Dr. Judith Orloff' dicusses her book Guide to Intuitive Healing

Dr. Judith Orloff: I always feel so excited about coming back to the Bodhi Tree, because this is my home store. I love this place. I feel like it is such an asset to Los Angeles, and I'm so happy to be here.

As a child, I was forbidden to talk about my intuitions, premonitions, or my sense of connection with spirit. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me. My first book, Second Sight was about my struggle to come to terms with intuition and the things that prevented me from embracing it. The book also describes how I began to use intuition, spirituality and my psychic abilities in my practice as a psychiatrist. I've come a long way since then.

Intuition has been a path towards my own awakening. It is a path to God, to soul, or essence, and its language is wordless poetry, meaning that there are no words to describe what it is. And yet, we have this still, small voice inside, beneath the mind that's jabbering all the time with thoughts, fears, and a laundry list of things to do. You can call that something an inner self or a spirit. You can call it intuition or love or even God. Whatever it is, it has something for each of us, and we should get in touch with it. If you're not in touch with it, trying to navigate this life, with all its ups and downs, becomes very difficult.

I know from experience that many of us don't believe there's something inside. In my work with patients, I sense an alienation - there is no real connection with the inner voice. And so, my role has been to help people find that connection. In my book, I present a strategy for developing intuition, so that it's not something that just happens sporadically. I look at intuition as a spiritual practice. It is something to develop as a seamless part of everyday reality, constantly with you, so that you don't have to stretch for it when you need it.

Now, I love the analytical mind, and I've developed my own through 14 years of medical training at USC and UCLA. But, I also realize its limitations. It cannot understand love or death, and it can't understand the deeper levels of intuition. That's why it's so important to be able to navigate between the analytic mind and intuition -- to go in and out as though in a dance.

To make intuition accessible to everyone, I created a five-step program. It consists of noticing your beliefs, being in your body, sensing subtle energies, asking for inner guidance, and listening to your dreams. It's a way to understand intuition and put it to practical use. To my mind, the practice of intuition can lead to enlightenment - that is, to a sense of the divine within you, a sense of truth and rightness.

The first step is to notice your beliefs. The premise of this book, and what I think is essential to any form of intuitive healing, is that love is the most powerful healing force in the universe, and everything comes from that. Everything. This is the premise of healing. And this is the underpinning of a healing life. Intuitive healing isn't just something you do when you get sick. It's the way you breathe. It's the way that you move or look at somebody. If you see somebody through the lens of love, it's very different than just looking at them.

The second premise is that you must commit to not leading a fear-driven life. A million fears will come up. Instead of being stopped by fear and negative thoughts, the secret is to say, "I know this is not true," and to tune into your intuition and find out what is true. To make that huge, conscious, evolutionary leap into the truth, away from the fear, might sound simple, but when you're in the clutches of fear, it takes everything that you have to make that leap. But, that's the basis of intuitive healing.

The third premise of the book is that healing has a very wide definition. It can mean wellness or vibrant health. But it can also mean illness, and in certain cases, it can even mean death. We go about our lives and never think about death. But intuition can teach you that death is not the end.

In one of the sections on death, I write about a meditation in which I take you into its energy. Most people find that death is like coming home. It's like light and love and it's the most beautiful thing you've probably experienced. This is a function of intuition. You can't know this with the mind. Your mind will never be consulted about death. Never. But your intuition will know what it is.

Intuition helped me at the time of my own father's death. As he was dying, I took a break from the deathbed to do a short meditation with my spiritual teacher. And, in the meditation, a memory came back of how my father used to take me body surfing when I was about eight years old, at a beach in Santa Monica. He used to tell me, "Just let the wave carry you. Just let the wave carry you." When I returned to the death bed, at a certain point, I felt compelled to tell my father that story. I was standing next to him with my hand on his head. And I said, "Remember when we used to go body surfing? Remember the golden light in the twilight?" And it was in the middle of this story that my father died. In my meditation, I was given the death image to help him over. This is very powerful stuff! And it came from trusting my intuition at every moment.

The second step is to be in the body. That means listening to the body's signals and being sensually connected to it and the natural world. It's enjoyable and good. You can learn about your body by acquiring a copy of Gray's Anatomy Coloring Book, which will teach you about your internal organs. The gorgeousness of our physical bodies pervades our three dimensional selves, and part of intuitive healing is learning about the workings of the body. If you do get sick, and you need to heal yourself, you'll know where to channel this energy.

