🎙️ Week 4 Audio Versions
I’ve made the audio recordings available in 3 formats, to hopefully attune to your preferred listening application.
Spotify:
Youtube:
Native web:
I had to make these links public to accommodate listening preferences. I would appreciate it if you could refrain from sharing broadly outside of cohort colleagues at this time.
🪄 Unfiltered Magic
Welcome to Week 4! This week is about learning another entry point technique to access intuitive guidance and how to create a life where you start to experience this type of guidance with increasing frequency and clarity.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you get talking about something all of a sudden clear answers and insights come flowing out of you?
Everyone around you might pause for a second saying, “Whoa—pretty wise words there!”
You respond with a chuckle, “No clue where that came from!”
This happens all the time as we relax our censor enough to let spontaneous consciousness flow through us without a filter.
I recently had an example of this happen to me. I just got back from a big trip and was telling my finance about some feelings I had around a friend dynamic during it. Though I could clearly recognize some inner discomforts during these interactions, I couldn’t quite place why I was feeling this way in the moment or hours after.
When I described the situation to my partner Zaharo, the precise words and insights came forth in a way that made it clear why I had been so uncomfortable. With this insight, I could then begin to unwind the pattern that had been causing my discomfort using emotional inquiry so that it wouldn’t trouble me in the future.
What alluded to the thinking mind, was made easy through simple verbal expression.
You tend to see the same exact thing in coaching or therapy. In both cases, YOU ALREADY HAVE THE ANSWERS. You just haven’t taken the time to practice inquiry in an effective way so that whatever insight you’re seeking can emerge.
Enter the practice of direct expression.
🛣️ Method: Direct Expression
Direct expression is very similar to the other practices in that what we are trying to do is pose a question and then allow unfiltered information to flow through us. The only difference is this time we will be actively verbalizing the information instead of witnessing it in our awareness or writing it without a filter.
Let me say that what I am about to ask you to do might feel very silly.
My attitude is who cares how silly I might look in front of myself if I am getting access to supportive information for my highest expression!
To practice direct inquiry simply pose a question and start talking about it out loud to yourself. I recommend doing this in a location where you have privacy so there is no sense of self-consciousness.
You can also do this with someone trusted if you like, but it has to be someone that you’re completely comfortable with and you won’t try to filter yourself. Once we start to filter, the purity of the information declines and you restrict the direct flow of higher intelligence to move through you.
To make the most of the practice, you want to avoid anything that entails you worrying about having to remember something. The more present you are, the more clear the information will be. This is why I recommend using a recording application that automatically captures the audio and transcribes it for you. Here are a few options:
- Oasis: I like this because it’s a very simple UI and provides clear transcription
- Otter.ai: My go-to for longer recordings
Like the other practices, it’s important for you to have some sort of prompt to direct the flow of information. For this, you can go back to the list you made in week 2 or bring forth something that’s top of mind for you. You can also try any of the following:
- What guidance do you have for me to live my highest expression today?
- How can I make today great?
- What should I pay closer attention to?
I’d play around with these prompts and get comfortable just talking off the cuff before applying more directive questions. Just like everything else we have learned, with comfort comes a more refined acuity to begin to ask for information about anything. You will know you can trust the information when the answers are clear, consistent, and come from a loving place.
Here is a video of me practicing direct expression:
🚫 Do’s and Don’ts of Direct Expression
DOs:
- Find a private, quiet space where you won’t feel self-conscious
- Make sure you are in a relaxed, calm state
- Just keep talking and allow whatever wants to emerge
- Speak for as long as you have the energy or until you feel done
DON’Ts:
- Perform this somewhere you feel like there’s an audience you need to perform in front of
- Analyze and restrain yourself while you are speaking
- Worry about sounding dumb or silly
- Cut yourself off before an expression desires to complete itself
If you find yourself questioning what comes out of you, you want to examine whether you in fact are truly acting as a clear channel or you are letting the censor filter everything down.
