I’ve made the audio recordings available in 3 formats to hopefully attune to your preferred listening application.

Spotify: (podcast available directly on Spotify as well during the course):

Youtube:

Native web:

These links are public to accommodate listening preferences. I would appreciate it if you could refrain from sharing broadly outside of the cohort at this time.

Welcome to Guided: Unlock, Access, and Expand Your Intuitive Power. I am so thrilled to have you here!

These concepts we are about to discuss are some of the most enriching parts of my life experience and I cannot wait to share them with you so you can apply them in your own journey.

As humans, I believe there is a universal desire to experience more joy, prosperity, health, connectedness, and creativity. It’s how we get there where things get interesting…

Many of you might be like me where you spent a big part of your life incessantly trying to control the outside world to create these things. For me, it was the better part of 30 years, before I realized the true path was inwards.

But even when we finally get to this recognition, we still need to engage in the outside world. Every day we need to make decisions, provide for our loved ones, and find purpose in our lives.

The goal of the teachings of this course is meant to harmonize and integrate the magnificence of your inner world with the outer world. And in the process, help you to become more effective, creative, and joyous in all your endeavors.

My hope is that by the end of this training you will be able to call upon your inner guidance to:

All of these outcomes are possible through a more consistent connection to a higher intelligence that expands beyond the thinking mind. All humans have this capability and I consider refining and honing it to be a birthright available to every person.

Now you may be asking - okay, what the hell are we talking about here?

The closest common language and experience that many people might be familiar with is what most people call intuition.

We can define intuition as the capacity to know something. In these experiences, we go beyond the realm of research, linear train of thought, and logic, to the state of just knowing something.

Many of the most successful leaders and innovators in the world have cited intuition as critical to their success, yet never discuss any formal regimen that they’ve used to work on it. It’s almost as if they have some unconscious superpower that they magically were born with that for some reason seems to elude the rest of us. It’s not like you hear Jeff Bezos talking about his daily intuition practice! He just credits it for his success, not really articulating what that practically looks like.

This course is about bringing awareness of this capability to all people and providing clear steps on how to improve it so that you can live your highest expression.

Before we go any further, I encourage you to join the community on Whatsapp. Here are links to each channel and purpose below

To join these different groups in the app, join the general link and then follow these steps.

Below you will find the tentative schedule. I don’t plan on changing this, but you never know how life may unfold. You should have invites for all live sessions on your calendar already. If you don’t please email jscottbritton@gmail.com with the email you’d like added to the invite.

The course flow is to provide asynchronous content each Thursday morning besides week 1 (Weds) and then meet as a group on the following Monday to practice together and go over any questions. This should hopefully give you ample time to consume the content, practice a bit, and come in with a prepared mind for our sessions together.

If you can’t make the live practice sessions, they will be recorded and shared in the WhatsApp group as well as posted in the final section of each week’s online page.

If you've never heard the word Satsang before, here's what it means.

Satsang is a Sanskrit term derived from two roots: sat meaning "true’"and sangha meaning community, company or association. It can be translated as "associating with good people" or simply "being in the company of truth," and refers to the act of gathering with like-minded, uplifting people, especially those on a spiritual path.

Like most people, I exclusively relied upon logic and intellect for most of my life. This meant that I thought the path to creating the life I wanted would be accomplished by expanding my intellect through consuming copious amounts of content vs. relying on the natural intelligence that had always been there.

Occasionally I’d have the sense that I had a hunch or feeling about something important, but I’d be afraid to trust it or simply label it as some silly thought. The times that I actually let intuitive guidance linger in my mind, I’d always chicken out unless it perfectly matched my logic. This resulted in many instances of ignoring my gut instincts and then later regretting it if things didn’t go to plan.

I also found gut instinct hard to recognize. It felt very nebulous to me relative to something that could be reasoned. This was my reality until about 2-3 years ago.

During all of this, I had become a meditator. When I was 24, I had an encounter with Alopecia that forced me to find a way to calm down which ended up being meditation. I never really wondered where it would take me, I saw it as a stress reduction technique that was part of my daily to-do list.

When it came to business and creativity, I thought good ideas were mostly about consuming more information and then pattern matching. So if I became an expert in all these different arenas of life, perhaps I could connect the dots in new and novel ways that would make me innovative and successful.

We’ll get into this later, but the challenge with this mindset is that there is no possible way to see all the information in a given scenario. You will always be constrained by what you've been exposed to which is just a minute fractal amongst the totality of information…and yes, I still feel this way even with ChatGPT.

I did ayahuasca for the first time over 4 years ago. It was the first time I connected with a presence in my awareness that seemed like a higher Source of intelligence that felt different than my thinking mind. I found that I could dialogue with the presence like I was having a conversation in my mind. I could ask questions and I’d just get these marvelous answers. The answers would often be things I didn’t expect and even use vocabulary that was quite uncommon for me. It felt like this presence could see the bigger picture of reality and I knew the answers it gave me were correct

After this experience, I had a few blissful weeks until I eventually went back to my precariously, compulsive life. I started working with a spiritual teacher and getting serious about evolving my inner experience. Over time I started to see that there was an awareness and then there was thoughts. Before this I had assumed I was the thoughts and now could see that there was actually a separation and that I was actually the watcher of the thoughts.

With this shift in identification, I started to observe how much of my thinking was nonsensical and driven by a strong desire to avoid harm. These feelings were particularly pronounced in scenarios where there was any potential moment of pain. Why was my mind so negative? And if I was just an awareness, where did all these preferences come from that I tried to fit the world too?

It started to became clear that my thoughts were derivatives from imprints of life’s events and the cultural ideas I had been exposed to. And that behind all that, there was a peaceful, loving, me that wasn’t so fraught with fear.

We can think of our consciousness as a conceptual overlay through which we interpret everything we see. I started to see that my consciousness was actually a just conditioned ball of ideas with a strong proclivity to survive and any emotion that might be painful. And behind this all was a loving awareness that was free, peaceful, and felt safe.

When I discovered all this, it didn’t mean I stopped experiencing fear or relapse into getting caught in the thoughts. But now I could notice the different texture of the two states. When I would relapse and become engrossed in thoughts, I could eventually catch myself & return back to identifying as the awareness.

