Intuitive Styles

Styles of Intuition

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 Processes
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.
Direct and Psychic Experiences
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.
Sensory and Feeling Modes
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
Empathetic Identification
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.
Through Our Wounds
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.
Blends of Intuitive Styles
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.

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