If you’re not sure, there is no harm in restarting the practice. If there is inconsistent information, it might be due to the ego filter swooping in. Whenever I get inconsistent information, I usually perform this 3x and if I’m still not satisfied, I’ll just put a pin on getting guidance and return to it the next day.
Pro Tip: Pair With Exercise
I notice information and clarity can be particularly alive during or after performing intense cardio exercise.
Sometimes I’ll be on a long run and stop to practice direct expression on the side of a trail. Other times, I'll come home and sit to practice direct inquiry immediately after. Each time I do this, I am always amazed at how clear and awesome some of the information that can come through is.
Although the mechanism as to why this is heightened post exercise is unclear, this phenomenon has been cited in many studies including The Positive Effect of Walking On Creative Thinking (2014) and Effects of short-term aerobic exercise on creativity (2022). The results showed that short-term aerobic exercise immediately improved the performance of convergent creativity and divergent creativity, but was less effective after a 30 min delay. This notion of a “window” where you’re more likely to receive creative intuitive insights during or close to exercise definitely aligns with my own experience.
🏋️ Week 4 Skill Development: Let It Flow With Direct Expression
Practice direct expression using a transcription app 5x this week.
You can make it one of the first things you do when you are starting your day or maybe include it as a mid or post-workout ritual. One fun place to practice this is in the shower. It’s likely hard to record, but you can still get great information to capture the highlights after the fact.
At this point in the course, you may have started to develop a level of comfort with trusting information from Source and can start to ask bolder questions where the stakes of applying it are a bit higher. This is obviously completely optional, but maybe you try going a bit bigger and more pointed with the way you direct your guidance.
🏗️ Setting The Foundation To Crank Intuitive Guidance On High
Up until this point, we’ve been focused on a handful of practices that serve as entry points to more intentionally receiving intuitive guidance.
The more comfortable you become with one or any number of these, the more you will be able to recognize these subtle whispers in your awareness.
As these skills develop, you might start to receive information outside of these practices in your everyday life. And the crazy thing is that it’s not just in your inner awareness, but also the people, places, and events in your outer world. The perfect choreography and synchronicity of it all is how the Divine speaks to you and is part of the process of Self-realization.
As this ability and experience begin to open up, there are certain things we can do to improve our ability to invite, recognize, and apply this information more skillfully.
We came into this world with an active intuitive ability and for most of us, the events of life closed the aperture. If we work on healing our minds, bodies, and hearts, it creates the foundation for everything to flow more easily.
Below are some foundational elements that, based on my own research and experience, seem to improve your ability to tap into intuitive insights.
Body Care
We need to take care of our bodies if we want to be in a calm state which is a requisite for receiving. Obviously, there are entire books written on health and the body, but here are some things to pay attention to and work on:
- Breathing - are you chronically breathing shallowly or relaxed and deeply?
- Stress - the more relaxed and robust your nervous system is, the more time you are spending in a receiving state
- Food & nutrition - are you nourishing your body with whole foods? Avoid processed food and make sure you’re getting all the nutrition you need
- Toxicity - common toxins are everywhere including alcohol, water, pesticides on food and so much more. With greater purification, comes great clarity.
- Exercise - daily movement is key! As we saw in earlier studies, it often allows us to tap into more creative states, right brain states
- Hydration - drink plenty of water!
Just being a healthy person doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’ll become an intuitive dynamo. All of this sets a necessary foundation and it’s more requisite/amplifier vs. a guaranteed precursor.
Two things that seemed to have a big impact on my abilities were cutting out alcohol and tempering caffeine. I probably have had alcohol 3X in the past year, and cut it completely out last Christmas. Since then it feels like I dream more vividly and have way more connection to Source. With all the non-alcoholic alternatives out there, it’s really never been easier to abstain from drinking. I know this might sound terrible, but I’m finding the upside of being more connected to Source way bigger than any temporary pleasure that alcohol would create. If you really need something to calm your nerves socially, you might want to try micro-dosing mushrooms which many people like and is way healthier.