This revolving door of awareness has been my experience for years. It’s like I just move through the door less and less than I used to.

Around the time of this revelation, I was instructed to notice when life disturbed me. In those moments were when I would be thrust out of identifying as the awareness and get caught up in my thoughts. So remaining in that awareness was an exercise of noticing the disturbances and then investigating the underlying thought forms responsible for the disturbance. I call these habituated response and thinking process patterns. My job became to be the watcher of my disturbances, identify the patterns, and then replace them with something more supportive that matched the state of the loving awareness that was the true me: unconditional trust, openness, love, gratitude, and reverence.

In practice, when I became disturbed, I was coached to quiet my mind, name the pattern, feel the tension in my body, soften it, and allow the right replacement thought form to emerge. This was interesting because the replacement was not an active thinking process, but a small way of trusting something emergent in my awareness.

For example, I’d notice worrying about money. I’d pause and see this imprint of doubt and notice the tension in my body. Eventually, it would soften and a word like “trust” would just pop into my awareness. It wasn’t an active thought, but more the observation of an emergence. This is different than I was used to operating which looked more like scanning my mind for a logical opposite until something made sense.

The more I did this, the more I got used to the perfect word coming into my awareness which I always did. I still do this practice most days btw.

Then I started to practice Advaita Vedanta which was popularized by Ramana Maharishi.

Basically, the practice is to still the mind and ask the question, who am I?

Sometimes answers would emerge that pointed down a further path of inquiry and other times there was just completely blank space which is the deeper purpose of the exercise. I am a big fan of this book Silence of the Heart which describes this practice and the forms it can take in detail.

This practice got me very used to just asking questions and waiting to see what emerged. It was almost like I had developed the skill of posing questions and waiting vs. immediately jumping in with active thinking like I had done for so long. My teacher advised me to use this ability to consult the stillness when I had questions about parts of my life.

I began doing this and noticed a quiet, distinct voice over time in my awareness. It felt exactly like the presence I had experienced on ayahuasca. At first, I didn’t know what to think. Was I just making this up?

As I began to consult the stillness on questions about my life, there was lots of trepidation around trusting it.  So I began experimenting with asking questions around small decisions.

All of these were very low-risk decisions. To my delight, I found heeding this advice resulted in positive feelings.

The first BIG leap of faith in trusting the information from the still happened when buying my house.

After a week of looking when I decided I wanted to buy, I found this great house and quickly realized it was the best available option that met my budget and suited my needs.

I put an offer in and ended up getting outbid by someone else. The winning offer was 40k above asking and I was one of 3 backups. I was bummed and decided to keep looking.

A few weeks later my realtor called me to tell me the offer had fallen through. He asked if I wanted to put in a better backup. I had been asking the stillness things daily at this point, but nothing of any consequence. I decided to quiet my mind and the number that popped into my awareness was 30k above asking. This was 10k less than the previous winning bid. I gave him that number and he told me that I’d likely lose to the other bidders since the price had already been set.

I decided to test how much I could trust the guidance I had received and told him to stick with the 30k above price “because I had a feeling.”

He ended up being right. I was not the highest offer, but for some reason, the sellers decided to choose me. I ended up getting the house despite all conventional logic.

When this happened I knew it was the house for me and that I was being rewarded for trusting my inner guidance. I’ve lived in this house for over 2 years and it has been an amazing home 🏡

This was the start of my journey of learning to trust my inner guidance above all else through life’s adventures and I haven’t looked back!

After I took this initial leap, I began consulting the stillness with more frequency and progressively important decisions. It became a daily practice that I used for all types of decisions:

In each instance, I was looking for clear, simple, and satisfying answers…even if they looked different than I expected.

The more I did this, the more I learned to differentiate what information from Source felt like vs. the active thinking mind which emanated from my survivalistic ego and conditioning. My life started to transform in subtle ways and layers upon layers of anxiety gradually began to wash away. Life started to feel like an adventure instead of an uphill battle to constantly make everything perfect. All of this motivated me to continue to go deeper and see where trusting this ability would take me.

One model of consciousness is the life happens to me, by me, through me, and as me which I believe was created by the Conscious Leadership Group. What I realized is that following my intuition and inner guidance was how the “life through me” paradigm practically revealed itself.

Instead of my allegiance being to the conditioned, survival mind, it was now to the true Self which would emerge in the quiet. So if you are on a spiritual path, it is important to recognize that following your intuition and querying the stillness for guidance is in alignment with your evolution and the divine working through you.

My practices and understanding have continued to evolve since then which is what we are going to cover in this course.

Most people think of intelligence as how smart you are.

I now understand that intelligence has different forms and we as a society have learned to emphasize some more than others. The 3 primary forms of intelligence are intellect, instinct, and intuition. All are meant to help us respond effectively to life’s moments.

Intellect - the accumulated knowledge we have gained through exposure or experience. This is considered knowledge that the active thinking mind can actively retrieve in a given moment. Having life experiences, reading books, listening to podcasts, and taking courses on how to cultivate intuition, are examples of intellect. Most of our intellect lives in the subconscious mind which is a vast repository that we can use the conscious mind to call upon it when we need it. There are also many things lingering in the subconscious that are not easy to see. In this way, our intellect doesn’t distinguish between helpful or unhelpful. It’s more so just a function of exposure.

For example, you watch a show about going in the sun and getting skin cancer. You find yourself now worrying about getting skin cancer every time you’re in the sun. Whether this is supportive of your life or not is immaterial to the intellect. It is merely there to regurgitate back to your conceptual overlay what you have fed it.

Instinct - the automatic functions and compulsions of the body. Your body getting tired when the sun goes down or hungry after you haven’t eaten for a long time are examples of innate instincts. There is definitely an overlap between our instincts and intuition because the body's sensitivity can help us assess what’s happening in a given situation in ways that are supportive to life.

Intuition - emergent inner knowing. Depending upon the type of intuition, this can arise from pattern matching from the intellect or the greater field of information beyond our historical exposure. You are likely already doing automatic pattern matching to make automatic decisions. This is just one form of intuition. Information beyond that which we’ve been exposed too is what mystics consider your heart’s intelligence. It’s what we usually think of when we hear the word intuition and the sixth sense that all humans have.