The third step for developing intuition is to sense subtle energies. It is essential. We have our physical bodies, flesh and blood, and the subtle energy fields penetrate our bodies and extend way beyond them. These are called auras, and are associated with beautiful, vibrant colors or a glow around us. The energy centers are called chakras and there is a particular feeling associated with each. When I open up the door to my waiting room, and a patient is sitting there, I feel his or her chakras in my body and I use that as a diagnostic tool. If I sense an imbalance in their chakras, part of my job is to bring them back into balance. In Western culture, a lot of people are taught to lead with their sexuality. So their first chakra, which is like a spotlight, blasts me with sexual energy. It's very intrusive and uncomfortable. But by introducing a sense of heart, and intuition, it is possible to bring all the energies together, so it's not just blasting one particular area.

The movement or flow of energy is like a great river. If it's flowing really nicely, everything is open, then it has a very beautiful health-promoting effect in you. If it is not, something is blocked, and you will experience discomfort and even bad health.

Our energy fields also interact with those around us, and it's important to know how you relate to another person's energy. If you're very sensitive to people, you need to learn techniques of centering and grounding.

The next step is to ask for inner guidance. It is very different than analyzing or trying to control. You put out a heart-felt, sincere request, whatever it is. Let's say your body isn't feeling well, so you put out a request, "Please show me how to be healthy." If your request is sincere, it goes from this universe to another and to another. You have no idea how far it travels. Then your task is simply to sit and wait to see what you get. There are certain circumstances where nothing will come through but most of the time, the answers do come. In Western culture this whole principle of non-action is very difficult for people, because we feel that to make something happen, we have to do something. With intuition, it's the exact opposite. You do nothing. You put out the request and you wait for a response.

The final step, which is my favorite, is listening to dreams. In our culture, we're not taught the relevance and the power of our dream life, unlike the Aboriginals or the Native Americans, who make it an essential part of their culture. Dreams have always been my most powerful conduit because a dream is the place and time where the laws of physics, such as gravity, don't apply. After all, you can fly in your dreams. When intuition occurs in your dream, the revolutionary thing is to act on it. For example, dreaming a phone number, and upon waking, actually calling it.

I have had some phone number dreams, and I want to share one with you because it was very illuminating for me. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about a Malibu phone number. The next morning I called it and I got a woman's answering machine. In my message, I introduced myself, "I'm a psychiatrist, and I wrote a book, and I had a dream and your phone number came through and you can feel free to call me or not." The woman called me back that day and said, "This is amazing. I just moved into an apartment in Malibu. You're my first phone call. I'm a healer and I had just put out a prayer for some help, and I had just read your book, Second Sight." You would assume from this that I heard her prayer, and that I was destined to work with this person because we had a very special connection. But upon meeting her in a workshop for healthcare professionals I was giving, I instantly didn't like her. I felt nothing in common with her. But what happened, and this is the point of the dream, is that she connected with a psychologist in the group who had terminal breast cancer. I had been the messenger so that these two women could make their important life connection.

You can ask for dreams that heal before you go to sleep at night. You don't even have to ask any specific question though sometimes people like to ask questions such as, "How will my body heal?" "How can I help my relationship?" or "What kind of career change do I need?" Then you have to let the request go and just go to sleep without worrying about it.

There is a secret to remembering dreams. In the morning, you have to refrain from talking for five minutes, because once the linear mind gets going, the dreams will evaporate. So you have to lay in bed and allow yourself to remember. It doesn't matter if it's a long saga, or one image. In the intuitive realm, more is not better. You just write down what you get in the morning and see what you find.

I also talk about physical, emotional, and sexual healing in my book. For one thing, the mind will never let you know sexuality the way intuition does. There is a deep connectedness of erotic energy to nature and spirit. Erotic energy doesn't necessarily come from a partner. You can develop your erotic side and your sexuality by connecting to the erotic forces of nature, by connecting the spirit and opening up. Then, if you choose to be in a relationship, you have something to bring to it.

Audence: How do you forget a bad dream?

ORLOFF: I think it's better to work with dreams than to forget them. Not to obsess or dwell on them, but if you're not making progress, to go to somebody who can help you. Once you deal with it, the fear, or whatever happened, then it lifts or goes away and you are free of it.

Audence: You spoke about love and how everything comes from love. How would you define love.

ORLOFF: This is really a nice question. My spiritual teacher spells out L-O-V-E on a piece of paper and says, "'L' equals life. 'O' equals nothingness, or emptiness. 'V' equals two souls coming together. And 'E' equals eternity."
Audence: I asked for a dream that would reveal one of my guides. And, I was rather disappointed, because in the dream, there was a young man, perhaps in his twenties, and he kept showing up in this line, maybe a restaurant or a cafeteria. When we saw each other, I felt like we were friends, soulmates, like there was something very special about our relationship, but he was in blue jeans, and I thought, "You can't be a guide."

Many people think guides are beings who come in white gowns with halos. It's not really like that all the time. How do you know if a guide is a good guide? If they give you advice that works. So, just keep it very practical. Don't ever listen to any kind of guidance that doesn't make sense, or that isn't promoting goodness, love and, of course, intuition.