Caffeine is also a tough one to give up. I haven’t given it up fully, but I treat coffee more like a special treat vs. an everyday thing now. When we are in a frenetic adrenaline-filled state, we are disconnected from the stillness and our bodies. Source can come through, but so can lots of components of the conditioned survival mind which loves to think ahead and control things. I find when I have coffee, the pusher who loves to accomplish to feel okay tends to dominate vs. the trusting receiver who is living in the now. It’s almost like caffeine is ego fuel.
If we get into the mindset that peace and stillness are where the magic happens, it becomes easier to relinquish the attachment to caffeine. I mostly drink this ceremonial cacao in the morning which is way easier on my system and calming. I don’t know exactly how the caffeine amount compares, but I can feel the difference in my body and connectedness.
Increased Sensitivity
As you begin to purify your consciousness and practice greater levels of interception, your nervous system becomes more sensitive. Things you used to be able to eat or drink may no longer jibe with your system. At first this seems like a burden and like you have become less robust, but in reality you are just operating at a higher altitude. Your increased perceptual abilities mean you can no longer dump anything into the body like you used to. I find that the connectedness to my body and everything far outweighs not being able to drink or have crappy food.
At first you might resist this, but I encourage you to trust the process. This is actually a very good thing. This transformation is like going from driving a Ford Focus to suddenly having an F1 car. You now have access to far more performance, but that comes with added responsibility. It takes some time to learn how to drive and frankly probably a support team of people. However, once you learn the ropes you can’t imagine going back to the Focus. The added performance comes at the cost of more maintenance and care. You can’t just dump 87’ unleaded fuel into the car anymore (a.k.a. alcohol, crap food, excessive caffeine). This new car requires much higher quality fuel and nourishment if you want it to run at full performance and last. You also need to learn how to listen to the car and pit when it needs it. The more driving you do, the better you get at handling it and understanding all these nuances.
You can read more about things I’ve learned with this shift on this post about energetic puberty and lessons learned tuning into the field.
Healing Emotions
I think the number one precursor to having more intuitive abilities is working on processing and healing all the suppressed emotions we’ve accumulated in our lives. Emotional healing and the development of intuitive abilities often go hand in hand.
A lot of emotional imprints and suppression tendencies originated from childhood and when we didn’t know any better. For most of my life, I never considered myself as someone having any trauma. But when I started to get really deep into this work, I realized just how much I had been suppressing things unconsciously to protect myself. By doing this, I was spending so much energy keeping these emotions down in my unconscious that I was blocking more expansive levels of creative energy to flourish.
I love this description from Osho in his book on Intuition around the relationship between healing and intuition:
“It is your energy. But when you are completely free from the unconscious and its involvements, it is clean and silent; then your whole energy is available. Energy has a fundamental principle about it: it cannot remain static, it has to move. Movement is its nature. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You have nothing to do: your work is finished when you have stopped repressing and you have cleaned your unconscious. Then you have nothing to do; then all that has to be done is done by your energy. And when you reach the center, a new faculty starts functioning in you, which is intuition. At the center of the unconscious is instinct. At the center of the conscious is the intellect. At the center of the superconscious is intuition.”
Unhealed emotions block your intuitive radio in that they allocate your life force energy to managing everything in the subconscious vs. being available to tap into the broader field. Healing your emotional blocks is a massive, life-long endeavor. I’m 4+ years in and sometimes it can feel like, is this ever going to fricken end? If you find yourself here, just remember you are in a process and fighting it is only going to make it more difficult.
Remember emotions are just body sensations with the accompanying mental formations we create around them. So the more we can move from sensing to feeling, the more in tune we become with what is going on with us emotionally.
Familiarizing yourself with the emotional wheel is going to help you be able to “locate” yourself with greater granularity. I keep a print out of one of these at my desk and look at it anytime I feel some sort of disturbance or body sensation. You might also check out the app How We Feel which will send you reminders throughout the day.
The big ones to really remember are fear, anger, and sadness because those are often the ones that we suppress which drain our energetic reservoir, stifling intuition.