Today most people live mostly from their heads (intellect) vs. from their hearts, bodies, and heads. The most prosperous, creative, and healthy people learn how to integrate all 3.

We are going to focus on learning how to access Intuition and then integrate it with intellect. The goal is not to completely trade one for the other but to have these different forms of intelligence work in harmony.

Now that you understand the different types of intelligence, let’s go deeper and dive into the different types of intuition. This model is based on research done by the Heart Math Institute which studies the science of the heart.

I think their model incorporates both what modern science has been able to make sense of, and phenomena which we know exists, yet haven’t really been able to prove using available instruments.

Implicit Knowledge - this is intuition that effectively comes from pattern matching I described earlier. This type of knowing feels automatic because it happens so quickly. For instance, when people gain experience in a specific area, they develop instinctive insights based on their ability to quickly and subconsciously identify significant environmental signals and associate them with known, familiar patterns. An example would be a Dr. quickly having a strong hunch on diagnosis because the reported symptoms match what he’s seen after many years of practicing.

Energetic Sensitivity - this very much is aligned with instinctual body intelligence and refers to our nervous system’s ability to pick up on electromagnetic fields. You might have experienced this when you’ve just had a “good” or “bad” vibe about someone. This is really just scratching the surface though of what is possible as the nervous system’s sensing ability becomes more refined. For instance, recent studies have demonstrated that alterations in the Earth's magnetic field can be perceived by humans. This is why you might see animals start to behave funny before an earthquake or some other major event.

Nonlocal Intuition - this is knowledge that lives outside of our realm of experience. It surfaces as an emergent knowing or directive. An example might be you on a walk and get an idea to call someone random. You reach out to them and they tell you they’re working on something similar and you find a way to collaborate. We typically write these off as delightful coincidences, but I’m here to tell you there is more going on here.

How is this possible? The most recent developments in quantum physics posit that everything is interconnected. We will go into more detailed explanation of this later but you can see how this might contain a clue as to what’s going on here.

Although numerous theories aim to elucidate the mechanics of non-local intuition, they have not been definitively proven, leaving a comprehensive theory still to be developed. However, over the past seventy years, a significant amount of well-documented and rigorous scientific research has been conducted on nonlocal intuitive perception. A meta analysis of nine experiments on peoples pre-stimulus responses or instincts around events that could not have been anticipated any other way, revealed statistically significant improvements in 8 out of 9 studies when people relied on these instincts or hunches than when they did not.

So even the scientists say that trusting your gut is a good idea!

Most of us have never been told about this special ability we are learning in this course. I know I wasn’t!

We all have our own collection of experiences which include what we’ve been through, the information we’ve consumed, and the people around us that influence us. This composite called consciousness becomes our perceptual filter through which we attempt to understand and navigate the world.

The idea that our past affects our perception is not a new idea. But have you ever thought about the implications of this?

What happens if you had a shitty past? Or you had a rough childhood and buried everything in your subconscious so that you didn’t have to deal with it? Like it or not, if these experiences or imprints have not been dealt with, they are influencing how your interpret the world because they shape our thoughts. We all have shitty things that have happened to us. Even though we think the events are behind us, we often bring them in the future because of their subconscious influence.

You also have the ego which quietly influences everything. The ego is our survival mechanism that is part of our mind. Its entire prerogative is to keep you alive. It does this by alerting you when you are in danger which is felt through stress. But how often do we feel stress when we’re not in actual danger? For most of us the answer is constantly. This is quite a different objective than being the most creative, abundant, and free being having an experience.

Between these two components that make up our perceptual filter, it’s easy to see how our conditioned survival mind keeps us small. It’s not out for adventure and abundance, it’s out for preventing any future experiences that look like things that hurt us in the past.

There’s also the fact that there is incomplete information in almost all situations. Some people have a greater, more robust composite than others. For example, the business person who is late in their career might have many more life examples to call upon which gives them a more expansive library of experiences. We seemed to have just accepted that this person will be a better decision-maker than us, instead of perhaps being open to another way of approaching things.

But think about all of the prodigies in history. How was it that they were so talented innately without a huge library of experience? When asked, they often talk about the notion that they just “knew” how to do something and were innately curious about it. To me, their specialness really just points to the presence of a strong divine connection.

In all scenarios, you are always calling upon your past to decide the present; you’re effectively using old answers, to every new question.

This is how most of us attempt to cope with this predicament:

Despite what you may think, most people really suck at this.

And even when you don’t, the problem with all these strategies is that:

The alternative option that I am proposing is to learn how to go beyond our perceptual filters and tap into an information Source that has access to a more expansive, dare I say total information store. This is moving beyond the world of the conditioned survival mind and into the world of intuition.

Now you may be asking, well if this information doesn’t come from our experience, then where the hell does it come from? I can’t claim to hold all the answers of the universe, but I will try to explain what I have experienced.

George Gurdjieff was an early consciousness pioneer born in the 1860s. He talked about how the human mind has 3 stories:

Story 1 - the subconscious. This is where all your imprints from life’s events live as well as the ego. Together this composite quietly drive your thoughts, emotions, and actions whether you know it or not. An example of your subconscious at work might be obsessing over being successful to compensate for low self-esteem. I know this one all too well. Our subconscious mind also contains all the information we may have consumed in our lifetime and not even remembered. This is where lots of implicit knowledge lives.

Story 2 - the conscious (thinking) mind. This is what you are actively aware of. This part of the mind can be directed using your intellect. An example of the thinking mind is asking what did I do last night and maybe seeing pictures or an audible answer.

Carl Jung pioneered the fact that these two parts of mind exist and they are now widely recognized in psychology today.

Story 3 - the superconscious. This is the part of consciousness that is greater than our immediate experience. It is connected to a divine source of information that knows all things including the best path for each and everyone one of us. This is not something science or modern psychology has traditionally had much to say about. My guess is because this is something most people have not experienced and we haven’t yet been able to definitively come up with a unified theory everyone can agree on. However, psychedelics are changing the experiential gap and quantum physics is providing compelling evidence for the interconnectedness of everything so I think we are on the precipice of this changing.

