In times of turmoil, uncertainty, and massive change, people naturally seek guidance and direction. The sources of guidance and direction you find can be variable, to put it mildly, and there are a lot of voices that are quick to tell you what you should think and how you should live, messages that more often impose someone else’s opinion instead of offering you the clarity of your own vision.
It is in times of transition that our original source of inner knowing, our intuition, becomes our true compass for navigating life. Many of our ancestors were aware of this, and intentionally cultivated this inner knowing and a relational sense of the unseen to ensure survival as well as to flourish in an ever-changing world.
To engage your intuition, sometimes also called psychic or “psi” ability, as a reliable source of guidance, it usually has to be reclaimed from the shadowy sidelines of cultural and personal awareness to become a living, dynamic part of our everyday experience.
Reclaiming from the Overculture
The word “overculture” here means the dominant cultural paradigm that largely determines what is considered “normal” and the ways those norms are enforced. In general, Western culture (as lacking in nuance as that phrase can be) has siphoned intuitive ways of knowing into two conceptual boxes:
- Unreliable, illogical, superstitious, and pathological
- Life and productivity hacks, cheat codes to wealth and romance, substitutes for life skills, and for controlling the future
As you can see, both of these angles—even briefly detailed—range from not very satisfying to deeply problematic. A whole book could be written on these attitudes alone, but ultimately they serve one thing: to enforce distance between you and your intuitive perception.
Traditionally, this distance was created by fear: fear of the devil, of being ostracized, of losing your grip on reality, or just being seen in a marginalized way. Rooted in colonial frameworks that split spirit from matter, self from world, this fear attempted to shut down our cultural access to truly ancestral ways of knowing. The shut down was also enforced through stereotype and discrimination.
Today, intuition, psychic ability, empathic ability, tarot cards, astrology, and a whole plethora of esoteric practices are on display in the zeitgeist. So, it might seem like the old fears are gone or simply not as powerful. But this saturation of commodified spirituality can also serve the same purpose of holding your own intuitive awareness at bay.
What has become known as the “spiritual marketplace,” the wellness industry, and the self-help industry, can at times serve to block your own sense of inner knowing.
We’ve all experienced times of uncertainty and confusion and found ourselves grasping for the next psycho-spiritual book title, the next masterclass, the next free webinar, the latest “5-step process” to “real transformation,” only to realize that we’re simply trying to feel safe. We want to trust ourselves and our own spiritual discernment. While some of these sources can have real value, many of them are basically “consciousness candy” that leave us hungry for more. Not in a good way.
What we truly need is often not another process or product. We need to be reminded of what already belongs to us.
Intuition is not a fantasy, a product for purchase, a pseudo-spiritual trick, or a pathology. Intuition is your birthright.
Reclaiming the Soma
Intuition is commonly considered a mental capacity, as the word “psychic” usually translates to “of the mind” and even the phrase “inner knowing” implies the mind as the knower.
While the mind is certainly part of intuitive ways of knowing, the mind is not the only knower.
With intuitive perception, it mostly serves as the part that decides a focus (such as a question or goal you want insight on and guidance for) and allows for usually unconscious information to become more conscious. The vast majority of that unconscious information, including spiritual information, comes through the senses and the body.
Our senses take in billions of bits of sensory data every second, but only a very small fraction of that data makes it to conscious awareness. In fact, there is an idea that the brain, normally considered the primary locus of consciousness if not the producer of consciousness. It could be, rather, an inhibitor of consciousness, reducing all the data you could be aware of down into a version of reality you can navigate in a somewhat linear way. It’s very useful for organizing tasks and being somewhere on time, but it can also leave out profound insights that could be very useful if you only knew how to embody them in your daily life.
The body is both ancient and cosmic in very literal ways with deep spiritual implications. Most of the atoms in your body, of which there are more than there are stars in the observable universe, were forged in the bellies of dying stars aeons ago. We are stardust and water walking, dreaming, and intrinsically connected to the sprawling life of the universe. Our ancestors, lineages of embodied and sensate starlight, weave this connection through time to the beginning of all things. Intuition is a re-membering of these connections in ways that are both personally meaningful and collectively transformative. Deeper exploration into this living web of relationality can be found in our Animism and Earth Reconnection course as well as the course for which we’re most known, Ancestral Lineage Healing.
You embody ancient legacies of wisdom and connection that guide you in unseen ways.
Reclaiming Power
If knowledge is power then intuitive knowing is an extra dimension of power. Power can be seen as the ability to choose, and to act on those choices. In many ways, the overculture, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc. are designed to limit power in order to hoard it for the privileged few. Power is not an object, however, and much of that hoarding is an illusion, albeit an extremely impactful one, that keeps us from seeing and acting in ways that are true expressions of our inner knowing. In order to move forward with disenfranchising people, devastating ecosystems, eroding social care, and fueling prejudice, it’s necessary for most people to see, feel, and know much less than they would otherwise be capable of.
If power is the ability to choose, intuitive perception illuminates choices that are usually unseen, or considered impossible. These are choices that can be made when you’re in communication with your ancestors and guides, when you see the threads of fate weaving into the future, when you deliver a healing message or a profound insight that changes the course of someone’s life. From an intuitive point of view, all time is now and all space is here. With that in mind, we can start to see and accept how powerful we really are when we truly step into our place in the greater relational field, despite the forces that would seek to keep us from that power.
An important choice with intuitive perception and the greater relational field is choosing to cultivate strong, healthy boundaries that allow you to be a unique self in a sea of blended oneness. I’ve worked with a number of people who felt overwhelmed by their intuitive capacity, absorbing the emotional and psychic content of the people around them and, on a larger scale, world events. This level of chronic blending is usually debilitating to some degree, leading to exhaustion and the inability to direct energy toward personal goals that are meaningful. Contrary to what you might think, having a strong sense of self, fully occupying your personal space, and a clear focus on your values and goals makes you even more intuitive, not less, because you know what is yours and what is not. Boundaries are less about creating walls to keep others out and much more about being in integrity with yourself. It is also an essential part of turning intuitive ability into intuitive skill, where you can manage your perceptions and direct them on purpose.
Reclaim Your Intuition
Join me and my co-teacher, Dr. Amber McZeal, for a six-week journey of reclamation that moves through personal experiences, scientific exploration, and cross-cultural contexts to offer a well-rounded view of intuition as a natural birthright that consciously connects you to the inner life of the universe, and your own guidance on your path of destiny. We begin October 27th. https://ancestralmedicine.org/online-course/reclaiming-intuition/