A big step function for me was learning to speak the emotional language of the body. When we are in touch with feeling into our body, often times we will experience tension and pain. It’s easy to just write these off as some weird sensation, ignoring it. Most of my life I was numb to these pains and then when I started to feel, I mostly wrote them off. Through the past few years, I’ve come to learn through teachers and my own practice that these uncomfortable sensations can be interpreted as suppressed emotions with accompanying thought forms that want to be acknowledged.
Every time I feel tension in my body, I drop in, opening to the sensation, and if I’m able too, practice emotional inquiry. I have done this 1000’s of times and I do it often while in the midst of something like a zoom call or part of a group conversation. Obviously, you calibrate with how deep you go into the sensation for the situation you are in. I see no downside though to feeling into anything that arises though vs. the alternative of shifting your attention away from it. Over time, there has been less and less tension in my body, more space, a stronger connection to Source, and a quieter mind.
You may feel these tensions in the middle of your workday or while you are doing something else. Each time this comes up, you’re faced with a choice of where to invest.
Do I invest in creating more freedom, joy, intuition, and love? Or do I invest in executing on my task list. For me the mental math is incredibly easy. To the extent I am able to, I always stop what I’m doing and prioritize handling the emotions that want to get acknowledged. I look at them like passengers that have been freeloading a ride from me for far too long. I’m tried of giving them my fuel and when I find one, it’s time to kick them off the bus…gently of course : )
One thing you can do to more easily access these pent up emotions are “activating practices” that stir up our energy. Examples of these include:
- Breathwork (I like Othership.us)
- Somatic work
- Qigong (I learned here)
- Bodywork - reiki, lymphatic drainage, massage
- Certain types of Yoga (Kundalini)
By doing these you are priming your system to face what needs to be acknowledged and given the opportunity to transmute the energy.
Another component and way to facilitate emotional healing is doing things that bring your nervous system at ease. When we feel safe, we create a window for suppressed emotions and experiences to come to the surface. This is why after we do something like breathwork, it is so imperative for us to lay down for 10-30 minutes allowing our nervous system to continue to process and rebalance.
Though people love the dramatic yelling and heaving that might occur during any type of somatic work, the real progress and healing often comes in the long rest period that we experience after. Do not short cut this. This is where you will really have an opportunity to feel into and see what wants to be faced. You can combine emotional inquiry with these long rebalancing periods as you feel into the body.
Here is a great conversation I had with Jonny Miller who runs Nervous System Mastery on more fine details of this type of work.
In addition to emotional inquiry, I’ve also added some supplementary recordings on the letting go method you can try on for size. It’s very similar to emotional inquiry, but a bit shorter and orients towards not just emotions, but habitual patterns that often are energetically charged. You can also read more about my thoughts here: How to Release and Transform the Patterns That Shape Your Reality
Here is a long overview guide on letting go of suppressed emotions:
And a shorter meditation without the instructions:
Here are some great resources and ideas on working with emotional healing:
Alignment
When you are out of alignment with what the deepest parts of you want and need, it’s like you are walking around with a weighted vest. We often try to block the weight out of our awareness because we know it means making hard changes that we don’t want to deal with. This could be in our jobs, relationships, friend groups, or so many other facets. There’s a subtle feeling of knowing something is not right, but we’re too afraid to go there.
One very empowering and freeing realization I had around this was getting really clear on what I was avoiding. If we see that emotions are merely physical sensations with mental formations, I find it a bit easier to be bold in these situations. It’s not to underscore that making life changes can have lots of actual consequences, but often the thing we’re most afraid of is the feelings vs. the actual changes. When we get clear on this, we can approach getting in alignment with more courage.
Intuition may be a place that helps us better understand what our true nature is yearning for. And until we make the necessary changes in the outer world, we’ll continue to have our energy directed at protecting ourselves instead of being open and available for receiving higher intelligence.
Concentration
The more you are able to have a still mind, the more space for intuition emerges. Meditation assists with this and why so many traditions focus on it. There is no world where becoming a better mediator doesn’t help you with your intuitive abilities. If you struggle to meditate, I encourage you to read this post.