Using intuition is about integrating information from the third story into the way we approach the world. It also is inclusive of parts of the 1st Story if we consider intuitive pattern matching abilities.

It’s not to say that Story 1 and Story 2 are bad. They are just limited and oftentimes don’t represent our highest expression. With Story 1 we often don’t consciously choose what goes in there and Story 2 is limited by our exposure and has inbuilt bias towards fear, and inner criticism.

Now you may be wondering, how does superconsciousness actually work? Well I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I can propose two ideas.

Many ancient traditions all point to some form of a higher power responsible for all of creation. This can be called God, Source, Creator, the Universe, and probably more names than I have time to list!

As the creator of everything, the energy/being has access to total information. It knows everything that has ever happened and is happening now. There are many people that believe that the notion of time is nothing more than a concept of mind and that this divine force can is aware of the past, present, and future.

This Source is also abundantly loving, benevolent and wants the best for you. This is because you are an expression of creation making you one with it. So when you are tapping into superconsciousness, you are really tapping into information directly connected and dispersed to you through Source.

I personally believe in and love this theory. The more trust and connection I have to it, the better my life gets.

In addition to the Source hypothesis, there is also the collective consciousness theory. This is a bit where you can begin to see some, but not a total overlap of emerging science and ancient traditions.

Many wisdom traditions believe that all things are composed of energy and information as part of a broader, interconnected field. This includes things in the physical world like matter, to things we can’t see like thoughts and emotions. So beyond the physical plane, there is actually a more fundamental plane where all of these things are interacting in energy form. The latest research on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics agree with the premise of all matter is composed of energy.

So if there is a plane where all things are energy and information which are interchangeable, than there is a theory that would explain how you could know things outside your experience.

There’s also the question of space and time. Lots of the latest researchers are beginning to question whether space and time actually exist or whether it's merely a characteristic of our limited perceptual abilities. If there was no space and time, than perhaps we’d be able to retrieve information from a broader field inclusive of the future to make decisions in our best interest.

In this interconnected information theory, where traditional science still waivers is how it evaluates the concepts of thoughts and emotions . Traditionally they have been evaluated from a more physiological and neurological perspective rather than as composed of energy in the metaphysical sense. Most science consider emotions as sensations that result from complex interactions between neurons, which are the basic units of the brain. These interactions involve electrical and chemical signals that transmit information across synapses, which are the tiny gaps between neurons. In this sense, emotions do involve the transfer and conversion of energy, but this energy is better understood as bioelectrical and biochemical processes, not part of a formless field. In terms of classifying thoughts and emotions as energy, there are scientists that fall in both camps today so there is no uniform consensus.

Regardless if we believe in an all-loving source that has our best interest in mind to be the driving force of superconsciousness, if we are open to the idea that all things are information in a unified field not restricted to space and time, a theory emerges that we could be receiving guidance on decisions that know what’s best for us by tapping into this much more expansive plane.

I can’t claim to prove this, but the more I go deeper into my own experimentation and experience, the more I believe this. Whether this is the exact mechanism behind what is happening I don't know. What I do know is that my life just continues to get better and better the more I prioritize this source of information.

One of the big misnomers about intuition and inner guidance is that it only arises spontaneously. I’ve found that there are two ways intuition can emerge: spontaneously and through active engagement.

Spontaneous Intuition - spontaneous intuition is exactly what it sounds like. You move through your life and in a moment of stillness you notice that you begin to have a hunch about something, hear a whisper, or become aware of an aha inside your awareness. This is how we think of intuitive guidance in the traditional sense. Even though this may seem random, we will learn in this course how we can experience more of these spontaneous knowings and improve our ability to recognize and trust them.

Active Intuition - active intuition is a more purposeful process that can take various forms. The core of active intuition is that we bring the parts of our life we want guidance on to the stillness in order to instigate guidance. Most people don’t know about this ability and we will cover the details of how to do this in this course.

In an ideal state, you are both receiving lots of spontaneous intuition and imploring active intuition techniques as needed. You balance these insights with logic and instinct as you see fit!

My belief and experience is that we all have this innate ability to tap into the broader field of information when we are born. As humans we are here to experience the full spectrum of emotions. In my opinion, that’s one reason why we came to earth!

We have a lot of conceptualizations of what an emotion really means, but the reality is it is just a mental experience of a bodily sensation. Inherently, the notion that emotions are good or bad is just a mental concept that we have become conditioned to believe. The truth is that emotions are just sensations with different textures of experience. Some are more comfortable than others, but the notion of comfort is also tied to our learned behaviors.

When these feelings arise, the mind then creates a story based on our relationship with the emotion emanating from our subjective history. For example, for a long time I thought that expressing anger was bad; that by doing it I was a ungrateful person or son and then later a novice spiritualist. These were all stories that were a product of my own conditioning which resulted in me suppressing anger.

Here is a a tool I recently discovered that call the wheel of emotion created by the Junto Institute that outlines all the various feelings across the emotional spectrum. You also might want to check out this How We Feel app created by the founder of Pinterest.

In an ideal world, we experience these emotions fully. However, due to our built-in protection mechanism (the ego), when we detect a less comfortable or unfamiliar emotion, we tend to bypass experiencing the full sensation. This is usually done by using our mind to distract ourselves or draw attention elsewhere so we don’t have to experience the bodily sensation or accompanying story that we created around it.

This is a unique human phenomenon. When we look at animals, they allow themselves to feel emotions fully instead of accumulating incomplete impulses in their subconscious and nervous systems. Check out this video of a polar bear on Youtube.

Looking at the wheel, the emotions we most often bypass or suppress are fear, anger, sadness and all there derivatives.

Often times this entire bypass process happens automatically, outside of our conscious awareness. A great example is getting on an elevator with a bunch of strangers and just pulling out your phone because you feel uncomfortable. Do you sit with the discomfort or just default to a learned behavior that makes you feel safe? Or how about avoiding looking at your credit card bill each month as soon as we feel any anxiety.

Each time we bypass, part of our life force energy is expended pushing it away and continuously suppressing these feelings and experiences from entering our awareness. It’s like your phone has all these apps running in the background that you aren’t even aware of, eating up your battery without you even knowing it.

