Listening To Intuition

Highly Sensitive People (empaths) are nothing if they're not listeners.  We listen to everything and sometimes wish we didn't.  People in general have intuition.  People in general don't seem to listen to their intuition enough.  Dr. Judith Orloff has an article with a test on how much we listen to our intuition (see Dr. Orloff's article).  Do you listen to your intuition?  We get really busy and focused in our daily lives.  It's common for everyone to get tunnel vision and we loose sight of what is going on around us.  When we do that, things may happen that can affect us without us realizing it.  So it's helpful to stop look and listen to intuition.  What I want to do is highlight some things that may prevent us from listening to our intuition.  Through experience, I found out that trusting intuition does not come easy,  interpreting intuition can be hard, and wishful thinking is a hindrance.

In our society we are told not to listen to feelings, hunches, and imaginations.  Well, not in so many words, but over time and the fact that hard cold facts is what gets listened to rather than preference.  So, it's not surprising that we don't trust when thoughts come to us out of the blue and give us information that seemingly has no evidence.   Our overgrown analytical minds want proof.  The reasoning goes nuts without logical steps.  So we blow the information off.  That information is our intuition telling us something.  We must learn to trust it.  It took me some time to understand that my intuition was giving me good information.  Sometimes even now, my mind wants to say that it's just all my imagination.  That's how strong my analytical brain is.  I have strong reasoning abilities and it often clashes with my intuition.  Telling yourself that there could be something to this information and testing the information is one way to start trusting it.

Interpreting the information gleaned from intuition can be hard to do.  Interpretation is a function of the analytical brain.  To interpret intuition, we need to have a "common frame of reference".  Yeah sure, I took that one from Spock in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (see quote).  You do have to have a common frame of reference to have practical information.  I see most of the common reference is learned in life as we associate feelings with situations.  Intuition comes in the form of emotion, and emotion is a language in and of itself.  Some things don't translate.  Some things are hard to put in words.  Some things you can only describe.  Some things are a driving force for action.  I went to a balloon race last weekend, and there was a large crowd with a festival.  There were lots of vendors of food and drink.  There were even some student dancers.  I picked up on the overall intuitive emotion int the area and my mouth relaxed and the ends of my mouth were edging upward.  That told me people were relaxed and were enjoying themselves overall.  Sometimes intuition comes like that.  I interpreted that one based on how I reacted to the emotion.  It's quite an art to interpret intuition. 

Wishful thinking is an enemy to intuition.  It will try to override the intuition information.  What I mean is that if you want something bad enough you may try to wish it into existence.  It's important to distinguish between what you want and what your observing.  I use this word observing in the sense of picking up information from intuition.  I have a hard head, as my wife would say.  That means my will is a strong one.  I blame genetics for that (thank you parents).  So, what I have to do is to get into a meditative state and listen for the intuition.  Sometimes, this takes a while.  I don't think it's because the intuition doesn't come to me.  I think it's there all the time.  It just takes a while to quiet down my analytical hard head.  By the way what I call analytical mind Dr. Orloff calls linear mind.  I use that word because I understand that the brain is very very complex, more than science understands.  So I don't think the work linear quite describes it.  Wishful thinking is a function of the analytical mind and it's made when we establish an intent (wish, desire, manifestation, prayer) we made earlier.

So, trusting intuition, interpreting it, and handling wishful thinking can help you listen to intuition.  As you listen, you come to realize that everything changes.  Then the more they change, the more they stay the same.  Sure, it's a paradox.  I think life itself is a paradox as well, but don't ask me to explain it.  The more you listen, the more you will change, and the more you become yourself  and you shed the facades you have in life.

Guardian Angels From Intention

This always used to be something of a mystery.  As a child I was told about guardian angels and how every child has one.  Like most things I was told I believed it.  I learned quickly that not everyone believes in angels so I kept mine to myself.  In fact I named mine.  As I grew older I didn't dismiss my guardian angel.  There were times in my youth when I would rely on my guardian angel to protect me.  Apart from spirit beings, guardian angels are extensions of ourselves.  What I mean is that we can create them out of intent.  If this idea is new to you, you may find it hard to believe.  I believe that brains affect brains in a semi direct way.  It may be via brain waves, or in non-corporeal ways.  I'm not an expert on the details of how it works, but I do know it works.  I also know that the brain can make automation processes just like a computer can.  These processes in the brain are invoked by using intent.  Since a brain is so much more powerful than any computer, it can create better stuff than computers can.  People have imagined worlds and characters and stories and have written them down as literature.  It's not hard to understand that the brain can create automated beings and these beings can do tasks.  In the past you can read about people encountering various spirit entities to include ghosts, familiars, the dead, angels, demons, and the like.  In modern times we have people who have multiple personalities and even children have imaginary friends.  These are examples of possible beings created by intent.  Now I'm not saying that these ghosts, familiars, and the like don't exist apart from us.  I just saying that any of these our mind can create so we interact with them.  In short the beings we create with intent are an extension of ourselves.  Mine is a guardian angel.  There are some thing I have him do.  I ask him questions, give him active tasks, and give him passive tasks.

