Woman Heal Thyself
By Jeanne Elizabeth Blum
Tuttle Publishing, 1995
Chapter 28, Revised, 2007
Feminine intuition is something for which women are famous—knowing or seeing without apparent effort. Clairvoyant or clairaudient women were burned at the stake millennia ago, yet now such gifts are considered a bit more acceptable in modern times. We all get that hunch, the gut feeling that encourages us to follow an instinct.
If you're in business, maybe you've had to deal with a contract that didn't feel right at first read, and then you identified potentially misleading clauses to your detriment. If you're a mother, your radar has probably prompted you to make a sudden dash for the bathroom, where your toddler hovers on the edge of the sink, about to reach for the medicine cabinet. This is your intuition at work.
How does this gut-level knowledge help you in everyday life? What if you find yourself with a very strong feeling that your partner is being unfaithful and the uneasiness is really beginning to cause havoc, gnawing at your gut to be honoured and listened to? Look at that sensation. Where is the feeling in your body? Is the uncomfortable awareness right in the center of your gut, your navel area? Is it near your heart? These are the areas where your intuitive perception physically registers its "knowing" as a tangible feeling. In meditation, this area is often called your "centre," a place to focus one's attention.
Be very careful to listen to such feelings and signals, and acknowledge them. To simply push them aside as suspicious, paranoid thinking will be of no help to you. That could be the case, yet never automatically jump to this conclusion. Treat the combined feeling and physical "symptoms" of the situation as an intuitive learning experience. Take note of all the intuitive hits that you ignore: bring your umbrella—and you don't, later to be soaked in a Noah's ark type deluge.
Begin to trust your gut feelings. Cultivate your intuition. Look inward to self-understanding and become your own best friend. Listen to the stillness within you, build up your inner knowing, and let it evolve into a powerful resource that you can rely on in difficult moments. Each time you acknowledge your intuition, you strengthen it, yet each time you ignore it, it weakens, almost as if you have hurt its feelings and it retreats in sadness and loneliness: really, all our intuition wants to do, is serve us.
In time, if observed and acknowledged, it will become a sturdy ally. Should you make that investment? Which school should your child attend? Vacation this month or next? What vanity license plates do you notice while driving, delivering messages direct from the Divine in their names? Listen for the answer in your gut.
Are you in a bad relationship? If so, what are you learning from it, what is it teaching you? Just how badly were you treated as a child and how much continued emotional or physical abuse will you endure as an adult? Abuse that is unchecked will never stop! Do you even recognize it as abuse? Have you re-created your childhood in your relationship? Are you ready to learn about your own patterns and how to change them?
If you are in an abusive relationship it may be because you were programmed, from childhood, to see abuse as normal. By being in another abusive situation, you have a chance to free yourself from this type of patterning for all time. Work on your own core issues without self-judgment. When you judge yourself, the inner beating up you give yourself causes enormous stress, and falls into the realm of "impure thoughts" in Oriental Medicine, taxing your internal organs to process and rid these thoughts from the body. The crazy making behaviour of abuse will never allow your mind to be at peace so that your intuition—that little voice within that gives you hunches—can function to peak perfection!
How do you begin to cultivate your intuition? Firstly by listening to it when it sends you messages. And by listening, your intuition will guide you with advice on your relationship, or your work—whatever—it will silently teach you what you need to do, moment by moment even.
Have you ever been about to drive off somewhere, perhaps for an appointment, and for no logical reason felt that you had to go back into the house for something? You know it will make you late, yet you go in anyway. You enter, the telephone rings, you talk with a friend, which delays you by five or ten minutes, then return to the car, drive off down the highway and see a tragic car accident that you would have been part of, had you not gone back into the house.
