Alongside the thrill of learning how to tap into a flow of images, sounds, sensations, and loving support, a gnawing question loomed at the edges.
“How do I know I’m not just making this up?”
The thought emerged again, and again, as I began listening to my inner voice. It’s probably one of the most common concerns among my students and clients as well.
And it’s an important question, because not everything we see, hear, feel, or know in our inner world is factual. In order to develop such discernment we must complicate this question even further and ask: what is the difference between our inner voice, gut reaction, instinct, patterns of thinking, and intuition?
How do we know if our intuition is a universal truth, or just for us?
When we take action based on intuition, and things don’t work out as planned, what do we do next?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between instinct and intuition. The best definition I’ve come up with is that instinct is the response to our world that emerges from a combination of past experiences and temperament. There’s an element of habit, patterns, what has worked or not worked, and some emotional tone involved too. Instinct points us towards our perception of safety.
Intuition is the ability to receive information beyond the physical, to connect with the deepest and most evolved expression of ourselves, and to connect with wisdom from something/someone greater than ourselves. Intuition is a skill, because it requires us to be in constant conversation between our conscious and unconscious patterns, which tend to seek validation of their instinctual response. In other words, we need to know the difference between true intuition and representations of what we’re already thinking and feeling.
It’s not as hard as it sounds, but it does take a lot of practice.
A trend that I find troubling in some predominant approaches to intuitive work is that it can be a bit self-centered. It’s not wrong to use intuition for personal development— that’s one of the most valuable results of practice — but if we stop there we miss the full expression of healing that comes from being intimately connected to all that surrounds us.
The personal development part happens in the space of learning discernment and understanding our own mind. Whereas the intuitive process is a venue for spiritual development that benefits more than ourselves as individuals.
Not everything is about us. We are just one person, each with our life path, goals, interests, past histories and karmic entanglements. And every other person has their own path and experience. Sometimes bad things happen and it doesn’t really mean anything: wrong place, wrong time.
They say that all experiences offer lessons, but the lesson isn’t always for us.
More murky, sometimes (often?) it’s a combination of living in a world of 8 billion people with free will and our own personal “healing journey.”
Intuition can help us see in the dark, to make decisions with limited information, and to grow emotionally and spiritually by virtue of an additional sense that is pointed toward the future.
But intuition also challenges us. It often leads us directly towards our fears— the ones that are holding us back. Intuition sometimes pushes us towards trying again when past experience tells us to give up.
This creates some friction as it relates to anxiety. Intuition that points to change, and anxiety that reflects our fears, can feel very similar. Sometimes they are cooccurring. However intuition never “yells at us.” Our intuition, or our Guides, may be forceful but they do not diminish. An inner voice that is mean or harsh is not intuition. In this way, intuition helps us understand the true meaning of “tough love,” the kind that tells you the truth but doesn’t punish you if you don’t listen.
Most of us have been habituated to discount our intuition in favor of cognition. For those who have experienced abuse, that inner knowing sometimes becomes distorted and distressing. It may be too painful to know, and ultimately easier to see yourself as the origin of your difficulties. Or our intuition can be warped into narratives that confuse us: our coping mechanisms can mirror intuition, leading us away from growth that may be also be destabilizing. Reclaiming intuition is a complex process of untangling beliefs and experience, from the senses that allow us to perceive what is subtle or not easily seen.
Maybe intuition is actually the opposite of a trauma response, because rather than seeking to predict or secure safety, true intuitive awareness guides us back to ourselves and reminds us that we are not in control of anything beyond our own actions. Our human minds are well-suited to analyzing facts and data, but in the absence of clear information we may need to look inward to discover what is the next right step. Knowing that it may still be incorrect, but it was the best choice available. There a tremendous sense of freedom in knowing that even though the future is unknown, you can always ground yourself and decide the next best action.
But it’s still our nature to try to predict the future, which makes it tempting to evaluate whether we can trust our intuition based on the track record of whether we are 100% accurate.
This fact-checking process can be a hindrance to learning to trust what you feel. We are not the center of our world, and it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen. The future is always changing.
Not everything around us is a sign, and not all events are about our personal growth.
And yet, we can find signs that can be used for our personal growth anywhere. Take for example, seeing a beautiful bird and experiencing its presence as an answer to a question. Did the bird exist and shape their day to present you with this insight? Perhaps (probably) not. But I would say that your perception of the world around you can be a navigational tool that brings you back to your inner knowing.
Inner knowing is most accurate when it’s connected to an embodied idea of being made of the same vital stuff as everyone and everything around you. If your sense of self is based on being more than this unique life you’re living, then the information that flows through is rooted in something closer to universal knowledge. Even so, it is discernment that gives us the wisdom to determine how intuitions can be best interpreted and applied.
There’s no formula to find these answers within ourselves, but I believe a common foundation is that when we know how to feel our bodies, to recognize the habitual patterns of the mind and learn how to let thoughts go, to hone our physical senses and perceive our physical environment more accurately, and remember the true Self that isn’t our personality and experiences, we have an reference point to help us tell the difference between self and other.
Most of us have dominant psychic senses and others which are less developed. We all have the same senses but some are naturally more active, some of us have our volume turned up by default, and some of us must choose to tune in.
Any sense becomes more acute and accurate when we practice paying attention. When I was in art school and taking life drawing classes, one of the perennial tasks was to distinguish between how we think things look and how they actually look. When drawing you need to really look, to pay attention to the details and resist the urge to conflate them with your memories of seeing. In this way, anyone can learn how to draw accurately with practice. Once you learn this skill, it changes the way you see your world in the day to day. You develop a habit of seeing more clearly.
Another example is hearing. When I first began bird watching an early suggestion was to listen for the sounds of birds first, and then train your eyes in the direction of the sound.
I was amazed at how quickly I began to notice all the subtle sounds in the woods, even though I live in Brooklyn and my woods frequently have planes flying overhead and sirens in the distance. I started to notice that my three-dimensional sense of hearing was improving rapidly, and sure enough I started seeing loads of birds on every walk. But neither sound nor sight were really enough on their own, they needed to be used in tandem.
Furthermore, I needed to calm my body, learn how to walk very softly, and slowly, and be a more harmonious part of the environment.
You learn how to wait, patiently, for a long time. Paying very close attention. Staying relaxed, grounded, and aware.
This is how we develop intuitive abilities. We focus on honing the senses one at a time, and then learn to weave them together. We develop trust and learn to enjoy the process. We remember that our inner senses and outer senses are related, and we develop the discernment to know the difference between them.
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Tuning In, my intuitive development course, is getting a reboot. It starts the same as the previous offerings, one week focusing on each psychic sense, and continues for two more weeks— delving into the process of weaving the intuitive senses together and practicing the art of channeling. We begin with learning and home practice, and each class will have a guided experiential component to develop the senses. In the last three sessions I will be offering live channeling/intuitive feedback for each person in the group. For this reason the group is limited in size to allow individual attention. You’re welcome to join by recording if that works better for your schedule (options will be offered for the live feedback portion).
Inward Vision 