There are countless apps that people have used to start meditating. The three most popular ones are Headspace, Calm, and Ten Percent Happier.
Self-Esteem
Studies show that when self-esteem is low, intuition and the ability to make positive decisions take a hit. It seems that anxiety short-circuits the brain’s associating processes. In simple terms, the higher your self-esteem, the clearer your inner voice will be.
This is intimately tied to the emotional healing work mentioned earlier. I have a lot of personal experience with this. For most of my life, I was very ambitious and widely considered a successful person. I never thought I had self-esteem issues. And then through lots of deep internal work, I realized that this ambition was driven by low self-worth; it was all a strategy I was running to invalidate a feeling deep inside myself that I wasn’t good enough. You can read more about this whole revelation here. Over time, the more I began to love myself, the more clear the channel I became to receive information.
I can now see how much life force I must have been allocating to blocking out the uncomfortable feelings of low self worth out of my awareness. I am elated that this is now available for more expansive use.
Okay, now that we’ve covered these important foundations to invite more spontaneous intuition let’s get into some more specifics.
👐 Inviting More Spontaneous Higher Intelligence
The easiest way to increasingly invite higher intelligence into your awareness is to work on cultivating and choosing activities that promote a calm, quiet mind. It’s during the stillness and space between thoughts that the information can make its way through our awareness.
So how can we be more still? Actually, probably more ways than you think.
I will break this out into active stillness practices and integrative behaviors. I encourage you to do both!
Active Stillness Practices
Active practices are things like meditation, breathwork, qigong/tai-chi, sound healing, or even things like vigorous exercise that focus the mind on one thing.
You need to start to think about resting in stillness as a skill that you can build and powerful state vs. suboptimal use of time. So your job is to try these various modalities that you can use to achieve a still mind and find one that works for you. Once you do this, then it’s just about doing it consistently so that the mind becomes increasingly still. If you struggle with this, again I encourage you to read this article I wrote for anyone who struggles with meditation.
I also recommend you explore any practice that helps you feel into the body. A few ideas are ecstatic dance, qigong/tai-chi, yoga, or mindful stretching. The more we go from thinking to sensing and feeling, the more we are in a receiving state. In fact, studies show that our bodies can even know things before they happen! This is commonly called presentiment or predictive anticipatory activity. The human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1–10 s in the future.
Integrative Behaviors
Integrative behaviors are how we can approach things we already do in a way that fosters more intuition. You can think about it as “setting the stage.”
This is actually a secret of some of the greatest inventors in the world!
There’s a story that Albert Einstein would often be visited by famous people and colleagues at his home. People would come and ask to see him to which his wife would often respond that he was in the bathtub:
“What does he go on doing, sitting in the bathtub?”
“He plays with soap bubbles.”
“For what?”
“It is when playing with soap bubbles that he has always arrived at certain insights for which he has been thinking and thinking but was failing and failing. It is always in his bathtub that insights flash into his mind.”
Thomas Edison leveraged hypnagogic states to spark his receiving state as I describe in this video:
Even our friend science, who is notoriously last to the game relative to direct experience, is starting to prove that relaxation and ease correlates with higher function! Neuroscientist Alicia Walf, a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, believes that experiencing boredom is essential for brain health. She discovered that when we're disengaged from activities, the brain's default network mode kicks in. Boredom, surprisingly, aids in refilling the creatively depleted reservoir, rejuvenating your work mojo and providing a period for potential work ideas to hatch. In such uneventful moments, strategies and ideas that have been developing in the background can be given space and come to fruition. For example, eureka moments come to many prolific writers when they're engaged in menial tasks such as moving furniture or showering.
Don’t worry, there’s more you can do than simply be bored which doesn’t sound like much fun! Here are a few more integrative behaviors you might apply to everyday life:
- Eating - stop multi-tasking when you eat. This means no youtube, podcasts, or anything else. When you eat, just simply focus on the taste of the food and see it as a time for ideas to emerge. The famous monk Thich Hanh claims to chew his food 50X before swallowing. Ever since I read about this, I started to bring more attention to chewing. I’m not at 50X, but this little trick helps me be more present when eating.
