Natural Born Intuition: How to Awaken and Develop Your Inner Wisdom
224
Natural Born Intuition: How to Awaken and Develop Your Inner Wisdom
224eBook
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Overview
Natural Born Intuition is a practical, step-by-step guide to living your best life through the process "Dr. Lauren" calls Knowing-living from a deeply guided, wholly trusted sense of inner wisdom. By demystifying intuition, "Dr. Lauren" teaches you how to bring your intuitive right brain and your analytical left brain together.
Using a simple self-assessment tool she developed, Dr. Lauren helps you determine your natural intuitive style—a two-part combination of the five intuitive types: Visual, Auditory, Sensory, Body Based, and Multisensory. She then provides specific techniques designed to expand your natural-born intuitive style into a reliable life guidance system. Natural Born Intuition helps you understand:
- That intuition is a natural extension of our senses, not some special "sixth sense."
- When to rely on intuition—and when not to.
- How to use intuition to enhance the success of your relationships.
- Why intuition blended with analysis is the most powerful problem-solving technique you can use.
- How to bring intuition to practical tasks—from finding a parking place to buying a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601639561 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 787,513 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Basis of Knowing
"Perhaps the greatest false truth is that some people are not intuitive, as if this key survival element was somehow left out of them."
— Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear (Little Brown & Co., 1997)
Right from the beginning, I want to assure you that you are intuitive. You have all the foundational elements and building blocks necessary to live from that place of inner wisdom, the place I call Knowing. You were born with a unique genetic blueprint, and within that blueprint is a particular and unique intuitive style. Just as people vary in eye color, skin tone, height, and weight, they vary in terms of their natural intuitive style. But it's always there. It may be hidden under the surface, but it's there. It's as much a part of you as the blood coursing through you right this minute. It's as much a part of you as your digestive system, which even now is working to keep you sustained, supported, and energized.
You generally don't think too much about your blood flow or your digestion (unless it's bothering you for some reason) and, yet, you rely on these unacknowledged systems, trusting that they're there when needed, efficiently doing their jobs in the background. Intuition is much the same way; it operates without much assistance from you. In fact, its purpose is to assist you rather than the other way around. Before we delve into the how-to's of Knowing, let's take a look at some background and establish some ground rules and terms that I'll be using throughout this book.
Your Intuition Is Always Right
Your natural-born intuition is always "right" in that it always wants to help you. In fact, the word intuition is based in the Latin term tuere which means "to guard or to protect." So if you think of your Knowing as a sort of personal guardian angel, particularly because it has the potential to move you quickly to a life-saving decision in times of danger, you won't be far off the mark.
Where we miss the full impact of intuition, where we get it wrong, is in the interpretation. Generally, I prefer to avoid using terms such as "right" and "wrong" because they are loaded with judgments. Of course, feedback matters and is a critical aspect of learning. But instead of focusing on your intuitive hits and misses — your "rights" and "wrongs" — as you work with this material, I encourage you to focus on the experience of being in the Knowing Zone, that place where you feel deeply connected and able to tune in to your deepest, wisest inner being.
The Ground Upon Which Knowing Stands: The Inward Journey
Natural-born intuition benefits from reflection and contemplation, which is why you'll find Inward Journey exercises throughout this book. The ability to tune in is developed through the Inward Journey of paying attention to your own way of Knowing, to seeking to understand your own intuitive strengths and weaknesses. It takes time, and attention, but I promise you, the Inward Journey toward Knowing will make the simple black-and-white distinctions of "right" and "wrong" far less important. That's because in the Knowing Zone, you experience a richer, textured, broader perspective communicated to you through your natural-born intuition, your own Knowing shorthand, your personal symbolism. Your personal values are a key aspect of those symbols and the meanings you associate with them.
Through these shorthand symbols, which require that you pay attention to your body and mind, you'll understand what each potential choice is likely to bring you in terms of rewards and tradeoffs. Being able to make more informed decisions is far more helpful to thriving in your life than simply focusing on "right" and "wrong" bits of data. So as you learn to trust your Knowing, you'll learn to pay attention to the process and the patterns as well as the hits and misses.
