Shakti Gawain discusses Developing Intuition
Developing Intuition: Practical Guidance for Daily Life
Shakti Gawain came to the Bodhi Tree in 2001 to discuss her book Developing Intuition. Shakti Gawain, as a youngster, was logical and skeptical, refusing to accept anything unless it had been proven by science. But coming of age in the 60's, exposed her to a more holistic approach to life, as she became interested in Eastern philosophies and began the practice of yoga and meditation. In time, her exploration of visualization, opened her mind to new vistas and her intuitive healing abilities. The practice of listening to and following her inner guidance became a priority, and eventually, an essential part of her inspired teaching.
Developing Intuition: Practical Guidance for Daily Life by Shakti Gawain (Nataraj)
This book is about learning how to tap into our inner knowledge and use it to enhance our life and achieve our goals. We learn many techniques for opening up our intuition, through relaxation and clearing exercises, and by interpreting intuitive messages. While there is a rational voice in each of us that is fearful of the consequences of embracing intuition, Shakti Gawain shows us how to confront our fears and to embrace intuition safely. It is all about allowing our life force to flow naturally and creatively.
"There is a universal, intelligent life force that resides within each one of us as a deep wisdom, and an inner knowing. We can access this wonderful source of knowledge and wisdom through our intuition, an inner sense that tells us what feels right and true for us at any given moment." --Shakti Gawain
The following is a partial text of Shakti Gawain’s Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation. Edited by Camilla Denton
Shakti Gawain: I was brought up in a family that was intellectual, rational, and very educated, and since our education system is pretty much oriented the same way, I was good at school. I got a lot of approval for being rational. As a result, even as a young kid, I was very skeptical. As far as I was concerned, it if you couldn't prove it, it didn't exist. I thought that God was made up by people, because we can't stand the idea that we don't know why we're here, or what life is about.
Then, as I reached my teens and my college years, things began to happen. For one thing, it was the 60s. A lot of people were getting their minds opened up in many different ways, including me. I began to realize that there were levels of existence and aspects of life that weren't rational and weren't easily proved, and subsequently found myself on a quest to find greater meaning and fulfillment in my life. I became interested in psychology and philosophies, including Eastern philosophies, and I began to study yoga, and meditation.
One day, my mother persuaded me to take a workshop at an organization called Sylvan Mind Control. The workshop took place over a week and its fundamental intent was to explain how the mind works, how we don't use a lot of its different functions and, of course, how we can learn to use them.
At the end of the workshop, we conducted an exercise. We each worked one-to-one with a facilitator, who had a bunch of cards. On each card was the name of a person, their age, their city of residence, and an ailment they had. These were real people, with a real illness or ailment. Our task was to see if we could, intuitively, get what was wrong with the person.
Well, a surprising number of us got the right information. It was amazing, like how did that happen? In fact, it happened to me. When I got the person's name, I intuited their information--over and over again. I got it right ten times out of ten. It was as if I was tuning my mind to the right channel, and all the information was there. It blew my mind. I had received this information not through my own five senses, but in some different way.
We all have this deep wisdom inside of us. And it is accessible. If we can check into it, it will actually let us know, each moment of our life, what we need to be aware of, and what we need to do.
What is intuition? First of all, it's a completely natural faculty. We're born with it. If our culture understood that and supported us in the natural process of developing our intuition, through our whole lives, we would always have access to it. Little children are very intuitive, but our culture doesn't really believe in intuition. We're more oriented toward the rational--not that there is anything wrong with the rational and scientific--but we almost worship these parts of ourselves. We've come to really disregard the intuitive sense that we have. And, when we're young, we do not get the encouragement and the support that we need to keep trusting our intuitive feeling about things. By the time we're grown up, most of us have lost touch with it completely.
Fortunately, it's really easy to re-learn and re-develop our intuitive abilities. And, after years of working with many, many, people with this, I've found that most of us, with a little support, can develop our intuition in a really practical way. For starters, we all have intuitive feelings, probably many times every day. But most of the time we don't know what has happened, because we immediately disregard or discount what we feel. You might have a feeling of, "Yeah, that feels right." Or, "Ooh, I'd like to do that." But, the minute you feel it, another voice counterpunches with, "Are you kidding? That's silly." Or, "No, you wouldn't be able to accomplish that," or, "What would other people think?" Our intuitive feelings are beaten down before we even know that the little discussion has happened. We don't realize that we may have had an important feeling, and just brushed it aside.
One of the first things in reclaiming our intuition, is to begin to pay attention to our gut feelings. Our sense of "This is where the energy is." Or "This is what feels right for me." Another reason why many of us don't trust our intuition is because, from the time we were small, we were taught that we don't know what's right for us, that some greater authority knows better than we do. We develop a habit of always looking to see what everybody else is doing when, in fact, we have the wisdom we need inside our own selves. Further, each one of us has our own path in life, so nobody else can know exactly what's true and what's right for us. We can get help and guidance and support from other people, and there are people who may have knowledge and information that we need, but, when it comes right down to it, we alone can know what's right for us. If you go to a doctor, or a lawyer, or any other expert, a teacher, a therapist, a guru, by all means listen to what they have to say, but then check into yourself intuitively to see, "Does this feel true and right for me?" You don't want to give away your power to someone else, and this is one way to begin owning your own wisdom again.