The good thing about having a guardian angel to ask questions is that he's always there.  I can ask him anything and he'll give me an honest answer.  The problem with asking the question is anticipating the answer.  I have to not anticipate in order to get a good answer.  Usually I just ask questions about myself and what or how I'm doing.  Yes and no questions are the usual types asked.  Questions requiring longer answers take a little more time.  Often once I ask a question and get an answer then a few hours later I will ask the question again and see if I get the same answer.  Does this sound crazy?  I know the angel is just an extension of me.  I don't tell people about him.  Actually, this is the first time ever I'm writing about him.  I think crazy is when you act crazy in front of people.  This is a private activity I'm describing.

Sometimes I will give the guardian angel an active task.  Once I gave him the task of bringing in students for my adult ed class.  He did a good job because all of the sudden I got an influx of students.  I will also use him to keep certain people away who I deem dangerous to me.  He has been very good with this task over the years.  Nothing really bad has happened to me.  I do think though its important to bring the angel back once the task requested is done.  That way I don't get drained, or set myself up for a counter strike by someone else.  We do live in a world with many people, and people can crate their own task doing being out of intent.  Since I'm choosing to do good not evil, I don't use the angel for retribution on anybody.

My guardian angel is a protector.  So I've given him the task of looking big strong and intimidating so that other people would not tend to do bad to me.  This is a passive task.  I've talked to many people over the years and have come to realize that people suffer needlessly quite often.  I'm just talking about people having accidents or getting into fights, or doing stuff that's so preventable.  If you have a protector guardian angel most of that stuff can be avoided in the first place.  You can say invoking a guardian angel results in luck.

These are the thing I do with my guardian angel: I ask him questions, give him active tasks, and give him passive tasks.  You could dismiss this as a childish thing to do.  Yet I see in my life that it has had some positive results.  When you read in the news how people die in accidents, or kill someone, or destroy someone's property out of situations that are sometimes comical but most of the times are sad, then you should wonder how to avoid such situations.  I say keeping a protective guardian angel is a decent way to do it.

Letting Go

There are an innumerable amount of incidents that occur just because someone is unwilling to let go.  Spouses argue and fight, parents and children clash, even professionals fight with the bosses or piers when they have to give up control on something they've been working on for a while.  Empaths are not immune to this.  I had a recent episode and I learned a couple of things how to deal with it.  Though I still have to prove my techniques, I have uses two and things are going well so far.  I want to share with you what these techniques are and how they work together.

The first one is what I term returning intention.  In my case, I took responsibility for someone for the longest time and effectively mentored them.  Now they are doing well, but I still see mistakes and areas where they could do much better.  I became critical and it came out in the form of a spat.  So what's happening is that my intention (or manifestation) on this person has been there for so long, I was still acting on it when it was unnecessary.  So I returned the intention to myself, effectively recalling it so it has no more action.  After doing this I instantly felt better about the matter.

The second technique was emotion flowing.  After having a spat with someone, you may feel insecure about being around them.  Since being around a friend should be a safe environment, emotion flowing should be appropriate.  This is where your near the person and let their emotions or energies flow through you without you grabbing hold of them.  Instead you just let them flow in and out of you.  This is a 'hands off' approach.  At the same time you get used to their emotions and energies and over time become comfortable with them. 

Returning intention and emotion flowing allows you to let go.  One relieves you of the responsibility, and the other helps mend and transform the relationship to something more positive.  At the same time the other person will feel more free around you.  Being empowered and having freedom are great gifts in life.

Practicing returning intention and emotion flowing help you to let go of you matured proteges.  Richard Bach wrote "If you love someone, set them free.  If they come back they're yours;  if they don't they never were."  Letting go is one of the great lessons in life.  The more willing we are to let go, the less arguments and incidents we will have.