The Roots of Knowing
Knowing is rooted in your natural-born intuition, which is deeply biological. It's not a special gift, but a birthright once used for survival. Our ancestors relied on intuitive instinct to make snap decisions that often had life-or-death consequences. Those with a greater degree of natural-born intuition survived. Over subsequent generations, natural selection meant that each generation had stronger, more reliable natural-born or innate instincts than those of previous generations. This is a key reason why so many children these days evidence powerful intuition from very young ages.
As we became increasingly removed from the natural world, we had less need for life-or-death, fight-or-flight instinct. But the "hard wiring" of life-saving instinct, strengthened by natural selection, remained. Today, we call the remnants of that deeply rooted instinct intuition. And it still serves us.
Intuition is like gravity: it's just there. Gravity doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, or understand it or not. Neither does intuition. They both operate in our world, regardless of your belief system or level of understanding of the underlying principles. But the greater your understanding of gravity, the better you can use it to your advantage and save yourself considerable time and effort. The same applies to intuition.
Even if you consider yourself a skeptic (I believe a true skeptic is open to new ideas. Modern forms of skeptical inquiry recognize that concepts are not "... fixed or final and may be modified in the future by future observations and theories." [Paul Kurz in Should Skeptical Inquiry Be Applied to Religion?, Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 1999]), please try the techniques in this book. Like the guy who figures out that working with the force of gravity makes life easier, you may discover that working with your intuition, accessing your Knowing, also makes life easier. See for yourself what works and what doesn't. Keep a log of your progress, a personal Knowing Journal (see Appendix B for suggestions). Use it as a scientist would: to keep a record of your experiments on the road to new discoveries, to your own Knowing. Be patient with yourself. Thomas Edison experimented with thousands of approaches that didn't work before perfecting the ones that did.
Knowing vs. Knowledge, Process vs. Product
Throughout this book, Knowing is spelled with a capital K to differentiate it from knowledge. Knowing is a process. Knowing is Now. Knowing is internal, personal, subjective. It's always about you and it always operates in the present moment. Knowing is a process.
Knowledge is historical, is external, and operates in the past. Knowledge is a product, an outcome of inquiry, reflection, and analysis. Based on collected observations, often rooted in the structured methods of empiricism and science, knowledge is considered more objective than Knowing (although even Albert Einstein admitted his fondness for intuition as a useful tool in scientific discovery, claiming, "The really valuable thing is intuition."). Usually, knowledge is "common," meaning shared or experienced by many. As a result, knowledge is generally about the collective, and applicable to many. An example is the common knowledge of plant lore that guided our ancestors and still helps us today.
Alignment: Left Brain Meets Right Brain
Your Knowing works best when you align your right brain's inner wisdom with your left brain's rational knowledge. Just like a worker moves heavy loads more easily with knowledge and the assistance of gravity, your knowledge helps your Knowing, and vice versa. Objective knowledge feeds and sustains intuitive Knowing; Knowing in turn illuminates and elucidates knowledge. Think of the relationship between Knowing and knowledge as an infinity symbol. Together, the two loops feed, extend, and expand our potential for understanding to an infinite level where anything, and everything, is possible. The most powerful point in the diagram in Figure 1 is the place where the two loops of the infinity symbol meet, where logic meets sensation, where thought meets feeling.
If you choose to access only one loop, approaching decisions and tasks entirely from logic, or entirely from feeling, you're limiting yourself. By using both your logic and your feeling centers, your left and right brain hemispheres, you expand your potential infinitely. The creative right brain, where Knowing lives, and the analytical left brain, where knowledge is at home, can be trained to work together. In fact, they're designed to work together, the way your right and left hands are. The power is in the partnership between Knowing and knowledge, in the link between right-brain insights and left-brain analyses, in the connection between insights in the present moment Now and the powerful historical data gleaned from passed "nows."
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As Albert Einstein said, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
It's time to unwrap the gift of your Knowing. But because you've picked up this book, you probably Know that already.