- Walks - go for walks with your phone on airplane mode. No music, calls or podcasts, just simply being. I have an app on my phone called Flite which takes notes and sends them to my email. When something pops into my awareness that I want to remember, I pull out my phone, jot it down, and it syncs the note to be sent when I turn back on data.
- Exercise - I mentioned this before, but any type of steady mechanical movement like running, biking, or jumping rope can be excellent for intuition to emerge into your awareness. If you already have an exercise you like, consider avoiding playing on your phone and being present. It doesn’t seem like music has much of an impact for me. I always listen to music and get a ton of downloads during my workouts. As things emerge, make sure you have a tool to quickly capture them as needed so you don’t need to worry about remembering. Eventually, you might not need to worry about capture, but it’s good in the beginning.
- Bed - I discussed this earlier, but before I go to bed I like to plant seeds in the field of consciousness by writing down questions I want guidance on. Oftentimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I have a completely clear mind. I view this as a golden opportunity to pose questions or ask for guidance. I keep a notepad next to my bed and sit up and await the guidance to come through. I then write it down using my phone on airplane mode as a light or more recently with the Remarkable tablet which syncs these notes to the cloud. This concept of waking up in the middle of night to tap into intuitive guidance is not new. Researchers have discovered many societies considered 2-4am “the mystical” hour when it’s easier to connect with the divine. Someone has actually written an entire book on it that I plan on reading. I wrote more about my experience here.
- Driving - interesting enough some of my best downloads come while I am driving. Obviously I am not advocating for doing anything unsafe while driving. You should 100% stay focused on the road. But it’s undeniable how many spontaneous strokes of insight pop into my awareness when I am driving. When these moments come up, I use the voice transcription functionality on my iphone and simply verbally express the information coming through on a notes app. I then send this information to myself when stopped or revisit it later after I am in a more appropriate place to process it.
These are just a few examples, but the overarching advice is quite simple: trade multitasking for singular activity and stillness in the name of receiving more divine inspiration and guidance.
As someone who spent years filling my mind with a zillion podcasts and seeing every moment as an opportunity to cram more in, I can tell you there’s actually much greater leverage by creating the conditions for the higher intelligence to come through. Not to mention, it’s pretty damn nice to actually be experiencing whatever it is you’re doing.
This isn’t to say completely abandon the podcasts. If you enjoy it, go for it! It’s more just about making conscious choices vs. compulsively feeling like you need to fill your mind to get answers every minute you can.
The last thing I’ll say about invoking more guidance is that it seems like the more I trust, the more guidance comes through. I demonstrate trust by adhering and acting on the information that comes to me. If I’m honest, it feels like the universe rewards me each time I trust by supplying me with more guidance.
🚶♂️Story: The Doing Tradeoff
One of the things you are going to run up against in all the integrative behaviors I just shared is the fighting the do-er or pusher. The do-er is my name for the ego component that needs to feel in control in order to feel safe. It doesn’t trust life unconditionally, so it compulsively needs to be doing and accomplishing in order to feel okay. I’m not saying getting shit done is a bad thing, it’s just the rigidity and attachment to it that needs to be examined.
I often will be in the middle of something like writing a blog post or some form of project work and then will notice something in my awareness arise that whispers “go for a walk.”
The old me would have looked at this as some dumb thought.
“Why would I go for a walk? I have identified my most high leverage activities and am executing them.”
It didn’t make sense in my mental model to act or trust spontaneity. What I now see that many creative geniuses have known for a long time that this allegiance to rigidity, blocks intuitive downloads and creative insights.
Now when I get these pings, I always follow them. At first this started with experimenting with trusting the nudges that would come into my awareness. If you’re asking well “how do I know this just isn’t my conditioned, survival mind?” I would recommend coming back to the texture.
Is it emergent, neutral, and clear? Or is it emotionally charged, persistent, and wavering?
