The earliest episode of intuition that I can recall was when I was one month short of my 5th birthday while living on the family dairy farm just outside of Unity, Wisc., on October 19, 1966. It was the night before my dad went out to bring the cows back into the barn so they could be milked. He hadn’t come home. The family became worried.
My mom, her friend Bertha and I went out to find him. My brother stayed at home, which was odd to me, since I was just a kid. I didn’t argue with them about it, as I was prone to do at the time, as I could feel the heaviness in the air around us and their emotional distress in response to it.
Bertha and Mom sandwiched me between them as we walked into the fields of dried corn stalks. To my surprise they kept stepping off in the wrong directions, either too far to the left or the right. I kept directing them in what direction to walk. I could feel a pull that led me. The pull began after I asked myself where my father’s body was located.
We came to the place where the large rear tractor wheel was in the air above the dried-out corn. The tractor had tipped over. Bertha held me back as my Mom went to confirm what we already knew. Her tears confirmed it when she walked back to us. We saved hours of wandering around the 180-acre farm and found my dad’s body using my intuition. At the time it was just my sense of things. It was my intuition.
I’d often wondered what was different about me.
My theory is that those who don’t “use their intuition” have inadvertently directed their subconscious to exclude their intuitive impressions and to not send them to their direct conscious awareness, with few exceptions.
When we are awake, attentive and aware, we take in sensory information every moment as it is presented to our conscious awareness from our surroundings, and other places, through our subconscious mind, which filters what our conscious awareness can perceive and accept in any one moment.
When we focus with our conscious awareness, our subconscious sends us the information we seek. But it also excludes information we’ve rejected, even if it’s beneficial — with a few exceptions. Within those exceptions is where we can work to change the blinders we wear and use our intuition.
Those blinders are mostly beliefs that we’ve accepted as true. They act to limit our full sensory recall abilities. “Developing” intuition is the process of calling those beliefs into question (away from answer/judgment/certainty) and looking for the cues of intuition anew. Meditation is a powerful tool, because it develops a more conscious relationship with the subconscious.
One area where intuition naturally slips through this guard to the conscious mind is in premonitions about a perceived threat to ourselves, to our loved ones, or community/nation. I am not recommending that we put anyone in peril! But memory can be used as a tool here. We’ve all felt threatened from time to time. Public speaking, learning a new skill, and going to a new school or a new job can all give us intuitive hits on the conscious level. If you muse over your memories of such incidents, you’re likely to find some sense of things that you don’t normally pay attention to. In the memory you may have ignored/been confused by an intuitive sense that came to you. Meditating on them can help you lower those blinders.
The more you respond affirmatively to your intuitive impressions, the more your subconscious will let those senses come through to the conscious self.