What Knowing Correlates to
This place of Knowing has some affiliation to the superego (to use the terminology of Sigmund Freud), the collective unconscious (in Carl Jung's schema), the Godhead, Universe or Creator (in theological and metaphysical terms). It's also been called the supraconscious, the Godhead, the Universal mind, the Great Intelligence, the higher self, Enlightenment, the Absolute, the Atman, the One, the All that Is (and Is Not), the oversoul, God, and many other terms. Use whichever term you prefer or make up your own; for the purposes of this book, I shall call it the Unseen World to differentiate it from the Earthly World in which we live while in human form.
Your relationship to the Unseen World is uniquely yours; at the same time, the Unseen World is shared with everyone else. A good analogy is this Earth: your relationship to the planet is uniquely yours, and you haven't seen all of it, nor will you in your lifetime. Maybe you like forests, whereas your friends prefer deserts, mountains, islands, beaches, or caves. Just as we don't all have the same relationship with the Earthly World, we don't all have the same relationship with the Unseen World, and we are not meant to. That's one reason that there are many paths of self-discovery to investigate. The gathered wisdom of many people over thousands of years, a nonreligious view called the Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley in his book of the same name (Perennial Classics, 2004), points out the Inward Journey is one which leads to connection to something larger than ourselves, whatever you choose to call it. I call it Knowing.
Just as there are many unexplored corners of this Earth, so too are there many unexplored corners of the Unseen World. And just as you choose where you live or travel on this Earth, so too do you choose what and where you want to explore in the Unseen World. You won't see all of it, either. Don't let the achievement model of the Western world get in your way. The journey is the point, not the destination. In fact, there is no destination, because we are stuck here in the eternal moment, Now, and we never actually reach a destination. We reach a state of mind. Knowing is the personalized form of this higher state of mind, and it applies solely to you and your life.
That's why reaching for those realms of higher understanding, of inner wisdom, requires you to start with Knowing your Self. Bridging the Unseen World with the Earthly World through your own Knowing is the journey you are on, that we all are on. As Shakespeare put it so well, "To thine own self be true."
When Worlds Collide
As everyone else has, you've had moments when the two worlds "collided." Many moments, in fact. These have been called peak experiences, Spiritually Tranformative Experiences (STEs), and a variety of other terms. Recall a time when you felt so completely connected to nature that time seemed to stop, so loving toward someone that you felt as if you had merged into one being, so peaceful that you would have been happy to stay in that space for eternity, so awed by a religious experience or so moved by a near-death experience that you felt completely connected to something beyond yourself.
Understanding this process allows you to row with the tides, not against them, to move in the flow of the currents between the Unseen World and this Earthly World. If we get "stuck" in our lives, we continue to be faced with the same situation in different forms, over and over again until we learn to row with the tides. At those "stuck" points, we're vainly striving to stay in the same cycle, hoping to be like a swimmer who never changes lanes but keeps doing lap after lap.
Ever feel like you dated or married the same personality in a different body a few times, or witnessed a friend do so? Or kept finding the same types of unfulfilling work assignments, over and over? Those are definitely clues that it's time to change lanes. It's time for an Inward Journey.
This blending of logic and insight, of right-brain hemisphere and left-brain hemisphere through the Knowing process, is fed by the energies of Unseen World (the upper loop of the infinity symbol turned like an eight) and your experience in the Earthly World (the lower loop of that figure eight; see Figure 1 on page 17). Learning to actively engage the Unseen World with the Earthly World will guide you to a place of inner calm, of pure awareness, of inner wisdom. A placed called your own Knowing.
A comparison to a scientific principle will make this more clear. Remember that certain parts of the light spectrum, such as the infrared, aren't visible to the naked eye, although they exist. Their higher rates of vibration make them seem invisible, but they're real. Your Knowing Self is like a broad-spectrum light pattern, a fully accessible version of you; it's "bigger, better, more," if you will. This book is designed to teach you how to allow your bigger-better-more-Knowing Self to inform and guide your journey on Earth. At the same time, your Earthly presence and the choices you make here actually alter the Unseen World. The following diagram shows graphically the Earthly World/Unseen World relationship.