Each time I’d trust the nudge, I’d see there was usually some breakthrough idea or positive encounter that would occur after. Practically this looks like stopping whatever I am doing and prioritizing what I am being guided to do.
Your to-do list is always going to be there. From my perspective, I believe the upside of following the unknown and potentiality of breakthroughs entering our awareness, outweighs the predictable known which we are already aware of.
We change the world by breakthrough insights and following through with action, not just plugging away on what is already known. Though there is certainly room for that and what I am pointing out here is an invitation to integrate both.
If what I am describing resonates, I recommend experimenting with breaking your mold and seeing what happens. Go and do that spontaneous thing you are being nudged to do and see what happens:
- Any good ideas come through?
- Any chance encounters?
- Did some unforeseen positive outcome emerge?
- Do you just feel good!?
I’d play with this for awhile and see what happens : )
💪 Improving Recognition
I’m going to come right out and say that the recognition component of intuition can be the trickiest part of this whole equation. Some of this section might feel like a review, but it’s so important that I think it’s worth it.
You’ve probably spent your entire life having a zillion thoughts in your awareness. So how come all of a sudden we’re going to come out and start to call these ideas that arise in your awareness as intuitive guidance!?
Being able to differentiate between intuitive guidance and rampant thoughts from the conditioned survival mind is a skill. Think of yourself as an awareness sommelier. It’s not like the first time someone tried wine they could easily discern the different varietals, vintages, and regions. Through experience and time, you eventually developed a refined palette. This is exactly how discerning the information from higher intelligence vs. the conditioned survival mind works.
Let’s revisit the characteristics again. Insights from higher intelligence are:
- Emergent, arise from stillness
- Are loving, positive, clear
- Often spontaneous and unexpected
We must become excellent recognizers of these things!
It’s important to note that the intelligence and direction from the divine may also come in the form of people, places, and events in your life. This is one of the main ways Source speaks to you. This may be hard to believe, but in my experience it’s true.
Let me give you a recent example. When I was writing this piece about going through energetic puberty, I was considering whether or not I should include the information about HRV. It seemed tangentially related and interesting, however, I thought maybe it’d be best to save it for a later piece on the relationship between the nervous system and consciousness. Shortly after I had this thought, I got a text from my buddy Justin asking about my HRV out of the blue.
Over the course of 10 years of friendship and 1000’s of texts, this may have been the first time he texted me about HRV. When our intuitive guidance is turned off, we likely:
A) wouldn’t invoke reality in this way
B) would just shrug this off as a coincidence
I took it as a sign and decided to include it in the article which got a ton of positive feedback.
I have countless examples of reality finding a way to opportunistically nudge me with impeccable timing. Your only job is to start paying attention. Oprah calls these “life’s whispers” and she is on the money.
When you aren’t sure how to interpret a situation, you can ask for guidance in the stillness. Learn to trust any pure information that arises and give yourself time to contemplate if needed.
Thoughts from the rational mind have a different texture. For one, we are often instigating them actively vs. witnessing their emergence. Anytime you say let me think about it or sit down and try to arrive at an answer via some logic or framework, you are in the “doing” vs. receiving state. It’s not that this can’t be useful, it’s just a different type of information and needs to be recognized as such.
Another big difference in texture is that thoughts from the conscious mind emanate from the ego which is our survival mechanism. Its whole goal is to survive which means the thoughts are often based in fear, control, scarcity, and self-protection. This has quite a different feel than being from love.
This is why whenever you encounter a negative or scary thought/directive, you can take comfort in the fact that it is a derivative from the limited, ego mind. It is not from the infinite, loving potential of the highest source of information.
This should make us feel great!
Anytime, I have a negative thought come up, I immediately just note it as “oh there’s the ego again” almost treating it like a little child. The ego serves a purpose, but the purpose is not to provide us with the most expensive possibilities and guidance in our life outside of protection. Hence, once we can clearly see it, we can treat it appropriately.
If you’re struggling to differentiate, it might be helpful to run it through the checklist provided earlier.
