, and that we should therefore take our “hunches” more seriously.
Historically, however, scientists have ridiculed the concept of intuition. They put it in the same camp as parapsychology, phrenology and other phenomenon considered to be ‘pseudoscientific’. The study of intuition has also commonly been considered a spiritual discipline lacking any real scientific weight. However, new research is showing that intuition goes a lot deeper than we might have thought. In fact, maybe Stephen Colbert’s character on The Colbert Report is right; thinking with your gut may be as valid as thinking with your brain. In any case, intuition is more than just a hunch, according to a new Leeds University study.
Intuition is the result of the way our brains store, process and retrieve information on a subconscious level says Professor Gerard Hodgkinson of the Centre for Organizational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University Business School. According to his research, intuition is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential.
Through analysis of a wide range of research papers examining the phenomenon, the researchers concluded that intuition is the brain quickly drawing on past experiences and external cues to make a decision on a non-conscious level. In other words, it happens so fast that we’re not aware that the intuition actually stemmed from a supercharged burst of logical thinking.
“People usually experience true intuition when they are under severe time pressure or in a situation of information overload or acute danger, where conscious analysis of the situation may be difficult or impossible,” says Hodgkinson.
Hodgkinson cites the recorded case of a Formula One driver who braked sharply when nearing a hairpin bend without knowing why he was doing so. As a result, the driver avoided hitting a pile-up of cars on the track ahead, which undoubtedly saved his life.
“The driver couldn’t explain why he felt he should stop, but the urge was much stronger than his desire to win the race,” explains Professor Hodgkinson. “The driver underwent forensic analysis by psychologists afterwards, where he was shown a video to mentally relive the event. In hindsight he realized that the crowd, which would have normally been cheering him on, wasn’t looking at him coming up to the bend but was looking the other way in a static, frozen way. That was the cue. He didn’t consciously process this, but he knew something was wrong and stopped in time.”
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“Humans clearly need both conscious and non-conscious thought processes,” he adds.
Hodgkinson, who is a chartered occupational psychologist, is interested in studying how intuition works within a business framework, where executives and managers often claim to use intuition over deliberate analysis when a swift decision is called for.
“We’d like to identify when business people choose to switch from one mode to the other and why – and also analyze when their decision is the correct one. By understanding this phenomenon, we could then help organizations to harness and hone intuitive skills in their executives and managers.”