Your Knowing Self-Portrait
An expansion of the image from the lower loop of the infinity symbol (shown in Figure 1 to represent the Earthly World) will help you create what I call your Knowing Self-Portrait. It's designed as a single place where you can record the self-assessment information you'll gather on your journey through this book. Feel free to make an enlarged copy of the blank Knowing Self-Portrait image found in Appendix A. You may want to keep a working copy in your Knowing Journal, too. Suggestions for journaling are found in Appendix B.
Knowing Is Always "Now"
Knowing is always present tense. That's because this present moment, the Now, is all we ever have in which to make choices. Certainly reviewing your history and focusing forward on your dreams and goals are important, but decisions always happen in the moment, Now. Living from Knowing is a way of being ever-present in the moment. It's also a way of deliberately interacting with a greater degree of your consciousness. It's living with your inner wisdom switched on, your consciousness more fully engaged. Living from your natural-born Knowing, that deeply guided, fully trusted sense of what's right for you, will take you places you never imagined were possible. And it will keep fear of change from running your life.
Releasing the Fear Factor
When you align the Earth World and the Unseen World, using both your Knowing and your knowledge, life is enhanced. Emotions are felt, but no longer rule you. Relationships flow more easily. Work — even work you don't like, or that is beneath your talents and training — becomes rewarding for its own sake, for the process itself. Life lived from Knowing continues in a perpetual, self-fulfilling cycle of movement, growth, and change, like an ever-expanding infinity symbol. Knowing is one loop, knowledge the other, and there's no room for fear.
This is because as you work on blending your Knowing and your knowledge, an even more powerful shift happens. Fear of change, which stops so many people from achieving their full potential, is released. Why? Because you no longer need to fear change. It's just part of the process as the "loops" of Knowing and knowledge expand and evolve. When you have a deep connection to your own Knowing, fear no longer fits; you'll find you've outgrown it.
Actually, you'll have transformed it. As you build bridges between Knowing and knowledge, between your rational left brain and your intuitive Knowing, between the ever-present Now and the past, fear becomes fuel for change, rather than a block to progress. Fear will actually become a motivator, because your Knowing and your knowledge, your intuitive right brain and your analytical left brain, the gift of your intuition and the servant of your rational mind, will be working together. As your ancient ancestors did, you'll realize that fear is simply a sign to move. Through ongoing practice, you'll learn to Know in which direction to move. The old saying "knowledge is power" becomes a new reality, one where Knowing adds even more power, because your inner wisdom, your full potential, is awakened.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Natural-Born Intuition"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Lauren Thibodeau.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
Introduction,
Chapter 1: The Basis of Knowing,
Chapter 2: The Limits of Knowing,
Chapter 3: Visual Intuition and Knowing,
Chapter 4: Visual Intuition in Action,
Chapter 5: Building Blocks: Auditory Intuition and Knowing,
Chapter 6: Auditory Intuition in Action,
Chapter 7: Sensory Intuition and Knowing,
Chapter 8: Sensory Intuition in Action,
Chapter 9: Gut/Body-Based Intuition and Knowing,
Chapter 10: Gut/Body-Based Intuition in Action,
Chapter 11: Mixed Intuition and Knowing,
Chapter 12: Mixed Intuition in Action,
Chapter 13: Putting it All Together: Your Intuitive Style Code,
Chapter 14: Trauma, Fear, and Knowing,
Chapter 15: Mediumship and Knowing,
Chapter 16: Values and Intuition: The Empowering Connection,
Chapter 17: Colors, Values, and You,
Chapter 18: The Four Corners of Knowing,
Chapter 19: Living in the Knowing Zone,
Appendix A: Your Knowing Self-Portrait,
Appendix B: Keeping a Knowing Journal,
Appendix C: Reclaiming your Passion and Purpose,
Appendix D: Tips for Simplifying and Integrating Meditation,
Appendix E: Aura Color Interpretations,
Appendix F: The Meanings of Aura Colors and Numbers,
Recommended Reading,
Web Resources,
About the Author,