Maybe the title should be “How to start trusting your intuition and knowing you’re not crazy!” We all have it – the 6th sense. Some stronger than others. Those are the people like Long Island Medium (I love her!) or someone who finds lost dogs by closing their eyes and looking and seeing where they are (I have a friend who can do that, I’ve seen him). But for all of us, no matter how sensitive, learning to recognize and trust our intuition is hugely important for living our truest and best life. There is a wild ocean and jungle and universe of information out there that a lot of us are just totally missing. Information that’s just not going into the pot of things we consider when making life’s decisions, big and small. But often that “psychic” or intangible information is the most important of all. It is almost always right. Haven’t you found that? That gut feeling? First thing that popped into your head? Intuition? It usually is. And we are taught in this culture to totally ignore it. Some cultures honor that information, go on quests to hear those whisper voices. Those are our life guides. Our souls speaking to us. We really should listen. But how? Half the time we have shut that voice out for so long we can’t even really hear it any more. It’s actually pretty simple. It’s like anything new…practice.

I had a wonderful spiritual teacher in Santa Fe with whom I still speak now and then (note to self, call her more!) and she helped me recognize this type of energy. I met her because I was starting in acupuncture school and I had to observe treatments in the clinic. My first observation was a treatment involving a man who was alcoholic and had a lot of intense anger. He got his needles in and I got all hot in the face, then felt like I was going to throw up and the room started to spin. I had to rush out and go sit down. It was very embarrassing. I found a few more times that around people with intense energy this would happen to me (and I’m not a fainting kind of person. I’m not put off by blood or needles or strong people. This was inexplicable to me). Someone in the waiting room said to me, “You’re just sensitive to energy. You should work with so and so. She can help.”

The main thing she taught me was this…listen really carefully. Intuition is talking to us all the time. But we often squash it before we even hear it consciously. We have to practice. Some hear information, others see things as an image, a vision. But it’s like anything new, it’s learning a skill. Try to catch those whispers, about people, places, situations, decisions. Hear them so we can use that information along with what we gather from the physical world – facts, statistics, reviews, etc – to make decisions. Something like 80% of all the information we get communicating with someone is non-verbal. A lot of it is gestures, expressions, etc but a lot of it is also “psychic”, intangible. So I did as she said but I was amazed at how long it took me to really trust the information. There are tons of little examples like – you’re leaving the house and you hear a little voice tell you to take something with you that there’s no way on earth you are going to need that day. So you don’t. Then by some strange twist of events you find yourself hours later just wishing you had that exact thing with you. This has happened to me so many times that no matter how strange it seems, I listen. Going out in the morning to the car wash and I get a psychic “hit” as it’s called to take bandaids and some lemonade? Ok? I do it. And somehow hours later I find myself on an impromptu beach picnic with friends, one of who falls and cuts her knee. Ok that never happened, but you get the point. I hear it, I do it. Most of the time. Though I still do get caught out having clearly intuited something and ignored it. It’s a challenge to really listen. But it’s like anything, a practice. A journey. Just start trying to hear that little piece of information before your rational mind tells it to shut its gob. And then see…see how often it proves surprisingly accurate or important. For things small (like bandaids and lemonade) to things enormous (it’s how I decided to pursue acupuncture and move to Santa Fe and change my life in big ways). Those gold nuggets often come disguised as flashes of intuition that we must grab and heed. Certainly now when I have a big decision to make, I gather all the logical information that the world tells me I should gather (and which is very valuable), but then I always sit and ask that higher source what it has to say…and I sit very quietly and listen for an answer. That feeling that comes from the gut, whether it arrives out of nowhere or is in response to a question, is almost always right. It has helped lead the way and lighten a path when I’ve been at a confusing crossroads many times. So maybe that is our own personal true North. That inner guide that never steers us wrong. For me it is anyway. So I make sure I try to hear the whispers and value them, even if a tiny piece in my mind still tells me it’s crazy. Crazy or not, for me, it works!