 |
Probably there are as many ways to be intuitive as there are people. Nonetheless, by identifying and refining your preferred style and developing
others, you can enhance your current intuitive skills. As you read through
this list of six styles of intuition, notice those you use and those that
are unfamiliar. Wellknowing Intuition Trainings help you identify intuitive
styles that work for you in personal and professional areas of your life.
Unconscious and symbolic processes have been explored in psychoanalytic
theory, archetypal psychology, and more recently in imaginal psychology.
Typically, writers in these fields have emphasized the importance of
dreams, symbols, mandalas, visions, archetypes, and myths to creative
insight and personal integration. Most of these writers have been psychotherapists
and have stressed interior psychological states, such as dreams with
symbolic representations that convey scientific insight or change the
course of the dreamer’s life. Synchronicities observed in external
events are thought to signal the congruence of internal processes and
external manifestations.
In indigenous cultures worldwide, the spirit world is embedded in both
interior states and the activities or movements perceived in the natural
world. On behalf of their communities, local shamans dream, seek visions,
and observe the animals, the winds, and spirit forces near a settlement
to support healing and make decisions. The elements of air, earth, fire,
water, and spirit interact with humans and can even be propitiated for
signs and assistance. Usually, in the West, such “appearances”
are dismissed as hallucinations. However, shamans are known to dream
awake, perceiving unconscious forces as projections on the natural world.
Great artists in the West have made careers of making the spiritual
forces of nature explicit to the public, such as the photographer Ansel
Adams, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and nature artist Andy Goldsworthy.
Their art reflects the numinous to which others respond and change,
often without knowing why.
Despite their rather common occurrence for some people, psychic and
parapsychological phenomena typically are unacknowledged in furthering
the insights of scientific research. Such direct and unmediated experiences
would include telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognitive experiences that
take place at a distance (in space or time). Since such experiences
are typically encouraged by our heart-felt feelings of connection with
others and specific circumstances, the researcher’s personal connection
to a topic and to the research participants is likely to encourage such
experiences.
In addition to the five special senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste,
and touch, proprioception (inner body senses) and kinesthesia (sense
of movement) serve as intuitive channels, conveying subtle forms of
information typically unavailable to the thinking mind. Typically, information
from receptors in joints, ligaments, muscles, and viscera are subliminal
to awareness. Yet, when brought to awareness, the same body senses that
signal danger, beauty, and novelty in everyday life can be finely tuned
to serve intuition and imagination.
Awareness of proprioceptive and kinesthetic signals can be enhanced
through attention and specialized training, using techniques such as
Focusing developed by psychologist Eugene Gendlin and Authentic Movement
developed by body practitioners Mary Whitehouse, Janet Adler, and Joan
Chodorow
Through empathetic identification or compassionate knowing, writers,
actors, psychotherapists, and scientists inhabit the lived world of
another person or object of study. Via a seamless display of gesture
and temper of voice, an actor convinces an audience that Macbeth is
present. Psychotherapists attend to the life-world of their clients,
seeing the world through the clients’ eyes, helping them see possibilities
they cannot see for themselves. Similarly, biochemist Jonas Salk trained
himself with what he called an “inverted perspective.” He
would imagine himself as a virus or cancer cell and ask how he would
act if he were that virus or cancer cell.
Having conducted and supervised research for many years, I am poignantly
aware that an individual’s intuitive style tends to settle along
the fault lines or wounds in the personality in a manner akin to the
concept of the wounded healer described by Catholic priest and contemplative
Henri Nouwen. For Nouwen, our human wounds are sites both of suffering
and hospitality to the divine. Similarly, medical anthropologist Joan
Halifax documents the role of extreme illness and close encounters with
death as crucial to the development of visionary capacity among indigenous
shamans worldwide.
From a spiritual perspective, wounds are also openings to the world.
Explorations along the fault lines of the personality tend to invite
change and transform these “openings.” The topics my students
choose to explore in research are often those aspects of their personalities
that seek healing either within themselves or within the culture at
large, or both. The topics often seem to mark places in their psyches
where they burn brightly. In turn, the findings tend to illuminate this
realm of human struggle for us all. Indeed, the ways of intuition can
also be so personal that they are darn right embarrassing. Some researchers
are distressed to find that the very aspect of their personal history
that they have been avoiding for years is a prime source of insight
and discovery! Others regress to childhood behaviors, bringing those
behaviors slowly into the light of awareness in a manner not unlike
the course of psychotherapy. Sometimes these processes and insights
are strictly personal, and sometimes they shed light directly on the
topic of inquiry, or both. As a research supervisor, I help new researchers
to distinguish the difference between personal and research insights
and occasionally suggest that they seek professional assistance from
a therapist or spiritual guide.
My own experience and observations regarding intuition concurs with
research findings indicating that intuitive experience tend to blend
across expressive modes. For example, internal images often blend with
feelings and bodily sensations. In my own experience, the body can act
as a unified whole expressing archetypal imagery, and even mythic content,
through sensations and movements in a manner independent of conscious
thought. In my mind, it is possible that advanced tantric practitioners
in Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism may be “visualizing” a
deity by using the physical body as a field of projected energy.
For references and a more complete description of the six styles of
intuition, see Articles by
Rosemarie Anderson on Intuitive Inquiry.
Contact Rosemarie Anderson at rosemarie@wellknowingconsulting.org for information, fees, and appointments.
|
Styles
of Intuition