It should be noted that intuition can often be congruent and confirmatory with our logic. Just because the guidance you’re getting is as expected doesn’t mean it’s of less quality. Moreover, it’s also important to remember that often the best insights and directives you’ll get are things you wouldn’t expect using complete reason.
🟢 Application 101
Once our antennas are turned on and we are in a receiving state, the rubber meets the road when it comes time to apply the guidance we’ve received. As discussed earlier, this can be very scary.
When we were children we acted purely from our inner impulses. We were able to move through life spontaneously following our aliveness. Then our parents, teachers, and peers conditioned us with ideas that we did not choose. This included concepts like the ideas that reason and logic are the superior way to make decisions. Thus we learned to apply this to a growing number of situations. In the process, we forgot how to recognize and act on inner guidance which is now why we find ourselves in this unfamiliar position.
One way you can train to trust your inner guidance is through small acts in your everyday life. Again, I come back to the notion of treating it like a skill or muscle that you’re building.
One of my favorite examples of this is HIT workouts of all places. I used to be someone that would have a very regimented workout that followed certain prescriptions, rest times, and weight progressions. Regardless of how I felt, I would force myself and my body into performing these movements because it was an “optimized regimen.” This wasn’t just a thing in my workouts, but the way I was in all parts of my life. I’m not alone in this.
How many people prioritize what people like Andrew Huberman say over what their body is actually trying to tell them in a given day.
A few years ago, I started jumping rope and doing circuits. I’d alternate jumping rope for 30 seconds and bodyweight movements like air squats. One day it dawned on me that for the movement exercise, I should experiment with doing whatever emerged in my awareness in the moment vs. working my way through the prescribed circuit. This could be an air squat, pushup, high knees, plank, or anything that I felt like doing in the moment.
I started to work out this way and found IT FELT WAY MORE FUN AND ALIVE than simply following a rote program. It was also an early way of learning to tune in and trust my inner guidance with my actions.
This might seem like a silly example, but the point is that you can use low-risk activities to learn how to trust the spontaneity of the moment. This tact can be applied to many parts of daily life to increase your comfort with trusting the moment.
Here are some ideas:
- Choosing what to eat open your fridge or pantry and in the quiet observe what you’re drawn to.
- How you start your day - instead of automatically doing your routine, ask the stillness “What do I feel like doing right now?” and then go do it. Try experimenting with this for a week
- Calling/texting friends - open your phone and ask, who should I call or text to catch up with? Trust the initial impulse of whoever pops into your mind
- Selecting a book - go to your reading list or “wish list” and ask for guidance on which book is most perfectly suited for you at this moment. You can even do this with opening a page of an existing book you are reading
- Picking music to listen to
- Go for a run and see where you get guided to go spontaneously vs. taking your typical route
One cool example of the benefits of trusting your instincts was this study on eating. They found that when women were asked to eat intuitively rather than make deliberate or pre-planned food choices, they lost more weight than those who went on a diet. This suggests that deep down we may know our own bodies better than we realize.
Anytime you are making a choice, you can begin to learn how to recognize and act on what is alive for you in a given moment vs. what your rational brain tells you represents the best decision. The more we flex this muscle, the easier it comes…and the more adventurous life can feel!
Again, I’m not seeing abandon reason. I’m seeing integrate both.
I mentioned this before, but one thing that I’ve noticed is that life seems to reward you the deeper you go on this path. The more guidance you get the more opportunities you have to trust and the more you show your trust, the more the universe seems to place wonderful opportunities in your lap. At Least this is my experience!
🧪 Week 4 Skill Building Exercise 2
Pick one integrative behavior that you are already doing that will help hone your intuitive abilities. This can be anything related to inviting, recognizing, or actioning more intuitive guidance! Try it on for size for the entire week and share your progress in the WhatsApp group!
🍿 Week 5 Preview
Week 5 will be our final week! It’s hard to believe. We will be covering
- Signs that you are progressing
- Creating an intuition log
- Setting yourself up for success beyond this course
- Things to be mindful of as you grow you seek to expand your intuition
- Recommended further study