This dynamic not only zaps our physical vitality and negatively impacts our cellular health over time, but also cuts off access to the superconscious. Our mind gets so cluttered with information from our conditioning and occupied with unconsciously protecting ourself, it’s as if the antennae that can tune into the broader field is blocked. There just isn’t enough energy available to connect to the field or space between thoughts to actually hear what wants to come through.

Simultaneously, no one tells us about this amazing ability or the notion that we can nurture it. In fact, everything we are conditioned to believe is that trusting this inner voice relative to logic would be ludicrous! How ironic is it that the idea of trusting things outside of ourselves is the common narrative.

As you begin to understand all this and purify your consciousness from the programming and suppressed emotions, it’s kind of like your antenna turns on and all the debris blocking intuition slowly starts to disappear.

We don’t know for sure precisely the mechanism responsible for this transformation, but many wisdom teachings cite how we expend lots of energy unconsciously to suppress our emotions. When we start to acknowledge and face these experiences, that energy becomes free and available for more expansive possibilities. The Hindu tradition believe that as we do this the energy moves away from the suppressing conflicts in the subconscious up into the superconscious which is our connection to the divine and broader field of information.

The purification process is what I described at the beginning of my story. As life disturbs us, we must dive into our subconscious to see all the things we’ve been repressing in order to protect ourselves. These could be bad memories, emotions we tried to avoid, and trauma. Don’t feel about the fact that you have all this accumulated crap. We all do. It’s just part of being a human and nothing to feel bad about. The reason this all got repressed is because of our built-in survival mechanism. But now that you know about this dynamic you can start to take some responsibility!

The work ahead of us is to begin to explore what already exists in the subconscious as well as develop our ongoing emotional fluidity. Emotional fluidity is ability to move between emotional states as called for by a situation without getting “stuck” or fleeing too rapidly. If something comes up that makes you angry, you sit with the anger until it passes through you. If you feel love, you enjoy and savor the experience. The more we can experience the full spectrum of emotions as they arise, the more free and in tune we become! Let us strive to be like the polar bear in the video shared earlier.

I originally wasn’t going to cover any emotional clearing content in this course. But there was this growing feeling inside of me that it wasn’t truly complete unless it had it.

After getting told to hold off launching for 2 weeks straight, I went to a retreat the week and we covered emotional inquiry which is something I’ve been practicing for years. I took it as a sign and knew why I was being guided to hold off launching. This all was so that I could put this information in this course.

Emotional inquiry is a foundational practice for acknowledging and eventually transmuting the stuck energy behind present and incomplete emotional experiences from our past. If you’re not familiar with the word transmute, it means to change form. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed. So our job is to discover all the unhealthy energy in our subconscious and transmute it into healthy emotions that match our natural state which has the characteristics of love, trust, gratitude, reverence, and openness.

There are many variations of emotional inquiry, but I like the following method. There is a guided recording below all this written explanation so feel free to skip ahead if you just want to be guided through the experience.

The first step is to shift our attention from thinking into sensing. We can do this actively or a great indication that we should do this is if we are experiencing any TAR.

T - Tension

A - Anxiety

R - resistance

Anytime you feel any of these things, it’s a great time to stop what you’re doing and preform emotional inquiry.

To do this, I recommend finding a quiet place and closing your eyes in a comfortable position.

From here, I want you to feel into any tension in the body. Your mindset should be curious. Once you locate the tension, speak to this part of the body as if you are talking to another being asking what are you feeling right now?

Instead of “leaping to answer,” see what emerges naturally. Whatever the first word is that comes into your awareness, it is likely that. It should come through clear and direct. If you do not receive a clear and direct answer, reset yourself and try again.

Now once you feel this emotion, I want you to continue to hold your attention on it. Your focus should be gentle vs. strained. You want to almost relax or melt into the tension vs. grip it or “feel the shit out of it.”

The next thing I want you to do is visualize that there is a mouth on the spot of tension in the body. Ask the tension spot what it wants to say? I want you to observe whatever words comes into your awareness that want to come out of that mouth and just allow them. I know this might be scary, but you must trust and allow whatever wants to express, to express.

If you want, you can also verbalize the words out loud which can even strengthen your ability to feel into the emotion. Continue to allow the energy to speak until it is done. During this time, it is possible that it may move around a bit. This is completely normal. Just continue to stay with and relax into the tension while allowing whatever wants to come out.

While this is happening you may start to feel intensely and experience compulsions to move the body or make noises. Instead of shying away, I invite you to open to these softly. Again, the idea is to relax as much as possible while letting whatever your body wants to do, do its thing. Our bodies are highly intelligent and its best to trust them.

Continue this until you feel like whatever you were dealing with has moved through. When you’re done, it should feel calm and open wherever the tightness was. This could have taken less than a minute or as long as 30+ minutes. For me, it often comes in waves where I’ll think I’ll be done with something and then the tension will come back indicating there is more to feel into.

Once you find this natural pausing place, see if there is a new replacement emotion that wants to emerge in that space. You can simply notice if a feeling or word comes up in you awareness, or ask the stillness what is a suitable replacement emotion? Try your best not to jump to answer and see what arises.

Each time we do this practice, we are purifying our subconscious and freeing up our energy for more creative and expansive endeavors. We are also stilling our mind because it is often these subconscious imprints that are responsible for all of our reactions to life. A friend of mine calls this “inner regeneration” which I think is a cool way to describe it.

I have probably done this exercise thousands of times. I don’t say that to discourage you, but rather to share how frequently you have the opportunity to work on clearing your emotions and your patterns so that greater amounts of intuition can emerge.

Here is a guided emotional inquiry practice you can listen too.

Spotify:

Youtube:

Web Version:

If you did the meditation, can you see how we simply asked questions and answers came into our awareness? This practice hopefully helped you locate which emotion was causing tension in your body, what it might be related to in your personal history, and what a more supportive emotion would be.

This practice of simply posing questions and seeing what emerges will become a fundamental part of our honing our intuitive abilities. The more we do it, the more we refine our ability to query the stillness for information and discern the purity of the information that comes through.

