With you as my therapist I finally learned to trust another human being. You helped me discover faith in the world and in myself. I didn’t think that was going to be possible. You have been a real gift in my life.
-- J.C.
Preparing for Intuition: Opening Channels Through Dreams and Synchronicities Part 1: The Listening Heart
“Intuition is a leap toward wholeness from fragmentation.”
Anodea Judith
Welcome dreamers!
Although it may seem counter-intuitive to speak of “preparing” for intuition, we actually can enhance our intuitive abilities. A good intuitive is someone who pays close attention to their inner voices and visions and to their outer surroundings. After we tune in and set our intentions, we need to ask the right questions, and then to listen up and watch out for the answers. This second step is often missed once the question is asked!
We can learn how to listen from the inside and from the outside: to ask, to pay attention to what we are asking for and also to what we are getting in response to our questions. An intuitive will often say something like, “I’m getting something here” as they feel information coming into their awareness, or “I’m sensing that …” One of my therapeutic clients calls these moments “downloads,” and will ask me, “Are you getting a download now?”
Although it may seem almost “automatic,” getting a good intuitive hit is the accumulation of years of different kinds of work and preparation in dreamwork, meditation, mindfulness practices, book learning, and body-based experiences.
Cultivating intuition
Great Teachers tell us that whatever we are on the lookout for, we will be more likely to see. So by purposefully sending out a message to the universe that we are open and available to receive this form of knowledge, we increase the likelihood that we will. That is what the word “Kabbalah” means: received knowledge, from the root l’kabel, to receive.
Our first step towards accessing our intuition is our willingness to be open to receiving knowledge from uncanny sources. In the still of the night, when much of the noise of the world is hushed, we are often better able to hear that “still small voice” that Elijah heard, if, as we wake from our own dream states, we embrace rather than dismiss our dream messages. There is no dream too small, no fragment too meaningless, that we aren’t able to find some gold within.
To increase our access to intuition or intuitive knowledge, we can utilize resources available in both our waking and sleeping dreams. What seem to be accidental coincidences, also known as synchronicities, may be signals from the universe that we have found that for which we had been seeking, or; that something is seeking us. There are patterns in the universe if we are paying attention. Anodea Judith states that intuition is the unconscious recognition of patterns.
Our ancestors were very clear that this was a valid form of acquiring information. We are starting to do a little better at paying attention to this form of paying attention. Even in our pop culture, Jennifer Laurence, in the movie “Silver Lining Playbook” repeatedly said to her boyfriend “If I’m reading the signs right, you should be …”. And she won an Academy Award for it. (It was good enough that I didn’t even mind seeing it twice in as many weeks, once with my husband, and once with my teenage daughter).
Satprem, in his book Sri Aurobido, or the Adventure of Consciousness, described intuition as the flash of a match in the darkness. Judith expands on this, saying that for a brief moment, the whole room comes to light. We can suddenly see the furniture, the wallpaper, the people in the room, and maybe even what’s going on outside the window. And then it is gone. The match burns out. Do we remember what we have seen?
Solomon receives his portion of Wisdom and earns his right to be known as “Solomon the Wise” by hearing God ask him in a dream what he most desires to receive. He responds to that question by replying “a Lev Shomea” — “a Listening Heart”. What a nice definition of the ability to receive wisdom from many sources — to have a Listening Heart. Perhaps that is the core of the intuitive process: to have a listening mind, a listening body, and a listening heart. Then we too may receive an additional portion of wisdom.
[Speaking of Biblical dream stories, Joseph was quite the dreamer too]
Read on: Part 2 of Preparing for Intuition: Priming the Pump: Preparing the Way for Intuitive “Downloads” Then and Now
Sweet dreams,
Linda Yael
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness the most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?… Your playing small does not serve the world…As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Williamson