That was your intuition delaying you by those five or ten minutes, because the intuition has a direct link to the Divine all knowing Creator, that's why a well developed intuitive gift is so accurate, it's straight from the horse's mouth! This is the part of us that can plug into the future, ten minutes ahead in time, a week, a month, or years—the stuff of truly gifted clairvoyants. When I was married to my first husband we had a cruise business, and my ability to look ahead into the week and see the weather, allowed us to plan maintenance on the yacht's engine on rainy days, and take no reservations in advance for cruises that day: a mundane use of a gift.
Now, think back, expand your mind backwards, drift to the right of time, do you remember how that feeling registered, when you got the urge to return inside the house? Was it a sense of calm that is hard to describe, yet different from the peace of looking out onto a beautiful sunset? Or was it a more urgent pull, like that for a forgotten pot still cooking on the stove? Where was that feeling located? In the area near your navel? Between your navel and your heart? The centre of your body? Did your stomach go into a knot? Did you feel slightly queasy or ill? Did the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, or perhaps your arms, or did you get little tingles up your legs? Did you see a quick video-like picture in your mind (eidetic imagery)? These are all ways intuition manifests physically.
What organs, as we understand them in Oriental Medicine—having more than just their physical function yet also an emotional and mental job as well—do you think are involved in the intuitive function? Look to Liver (which houses the Soul), Kidney (which registers fear yet energetically feeds the brain through Kidney flow), and Heart (where Spirit energy dwells). These are all Yin organs, feminine organs dealing with emotional issues that can cloud or clear the mind. During an intuitive episode the mind actually expands and reaches out through and beyond time with an ease that is so smooth it is almost hard to comprehend such sublime grace. Each one of these organs is associated with a colour: the Liver green, the Kidney black and the Heart red. Wear these colours daily if you wish to develop your intuition, as colour therapy is an integral part of the ancient teachings of Oriental Medicine.
When a fast thought, a realization, comes into your mind, and is accompanied by one or more of these feelings, recognize it as your intuition. If you have to think about it, that's your limited rational mind. The conscious rational or irrational mind on a bad day, and negative emotions—fear, paranoia, regret, resentment, jealousy or hatred—are the biggest negaters of intuition.
By now you should have figured out that intuition, gut hunches, flying by the seat of your pants, clairvoyance, and psychic knowing are all one and the same. Or are they? Remember that there is a fine line between intuitive caution, and fear and paranoia. If you are continually wrong with your hunches, then you really must honestly address your own fears and the places to which your mind is taking you.
It's also imperative that you trust your own hunches instead of someone else's. There are many people who are addicted to their psychic advisors—who are rarely correct—and this bothers me; both the addiction and the continued fraudulent advice.
Sometimes being intuitive is hard, especially when information offered is refused and unheard, and silence is often the only apposite answer. As Einstein understood it, through his theory of relativity, somewhere in time, the Battle of 1066 in England has yet to be won! After a while, "I-told-you-so" loses its gusto. And sometimes when you know that saying what you have seen must be acted upon to avert disaster, yet not said, there are ways of doing just that.
Have you ever had a dream that felt like precognition, seeing the future? We've all had the experience of déj'a vu—of remembering an experience from before while we're in the experience. The "before" is quite often a dream you've had, and have forgotten. One such dream that came to me did so on Christmas Eve when I was a teenager. My family had gone to Connecticut to spend Christmas with my aunt.
Violent nausea awoke me the next day, one of the psychic body reactions I get, and I dreamed that the house caught fire and we were all severely burned or killed; and I instinctively knew it was going to happen Christmas morning, that morning. There had been times in my childhood when my parents were not interested in listening to me and my dreams, like a bad weather report, they were overwhelmingly accurate. I knew this would be one of them. It is unlikely that, "Good morning everyone, Merry Christmas, let's get out of the house because it's going to go up in flames!" would have been well received. What to do became an instant obsession. We had all been awake for about half an hour, my mother and aunt were busying themselves in the kitchen preparing the turkey when the electricity went off. My nausea—my "gut" feeling—became worse. The electricity would somehow be connected with the fire.