Another thing that is important is to learn how to relax. We have such hectic lives, and we're driven all the time to be doing so much. Our lives are filled with so many wonderful opportunities but, the problem is, we try to do them all! We are so oriented toward doing and accomplishing and getting places and making things happen or having things happen, we've really lost touch, as a culture, with the value of being. Yet, it's in being energy that we can really get in touch with ourselves deeply, and allow the life force to come in. This is where we can receive, and replenish, and refill ourselves from all the constant giving and doing. If you're doing, doing, doing and giving, giving, giving, and producing and producing, after a while, you're empty. We need to have a place to replenish the energy that we've been putting out. And that's how we can get re-inspired for whatever we need to do next. You can't access your intuition when you're just on the go all the time. Personally, I try to do a little bit of Hatha yoga every day just to get connected to my body and being. Other options are to take a hot bath, or a walk. There are many things you can do to relax your body and mind enough to sink into a more intuitive place.
Once you have found a way to access your deeper awareness, you can ask for whatever you need, for example: "What do I need to be aware of right now?" This is a good one, because it serves to subtly open the door for your intuition to send you any kind of message, reminder, or awareness that you need to have in the moment. But, if you have something more specific that you want to ask about, say a problem you're wrestling with, or if you want some clearer direction, help, support, simply ask for whatever you need. Develop a relationship with your own intuitive self in which you ask for whatever you need. The more you practice, the more you will develop the process to the point where you will be able to ask for guidance and it will come to you.
Sometimes you will get an impression, thought, feeling or image that doesn't particularly make sense to you, but that's okay. Let it be there. Don't try to figure it out. At other times, you may not really get anything. At least nothing that seems particularly relevant or powerful. It's okay. It doesn't always come right when you ask. Just let it go, and go about your life, and what will often happen is that it will come to you later. You may wake up tomorrow morning with a flash of insight. Or you might be walking down the street and suddenly have an impulse to go into a bookstore. You'll be drawn to a particular bookshelf, and to a particular book. You'll open it up, and boom, there will be a paragraph about exactly what you need to hear.
Our intuition is always guiding us, and it's often guiding us to learn the next thing that we need to learn. No matter or not if you're asking inside for it, it will start to come to you in one form or another. Our intuition is connected to our soul, and also to the universal intelligence. Our rational minds are like wonderful, state-of-the-art computers that can process anything that comes in through our five senses. But it is limited to what our experience is in this life so far. Intuition taps into all the wisdom and knowledge and information in the universe, and bring us just the piece that we need at any given moment. It's amazing. Our soul is always moving us in the direction we need to go for our greatest development. And our intuition is one way that that can happen. It's kind of like our soul communicating to us and saying, "Go this way." Or, "Do this. Don't do that."
At the same time, one of the things about intuition is that because it's trying to help us develop, it often takes us to places that are somewhat unfamiliar or, at least, they are not the places we might have consciously chosen to go. As a consequence, there's often a feeling of being a bit on the edge. Learning to follow intuition is, in one way, about learning to follow the life force as it moves through you. But, it doesn't always proceed in a linear way. It is not like step one, step two, step three, step four, all in a row. Rather, it's more like, take this step. Okay, now step over here. In fact, we might even step backward. And then we'll step here and then we'll go here . . . as you follow, you begin to dance. It's the dance of life.
One of the sure ways to know if you're following your intuition is that you feel more alive. You may feel a little scared, or anxious, or excited, or whatever, but one thing for sure is that there's an aliveness to it. When we don't do what's really true and right for us, we lose a certain amount of life force at that moment. We actually get depressed or a little stuck feeling. More dead than alive. And we can learn from noticing when we feel more alive and when we don't.
Listening to your intuition is one thing, actually acting on it is a whole other matter. There are many people get intuitive messages, but don't have the courage to do anything about what they hear. What I advise is, start with the small things. Don't go out tomorrow and quit your job because you think maybe your intuition is telling you to do that. Or any other major, dramatic thing. Start with the seemingly little decisions we make every day. Like, "Where shall I have lunch?" Or "Should I call my friend?" If someone invites you to an occasion, instead of automatically going, "Yes" or "No," stop. Take a moment. Breathe. Check in. Does this feel right for me?
One of the most important questions in all of this is: "Well, how do I know what's my intuition and what's just all those other feelings and thoughts going on inside of me?" The simple answer to that is you can, with some practice, learn to distinguish that intuition has a different feeling than any of the other feelings, and thoughts, or voices that come to you. Intuition is always with us and is always correct, but we don't always know how to hear it, or we don't always know how to interpret it. Sometimes we've got other stuff going on and, that messes us up. Also, we go through cycles with it.
Interestingly, the question of distinction actually takes us into a whole other realm of understanding, and I talk about this a bit in the book. We have many different voices inside of us. Many different selves. It's like having a whole lot of people living in there.
So you've got one saying, "There's this thing that I want to do." And you have another one going, "Are you crazy? You gonna give up the paycheck?" You know, "That's stupid." Well, they're both valid. So, what to do? And where is your intuition in all of this? One way to figure it all out is to take some different colored pens, and to use a different color to express each of the voices. Like the one that wants to quit the job and do something else. Fine. Write out everything that that one wants. Then, take another color pen and write out everything that the naysayer thinks. If there are more than two voices, use a different color for every one, but express them all. You can do this in a spoken form with a facilitator, too. You need to hear what the different voices are saying, and to accept that they all have validity. There's not a right one and a wrong one--there's right in all of them. It means you have to learn how to hold on to the process and not necessarily make an instant decision. You simply want to be with it instead. But eventually something good will emerge. Most often, it will come from your most intuitive place. And it will clearly tell you what your next step should be.
For more information about Shakti Gawain, consult her web site: www.shaktigawain.com.
