Going With Your Hunches
by Patricia Fry
(Published by Woman's Life Magazine 2003)
Have you ever said after something wonderful happened, "I must have been in the right place at the right time"? Do you sometimes think about someone just before they call you? We've all experienced spontaneous bouts of knowingness. But what if you could tap into your intuition to solve tough problems and make important decisions?
"You can," according to Crystal Jonas Bevans, founder of Tap Your Genius in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In fact, successful businessmen and women often rely on hunches to build their wealth. Bevans talks about one of them. "Hilton, the guy who owns all of the Hilton Hotels, had a feeling about a bid he made on his first piece of hotel property. He called and changed his bid. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have gotten that piece of property."
We all have those occasional nagging feelings nudging us to go in one direction or another. But most of us aren't so quick to trust our instincts. Bevans explains, "Ours is a culture that privileges logic. We don't really encourage people to cultivate the other senses like intuition."
And we're not so quick to trust our instincts. How do you know when that inner voice is valid? According to Bevans, intuition is not just a function of the mind. It's the mind and body working together. She says, "You really do know when something is right or wrong for you by the way your body responds."
She tells participants in her emotional intelligence seminars, "A good place to start developing that intuitive part of yourself is through yoga, meditation or going for a walk. You must quiet your mind and tune into what the body is telling you. When you notice a thought that makes you feel uncomfortable, explore it. How does it feel in the body? Is there tension anywhere?" If so, what you're considering probably isn't right for you at this time.
Penney Peirce, a professional intuitive and author of The Intuitive Way, describes how to read your own body language. "If your body expands or feels comfortable, warm and bubbly about an idea, it is probably right. If it contracts and feels cold or tight, the idea is probably either dangerous or inappropriate."
While these body feelings always appear when we're working through an issue, a scant 1% of us pay attention to them. Peirce says, "We don't' listen to ourselves because we don't think we know anything. There's a lack of self-esteem. We really have to develop the habit of centering in order to notice that, hey, the body knows. It just knows."
Melanie Albert took courses in intuition training at the Kaiser Institute in Melbourne, Florida. Now, when she wants intuitive feedback, she uses a technique called body scan. She explains, "When I'm determining whether I wish to work with a client, I scan my body and notice where I feel sensations. For me, when I feel or react in my heart area and feel the energy moving fast though my body, it's a positive sensation. When I feel restricted in my gut, the feedback is negative."
Sometimes the answer you seek isn't immediately accessible. In this case, you need to raise your intuitive antenna so you're ready when the information becomes available. Maybe you're out of work and you're looking for a job. Bevans offers this, "Instead of expecting the worst, create the future and then you can find the opportunities." She explains that when you are open to what the world has to offer, "You pick up on conversations. You might say something out loud and someone hears you. It all goes back to what you want the outcome to be."
And that's another aspect of intuition training or development—creating the outcome you desire. Bevans says, "Ask yourself, if you could have anything what would that be? Put that into your mind, write it out, detail it, add the emotions so you've got right and left brain thinking. Review it in what I call the magic moments of the day—the twilight hours in the morning when you wake up and when you go to bed at night. That's when your subconscious mind is most effective. Then your subconscious mind goes to work finding those opportunities."
She also suggests keeping a journal. "Keep track of everything. Write, ?I have a feeling that this is going to happen,' and then follow up with it and find out if you were close or what part you had right. Then figure out, ?how did I know that? Was it body language?' Did you notice something you wouldn't normally notice?"
Cameron Hogan has worked professionally with Penney Peirce. He says that while he has been interested in honing his intuition for several years, "Men, in general, are particularly very bad at honoring the wisdom that comes through emotions. After time, however, you begin to learn the feeling state that you can trust."
He once trusted his instincts in a highly difficult decision—whether to keep working or to quit his job and open his own business. He said, "It just came down to getting feeling in the gut. I knew what the right decision was. Often we do know what's right, but it's scary. You have to trust the intuition that this is the right thing to do and then it becomes immaterial how scary it is."
Toronto intuitive, Arupa Tesolin, has designed a leading edge program to help men and women develop and use their intuition. She describes the most obvious kind of intuition: "A vision, a dream, a fleeting sensation, a feeling of knowingness, a very direct insight." Through her Intuita MindWare programs, she offers a variety of techniques to help clients more precisely direct their intuitive powers—Animal Guide, for example. In this exercise, the individual asks a question and then waits for an animal to appear. The type of animal you see might give you all of the information you need. Or you may have to ask the animal to provide more clues.
Tesolin recalls the experience of an unemployed friend. "She was exhausted from sending out resumes, so she used the Animal Guide process. She asked how she could find a job and she saw a burro. When she asked the animal to go into motion, it just lay down and took a nap. She said, ?Okay, I'm not going to do anything at all for three weeks.' On the last day of the third week, she got a phone call with a job offer"
Trusting is another issue for someone not accustomed to following his/her instincts. As Tesolin says, "We've been taught to give our trust to government, insurance companies, financial advisors, doctors, teachers. Ultimately, in the process, we've eradicated our self-trust."
The ego plays a part in this lack of trust. But Peirce is among the experts who believe that we are slowly changing the way we approach issues in our personal and business lives. She says, "You can't keep using so much will power and mental cleverness to get the job done. People are getting exhausted from it. It's like overloading an old system and revving it up and revving it up and it just won't go any faster." What is the predicted outcome? According to Peirce, "I think we're shifting from the information age to the intuition age."
Patricia Fry is the author of A Writer’s
Guide to Magazine Articles for Book Promotion and Profit (Matilija Press,
2000).
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