Desperately I knew I had to get everyone out of the house. So I became an instant demanding brat, I insisted on going out for breakfast—I was hungry, I whined, I wanted food; no I would not wait until the electricity came back on, I wanted food now.
This behaviour was so uncharacteristic of my quiet, patient nature that within fifteen minutes everyone was dressed and bundled for a snow bound outing. We had a great Christmas brunch and drove back home about three hours later. As my aunt opened the front door, we were enveloped in thick black smoke billowing out. My father gave me one of those "Ah-ha!" looks that said, "You knew, didn't you?"
The electrical supply for the entire three hundred condominium village malfunctioned and came in as a power surge through my aunt's heating and electrical system. It came down the kitchen stove exhaust extractor and was so intense that it cooked the thawed turkey sitting on the kitchen table, six feet away. My mother and aunt would also have been nuked. It came up the heating duct next to my guest rollaway bed in the den, which was fried to an unrecognisable crisp. Electric overload blasted out of the power outlet in the guest bathroom where my dad would have been standing, doing his morning shaving ritual and it melted half the shower partition, seven feet away.
• • •
So, how do you develop and strengthen your intuition? The best way is through meditation. There is a gentle exercise that you can do to increase your sensitivity. It is most easily done while relaxed and lying down. Or you can sit in a comfortable meditation pose in a nice puffy cushioned chair if you prefer: the lotus position is not necessary, comfort is your initial goal, and you need no mantra or music or candles, only your mind.
Close your eyes and focus your attention in the middle of your forehead. You do not physically look to the middle of your forehead with your eyes because if you did, you would be cross-eyed, and quite uncomfortable. Your closed eyes will encounter blackness. Focus your attention and "stare" into this blackness, look into the centre and go deeper and deeper into the darkness until you encounter its core. Be patient, just look. In this core there are colours that fold in and out of each other, in and out, similar to a bright tie-dye T-shirt, endlessly swirling, folding, gliding in and out of one another. Continuous, endless, infinite.
When you encounter the colours, watch them as they smoothly expand within your head. As a child I used to love doing this exercise, and I still do everyday. Closing my eyes delivers a wonderful round blue ball of solid colour which is motionless, then it begins to spread and fold in on itself, and it merges into purple and white, and sometimes pinks and the hues of a lovely sunset. As I am watching the colours, I get to a point where awareness consists of only colour, again an incredible beautiful big blue ball appears, known by adepts as the Blue Pearl.
The Blue Pearl has become a daily meditation I have done for fifty-one years. My mind is still and blank. There are no worries, no thoughts at all and a relaxed bliss is all that I feel, often for hours. This simple exercise helps to keep my intuition in "good shape," similar to lifting weights or any other type of physical exercise for the body. While expanding my brain and mind inward, I am also expanding it outward like the Taoist symbol of the "ultimate ultimate", the Yin Yang ball. Continuous, endless, infinite.
As discussed in the next chapter on acupressure and auricular therapy—treating ailments and imbalance through 365 acu-points on each ear—I wear amethyst, emerald or lapis 18K yellow gold earrings in my psychic ear Soul point, which enhances this ability as well. In the early 1990s Norman Shealy, MD., and Caroline Myss, PhD., took this childhood gift and trained me as a Medical Intuitive, able to look inside the body to find the cause for symptoms or disease.
Jeanne Elizabeth Blum, MT, OMT, is a therapist of Traditional Oriental Medicine and the author of Woman Heal Thyself (Tuttle, 1995). She resides in Europe for half the year, teaches, see clients and lectures all over the world. Her latest book, The Tao of Piercing: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Health and Pleasure (Elite) will be published in early 2007. www.womanhealthyself.com and www.thetaoofpiercing.com
HOME * FOREIGN * AUTHOR * TRAINING * GREEK WEEK * FOR MEN * COMMENTS * CONTACT