Though we only give a primer on healing unprocessed emotions in this course, it is so important, not just for everything we’re learning, but your own joy and growth. Emotional healing goes hand in hand with increasing your intuitive capacity.

We will discuss this more in Week 4 and I will share some additional resources. If you want to start building a more regular habit of identifying and feeling into your emotions, you might want to check out the How We Feel App that the founder of Pinterest created. It’s very well done.

At first, recognizing the difference between intellect and intuition might be difficult. I know I thought it was!

The good news is that your sensitivity and discernment can be vastly improved with practice. That’s why I like to think of this ability to discern between the two textiures as a skill.

So start let’s compare their different characteristics:

Now as nice as this chart is, I want to make the difference to you very real by talking about what this actually feels like.

One feels like a river…

The other feels like a gentle stream….

What you are probably used to is the river of the conditioned survival mind. Here is a practical example that characterizes the difference in texture.

Let’s say you have two job offers. Both are excellent opportunities, just different. One is attractive because it offers $30,000 more a year. The other is interesting because your manager is someone that you think would be an amazing mentor. Let’s say you decide to sit down and contemplate which opportunity is best for you. You quiet your mind and then ask which one you should choose? Immediately you begin to think about how you’ve been saving for a house down payment and how the $30k would be immensely helpful in paying it off. Then simultaneously you wonder if you have more long-term career growth because your manager is more experienced and if that has more long-term financial upside. Then you start thinking of a podcast you listened to where someone said you should optimize for learning at this point in your life and wonder if you’ve already aged out of that. Then you remember hearing about someone who worked at one company and left because they hated the culture. This river of thoughts continues only creating more second-guessing about what’s right for you. You decide to talk to a friend who's been in a similar situation hoping that something they say will give you conviction because the inner river has only left you more confused than when you started.

The stream of intuition looks and feels a lot different. You sit down and quiet your mind and ask which opportunity is best for you? Immediately upon asking the word “mentor” just pops into your awareness in the stillness within the first split second. You recognize this immediate answer is pointing you to the one opportunity. A thought or two may arise a few moments after that, but you recognize that as the tendency of the thinking mind that is heavily influenced by the ego’s desire to survive. You smile knowing you got the message in the stillness and decide to let go of all the opposing arguments as to why this could be wrong.

Understanding the differences in texture is part one of developing your ability to recognize intuitive guidance. Over time, you will develop a clear acuity that can differentiate whether something is a product of your thinking mind (ego + programming) or your inner guidance.

This takes practice and there are certain conditions such as working on acknowledging all the emotions and concepts in your subconscious that will start to make identifying the differences easier. We will cover all of this in more depth in the coming weeks.

In the software industry, there is a concept of a maturity model. A maturity model is basically a map that characterizes all the stages of growth from getting started until you become an expert! Here’s what an intuition maturity model might look like.

Stage 1 Initial Recognition - you experience and are able to recognize when something makes its way through the crazy mind chatter. Maybe only for a split second. It might be a hunch, whisper, spontaneous idea, flash visual, or word…either way, you recognize it! You’re not ready to act on this thing because that feels bold, but you acknowledge a gut feeling.

Stage 2 Growing Sensitivity - you start to develop a sensitivity that expresses by increasingly recognizing emergent insights. You might not act on them but are beginning to notice things popping up more both in your inner and outer landscape when your mind is quiet. You start noticing more synchronicities around you, and you see signs and symbolic messages everywhere. You’re not sure what to make of all this, but find it interesting.

Stage 3 Baby Steps Of Faith - between the nudges you're getting in your awareness and coincidences you notice in the world around you, you start to recognize that perhaps you’re being guided. You decide to experiment with this by taking an initial leap of faith in a small decision or something spontaneous you feel called to do. Maybe heeding some advice to call someone or do something out of your usual routine that comes from the more expanded awareness. It feels good which makes you excited.

Stage 4 Trust Grows - your sensitivity is growing and now you are progressively trusting your intuition for decisions of greater magnitude. You understand that you don’t need to know why you are being told these things and simply learn to trust the guidance. You have cultivated a practice to go inward whenever you need answers and can easily discern what is Source guidance vs. conditioned reactions from trauma and culture. If you’re unsure about something, you know how to handle it by consulting with reason or knowing that clarity will come.

Stage 5 A New Paradigm Aliveness - you are now very excited to be awakening to a whole other paradigm where following your inner voice is leading you to new people and new realizations about yourself and the world. You feel connected and plugged in as part of an interconnected system that is guiding you and always has your best interest in mind. Your days are full of creative flow where inner knowledge around all parts of your life is emerging into your awareness with ease, constantly. You take inspired action vs. get bogged down by a constant stream of “shoulds.” You still have goals and a strategy for approaching your day, but if you have receive a nudge, you pay attention and remain flexible to follow the flow in the moment. This might be different than the previous paradigm where you let logic lead.

Inspired actions are ones that we feel naturally pulled to in a given moment. We may not know why in the moment, but we feel called to it and the process of following it feels enjoyable.

Shoulds are what logic and the conditioned survival mind often dominate our thoughts with. It’s very common that we feel an inspired action and it gets overtaken by a should within seconds. Sometimes a should might make sense, but the truth is that the balance most people feel today is far over-tilted relative to what life can feel like. By taking this course you are being asked to start to pay attention to these differences.

A quick example might be you start your day off with a task list. You’re in the middle of a task and you get a feeling to call your mom. It is coming through loud and clear in the stillness and you recognize it as source guidance. If you’re living from inspired actions you just pause and call your mom in the moment. If you’re living for shoulds you rationalize you’re in the midst of a task and will get to it later when your time is optimized. One is spontaneous and the other is rigid. I’m not here to tell you one is better then the other, just calling out the difference so you can start to see what living from spontaneity might look like.

The path to trading shoulds for inspired actions is a long road that the material in this course, working on patterns and emotional healing will help tremendously. Take solace in the fact that you are heading in the right direction and that this is not something to be solved overnight.

You may be wondering whether there is more some robust way of understanding the proposed intuition maturity model. The closest thing I can relate to is looking at various unified consciousness models. Examples include David Hawkins Map Of Consciousness, Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and The Human Consciousness Continuum that I have created.

In my own model, intuition and the emergence of the True Self becomes more pronounced in the transpersonal depth of awareness. If none of this makes sense, you might want to read my own series on David Hawkins Map of Consciousness.

In David Hawkin’s model, the key inflection point where the heart begins to open and one starts to access more expansive parts of mind and Siddhis is above the energy of 500 hz. He calls this the spiritual paradigm.

I don’t think you need to be at this point of evolution to begin to experience and work with intuition. Just ask yourself if you’ve ever had a nudge that pointed you in the right direction. We’ve all likely experienced these things, regardless if we are an enlightened being or not.

A more productive way to think about it, is that intuition expresses more prominently as awareness deepens. For more on the subject, I highly encourage you to read David’s work or my cliffnotes on Substack.

I am sure there are levels of being and intuition beyond this. This is merely a reflection of what I have experienced which seems to be consistent amongst many teachings.

Now all of this may be very exciting, but you may be wondering about what this means for your intellect and conscious mind.

Does following this path mean abandoning logic altogether?

The short answer is no. What we are striving for is the integration of all forms of intelligence: instinct, intellect, and intuition. Practically this means you may start to tap into intuition and cross-check it with intellect as well as how you feel in your body (instinct).

Over time, you’ll begin to develop a deeper trust in sources of intelligence beyond intellect and understand which situations represent opportunities to lean on one information source more than others.

People often ask me which decisions make sense to trust our intellect and which ones make sense for intuition?

This is actually a trickier question than it seems. I think the answer to this question depends on where you are in the maturity curve.

Very high beings who have purified their consciousness look at the intellect like a servant. When they want to recall something from their experience they tell it to go fetch like a dog. For everyday life things like remembering the directions to walk home or some piece of knowledge, they’ll dial up the intellect which acts a retrieval mechanism for information in a relevant circumstance. Their minds are not constantly dominated by thoughts that are trying to persuade them to do things arising from the conditioned, survival mind. Those have quieted down. This means that as life presents itself, they receive all the guidance they need in the moment. There is much less need for reason with this type of mind, though it is there as a tool when needed.

I’m making the assumption that most people are earlier on the maturity curve than monks or enlightened yogis with this type of mind. This means that intuition will be more spontaneous and appear in spurts. The name of the game is recognizing it while it is still growing and then learning to trust these hunches and impulses over time.

In situations where you do receive inner guidance, by taking this course you are now being invited to pay greater attention to it; to treat it with reverence vs. dismiss it as some random thing. You now have a better understanding of the various actors at play in your mind more so than before.

There are some situations where intuition isn’t really required. This is when empirical evidence is obvious. For example, when I run tests or growth experiments on my content, the resulting evidence paints a clear picture of whether something worked or didn’t which help direct future behaviors. I might follow up this experiment with using active intuition practices on what subsequent tests or tweaks I could could be. This creative challenge or innovation is a good opportunity to combine my learnings with intuition and an example of how these two things can work in harmony.

So when you are faced between intuition and logic, I encourage you to explore both with curiosity. The only way the weight you put on intuition is going to increase to the point where you begin to contradict conventional logic is through experience. You will need to learn through verifiable evidence that trusting your deep inner knowledge is actually the more intelligent thing to do in scenarios with incomplete information. Developing trust is a gradual process that we will cover more next week.

So the weights you apply to intuition or logic really depends on the degree to which you develop and trust your intuitive abilities. In the absence of any need for intuitive guidance like the example when there is empirical evidence, you can feel free to employ reason to the fullest!

Early on in this journey, I encourage you to heir on the side of applying logical discernment for any guidance comes up that does not make sense. Until you really develop an ability to recognize directives from the conditioned survival mind vs. a more expansive consciousness, you may very well mistake one for the other. This is why cross-checking with logic and starting with low stakes decisions is a smart path until a certain acuity is developed.

I’ve heard stories of people being guided to quit their jobs and then ending up in a horrible position. What happened here? Was it someone’s mind playing a trick on them? Was it a nefarious energy trying to infiltrate someone’s awareness? We can’t know for sure, but until you develop a certain competency, it’s better to heir on the side of caution.

If you find yourself in this position, it might be helpful to consider a worse case scenario and understand if you are comfortable with that reality.

I’ve been on this path for over 2 years at this point. I’m comfortable enough at this point where I tend to implore my intuition and spontaneous directives more so than logic any time I find myself “trying to figure it out.”

Apparently, I’m not alone! I find this clip from Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx who was the first female billionaire to be very inspiring.

It’s been a journey to get here, but it feels like this strategy is serving me well. I feel more creative and adventurous than I have in my whole life. To me, that is success more so than any definition we have been spoon-fed by society.

For some of you, everything I just said may be hard to hear. You may have developed an immense attachment to logic and reasoning. First, I encourage you to acknowledge your attachment. It may have served you well up to this point, but the mere fact you are here in this course, you are being called to expand beyond it. No one is asking you to abandon it. Instead, you are being called to expand and make room for more. Instead of fixating on one vs. the other, let’s combine them and use both!

Now I want to guide you in a brief meditation to begin to wet your feet on what tapping into another form of active intuition feels like beyond the querying we did in emotional inquiry. It’s important that you do this in a calm, relaxed state for the best results. I recommend finding a quiet space where you won’t be distracted and doing this first thing in the morning if possible.

Here is a guided audio and well as a written description below.

Spotify:

Youtube:

Web:

I want you to pick a name for whatever you call the creator of all things. Here are some example ones:

And what we are going to do is get into a calm state and practice some basic inquiry to practice both feeling (instinct) and intuition. The important thing to remember is to do your best to not try and jump and answer the question using active thought, but instead to try and observe whatever emerges initially.

Think of it like opening a door. Instead of jumping through to see what’s on the other side, you just take a step back and see what wants to come through the door. Notice what emerges naturally vs. trying to force anything.

Follow along the guided audio above, or you can simply quiet your mind and self-pace yourself with the questions below.

Let’s start with trying out feeling:

Were you able to notice the differences? Did one feel tight and the other light? Or maybe some emotions came up in one versus the other? Did the body seemingly move itself in either instance?

Now you might not have felt anything. Does that mean it didn’t work? Well, it could mean a lot of things, but like any skill it might take some practice before you grasp it fully. Learning to clear the mind and simply feel is something we might not have done for a long time.

Now let’s focus on asking a basic question. Again still your mind or follow along the guided meditation.

What was the first thing that emerged for you? Did you notice the mind in over top and start piling on thought after? Did you feel a compulsion to come up with an answer? Was it confusing?

There is no wrong way to do this, just features to notice as you begin to develop this ability. Remember the example of the river vs. the stream? We’re looking to learn how to develop our abilities so that when we pose these questions it always feels like a stream.

You also might have gotten an answer that did not satisfy you in some way. If this happens, I would just put a pin on the question and revisit it again the next day and even multiple days in a row. Try to notice if there is some consistency there.

You can also do this in a single session. Sometimes it takes me 2-3 times of asking the same question to really make sure I am dropped into a receiving state vs. the monkey mind trying to take hold of a concept and barf out something to feel a semblance of control.

Over the next week, all we want to do is get comfortable with this idea of quieting and calming our minds, posing questions, and seeing what emerges. All this takes is a few minutes a day and you can use this guided meditation to help you.

Now we may get over-eager and get excited about asking MAJOR life questions out of the gate.

This is fine, but I think perhaps it’s best to start with some low-risk questions. It’s kind of like when you start running, you don’t sign up for a marathon on day 1. You take time to build your skills and comfort level before doing anything major.

Okay, it’s time to put all that you’ve learned to work.

To practice your skills, I’m going to give you two options. Over the next week, I invite you to:

Or if you really want to be an all star you can do both!

Depending on how easy it is to quiet your mind, this likely means committing anywhere from 2-20 minutes a day until the next time we meet as step one to unlocking this limitless ability.

Both skills are valuable, but if I was to recommend one over the other, it’d be emotional inquiry. During this practice, you’re going to get practice posing questions to the stillness and familiarizing yourself with the emotional healing process can really start to catapult your growth. We’re going to talk more about this in Week 4.

For easy access to both meditations, I’ve included a meditation link appendix which include guided versions of both.

As you begin to notice things and get answers, please feel free to share your experience in the Whatsapp group!

As you go through this, there are bound to be some questions that come up as the process is very nuanced.

I went ahead and documented some common F.A.Q. here, but also feel free to drop them in the Q&As Whatsapp group.

I know many people are going to get hung up on the science of everything that I just shared. So I wanted to provide links to some of the most compelling evidence on the science of intuition here for your own reading.

The truth is that the information you get in the beginning very well may be. The main thing to investigate is the texture of the information using the common characteristics we reviewed earlier. This is why it is important to use discernment with your intuitive guidance.

Over time, you will begin to develop an acuity of what inner guidance feels like vs. the thinking mind which is grounded in our conscious and subconscious imprints. Remember, this is a feel thing and takes practice.

If you think about it, the worst-case scenario of “getting it wrong” if we’re talking about smaller decisions is following a part of the mind you’ve been using for most of your life. So there is no reason to be scared if you are operating at a level of consequence you are comfortable with.

The answer is yes. There are likely moments where you had some sort of hunch or random insight pop into your awareness that ended up guiding you in a positive, unforeseen way. Whether you were able to recognize it as intuition and actually have the courage to follow it is entirely different. Most of us have not been taught about this level of mind and how to discern between the two. This leaves us constantly fighting any intuitive guidance that comes up and second-guessing ourselves.

Think about the last time you went with your gut and it worked out. How did that feeling come through for you? The more you begin to pay attention to these pointings, the more you will be able to understand how intuition reveals itself to you specifically and familiarize yourself with the texture.

I’m not going to pretend that all of this doesn’t get easier with a quiet mind. The more you are able to settle down the inner chatter, the easier and more profound all this becomes.

There are two ways to look at this. One is to be upset and discouraged. The other is to see this as a motivator to work on something you can change as countless people have done before you through the ages.

You can absolutely experience and improve intuition without a quiet mind, but you’re likely just always going to have a ceiling and your progress will be slower.

So I would treat this like any new skill. I like the example of skiing or surfing as a corollary. The first few times you do it, it can be pretty tough. But when you stick with it after a while something interesting happens. There tends to be an inflection point where you develop enough skill that it actually starts to become enjoyable. And then you just keep improving which results in greater capability and joy. I would treat the quieting of the mind the same way. You can read more techniques to quiet the mind here including ones outside of meditation.

Remember the T-Chart of Source guidance vs. the thoughts from the conditioned survival mind? Source-generated guidance is always encouraging, loving, and mostly neutral in its advice. So there is nothing to be afraid of. Anything negative that comes up is just the ego and conditioned mind up to its usual tricks. When this happens to me, I’ve learn to recognize it like a little child - “Oh, there’s the scared little ego again.”

You may be given guidance to do something that go against your conditioned preferences. This may include facing something that’s painful, that deep down you know has been something you’ve been putting off.

This may be startling at first, but if you believe there is a higher power with your best interest in mind, I encourage you to be open to exploring it. You don’t have to act on the guidance, but consider it an invitation to explore. The whole reason we got into a lot of messes in our life was suppressing and avoiding things. It’s time to be courageous and turn over a new leaf.

Over time, you will develop greater skill and trust to begin to follow guidance that may not make sense in the moment. But the expectation shouldn’t be to do this out of the gates.

This may not be a satisfying answer, but we don’t know for sure. There are many people starting to prove that the Newtonian space-time paradigm we have been identifying with is actually not true. Mystics have said this for a long time. This might hold a clue.

And if you can be open to the idea that a loving Source that creates all things is coming and working through you, surely such a being would be able to point you in the right direction. You are after all a direct expression of its creation. How could Source not want what’s best for itself? This is often what is behind the hard events of life that actually lead us closer to greater levels of Self-realization.

Next week we will be building on everything we discussed this week in a way that makes practical application easier. We’ll be discussing:

Materials will be sent out on Thursday the 8th.

Spotify:

Youtube:

Native Web:

Spotify:

Youtube:

Native web: