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Practical Intuition 2-day Training Manual

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Two Day Intuition Training Introduction ...........................................................................................................3 How does intuition work? ..............................................................................3 How to get the best from the training ...................................................4 Exercise 1 - Surrendering visualisation ............................................4 Judgement/Intuition ........................................................................................5 Exercise 2 - People reading visually....................................................5 Map/territory.........................................................................................................7 No failure .................................................................................................................7 Exercise 3 - Ribbons......................................................................................8 Levels of communication................................................................................9 Exercise 4 - Closed eye processing ......................................................9 Filter systems ......................................................................................................10 Exercise 5 - Controlled eavesdropping ............................................11 Getting rid of rubbish .....................................................................................12 Exercise 6 - Psychic protection part 1..............................................12 Primary communication mode ..................................................................14 Methods of protection ....................................................................................14 Exercise 7 - Psychic protection part 2..............................................14 Other methods of protection......................................................................15 Thinker/Prover...................................................................................................16 Observer self........................................................................................................16 Exercise 8 - Observer self visualisation ..........................................17 Acceptance of self.............................................................................................19 Exercise 9 - Drawing the observer self............................................20 Right and wrong ................................................................................................21 Exercise 10 - Child like visualisation.................................................21 Flexible learning state ...................................................................................22 Language acquisition......................................................................................23 Exercise 11 - Talking Drivel ....................................................................23 Conventions of speech ...................................................................................24 Rep systems .........................................................................................................24 Exercise 12 - Chocolate .............................................................................24 Database.................................................................................................................25 Decoding symbols –levels of awareness ............................................25 Exercise 13 - Decoding symbols ..........................................................26 Dictionary ..............................................................................................................27 Convincer ...............................................................................................................27 Wrap up...................................................................................................................27

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Introduction The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines intuition as: Intu’ition n: immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning; immediate apprehension by a sense; immediate insight My definition is: ‘in’ as in inside and ‘tuition’ as in teaching and learning. Consequently what it means to me is the ability to communicate and understand exactly what we feel and how we process information from within ourselves. All intuitive work stems from this ability to know the self. If we know how and why we do things and how we communicate them it makes it much easier for us to understand others and how they process, as well as being able to distinguish when an emotion we feel belongs to us or somebody else. This training and the manual that accompanies it are a foundation course in learning the basic intuitive processes and how they affect you, based on my own personal understanding and practice of intuition. There are no rules and regulations regarding the work. I advise you to work through the processes with an open mind, find what suits you and use it. If something is not comfortable for you, then leave it alone. If you want to do one of the exercises but find it works better for you in a different format please feel free to change it.

How does intuition work? Everyone has an intuitive voice. A baby’s ability to communicate with its parent at the most visceral level is intuitive. If a baby cries a mother may be in a different room and still be able to tell that it is her baby, not only that but she will find her milk beginning to flow despite the physical distance between her and the child and will tend to begin to move towards the child without even thinking about it. This is the primary function of intuition, to ensure the survival of the individual. It works at the same kind of level as the primitive physical survival reactions of someone placed in a traumatic situation where the fight or flight syndrome kicks in. Behavioural patterning in the form of cultural expectations (who is ‘right’, who is ‘powerful’, what is ‘acceptable’) can squash this intuitive voice early on in a child’s development as well as other modern inventions which can bypass intuitive processes, such as telephones, supermarkets, television etc.

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How to get the best from the training It is always best to experience new learning and access old, forgotten learnings in a relaxed and happy state. It has been scientifically proven that peak learning states occur in the moments before sleep when a person is most relaxed and open and when they are just waking up in the same state. The worst time to learn is when a person is agitated or stressed. Their internal responses and voices can work to drown out new information coming in because the brain is too busy coping with the ‘panic’ state which has been induced. Exercise 1 - Surrendering visualisation I want you to sit comfortably in the chair, feet flat on the floor, legs slightly apart, hands relaxed in your lap. Close your eyes and make sure your head is comfortably positioned on your neck. Take a moment to slow your breathing to an even pace that suits your relaxed mood. Now I want you to imagine yourself floating on the surface of a body of deep water. As you feel the water against your skin, know that the minute you surrender and let go, your own natural ability to survive kicks in. It needs no prompting from your conscious brain or effort from you. The more you relax, the more easily your are able to float. The natural, unconscious human drive is to survive peacefully and harmoniously. The body knows that it needs air to breathe and, like an inbuilt tracking system will naturally gravitate towards the nearest source of oxygen. Babies don’t need to be reminded to breathe once they are born. Left to their own devices their instinct is to take big breaths of life-giving oxygen, entirely unprompted by anyone else. As a baby you use your intuition and instinctive ability all the time. When you relax you begin to understand that everything is taken care of. Now you are completely relaxed and have surrendered to your own intuitive ability to live peacefully. You will notice that your internal communication system works beautifully and that your brain is more than capable of taking complete care of you without your conscious mind interfering. Your conscious mind can relax now. Know that your unconscious mind is always floating peacefully on the surface of the water waiting for you to access it whenever you want.

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Let go of the need to control things and embrace the truth that everything you need to know is already available to you and that you are a superbly gifted human being, replete with all the skills you will ever need to find in order to live life flawlessly and comfortably. Whenever you are ready take a few deep breaths and prepare to join the rest of the group, relaxed and ready to learn.

Judgement/Intuition People can be afraid to trust their intuition for all sorts of reasons. A key reason can be that as a child we can experience a feeling or emotion that we are then told by our parents is wrong. Lots of people can recall having a nightmare and being told by their parents: “Of course you aren’t frightened” or that: “There is nothing to be afraid of”. We are torn between our internal intuitive voice and that of our parents. Our primary need is for survival. Do we choose the internal, intuitive voice, that wants us to survive or the external parental voice that we know will look after us? Do we choose to think that it is our internal voice that is lying to us, or that of our parent? In these situations most children go for the lesser of the two evils and tend to choose their parents explanation over what they feel to be true. This is the place where our ability to trust our intuition first gets questioned and other cultural and personal experiences reinforce this. We learn what is ‘true’ from without rather than from within. We can get caught up in listening to the pre-conceptions and judgements that our conscious minds and mistake it for our intuitive voice. When we make judgements based on our learned values it can often go wrong, but because we have coded this ‘voice’ as our intuition, it is this we learn to distrust, not our conscious mind. Exercise 2 - People reading visually You will need a collection of photographs of people. People of different ages, sexes and cultures. Choose pictures in colour and black and white. Half a dozen should be sufficient to the purpose. Choose people who are not known to you from the media. Pictures of Kate Moss are not appropriate (although very lovely). These people need to be strangers to you. Arrange the pictures so that you can see them clearly and think about each individual as you look at them.

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The kinds of things I want you to think about are the subject’s: • • • • • • • • •

Age Occupation (jockey, housewife, media executive…) Type of accommodation (house, flat, homeless, traveller…) Living arrangements (single/married/gay/divorced/widowed…) Hobbies (canasta, clubbing, crown green bowling, swinging…) Social life (or lack of) Class/culture (common, middle class, Western, European …) Food preferences (vegetarian, carnivore, omnivore, eating habits…) Clothing and general appearance (smart, scruffy, expensive grooming…)

Basically use anything that would randomly flit through your brain when you are indulging in people watching in a café or train station or walking past someone in the street. The key for this exercise is to not think about it in too much depth. Try to model the type of thoughts that you would normally have if you had just casually met this person in passing. Write down the list on a piece of paper and then take a few minutes to highlight which of these categories are ones which you consistently group people by. For instance, do you always look at a person’s shoes when they walk into the room? What does that tell you about them? You will probably find that you have between two and four things that you tend to habitually sort for when trying to place a person in your mental filing system. If you have someone else to do the exercise with, so much the better. Compare your list with theirs and see what differences or similarities there are. Notice that we are often unaware that we even have such a sorting process occurring at the level of the unconscious. Or that we are aware of it but believe that our sorting criteria are the same as everyone else’s. Because we don’t often talk about how we process information it can be surprising what we perceive to be ‘normal’. A friend of mine often experiences what is called synaesthesia. This is where the body codes sensory experience radically differently than most people’s common perception. She has the ability to hear a previously unknown person’s name and see that name as a particular colour. She has had experiences of then meeting the person and being able to recognise them instantly because of a halo of coloured light which she perceives around them, which matches the colour of their name! Other people see music as colour. It is not a problem, it is just a different way of understanding the world. My friend was completely unaware of the fact that other people do not usually perceive the world in this way until she let it drop in casual conversation. She was in her twenties when she made this discovery and up to that point had considered it to be a totally commonplace way of experiencing reality. Practical Intuition www.saladltd.co.uk

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If you are doing this exercise with someone else think about whose set of sorting criteria is correct. If you unpack the perceptions you have made by choosing these criteria what does it tell you about what is important to you about other people? Have you all come to the same conclusions about the same people? The answer is, probably not. Strange to think that we go about our daily lives often thinking that we understand other people perfectly, when what we actually understand is how we think of other people in relation to our own perception of the way the world works.

Map/territory The exercise shows where things like stereotypes and other sweeping generalisations come from and how easy it is for us to code them as ‘true’. This is a clear demonstration of the phrase: “the map is not the territory”. The map is everything that our conscious awareness codes to be ‘true’ about the world that we live in based on our life experience and learnings. The mistake we make is in thinking that all people experience life in the same way that we do and that the map is the only version of reality that has any validity. Comparing belief systems shows how divergent people’s maps are and how much of the world is actually undiscovered territory to us. The territory is all life and all experience of the world and we cannot possibly get a full understanding of it, no matter how hard we try because we will always filter experience and understanding through our own sense of ‘map’. What we can do is get enough experience of our map to recognise it so that when we experience something ‘other’ we can understand that what we are actually feeling is a part of somebody else’s map of the world. We can also open our belief system up to the possibility that other people’s maps are just as valid an interpretation of the world of our own.

No failure The best thing for me about intuition is that it is always right. No matter how I interpret something it is right, as long as it is my initial, intuitive reaction that I am decoding. What we are looking for in intuitive dialogue is that flash or spark of understanding that takes place before conscious processing occurs. We might then choose to take a closer, conscious mind look at the information we have gleaned. The nice thing about this is that it only adds more data and understanding to what we already have. It is very easy to interpret and gain deeper positive experience around our intuitive self as long as we are open and accepting of it.

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Exercise 3 - Ribbons There is a very simple exercise you can do to show how varied and complex the world of interpreting symbols can be. I also happen to think that it shows what a rich and fascinating subject it can be, but I will let you decide that for yourselves when you have finished! You will need a group of people, half a dozen is a good number, and a bag of multi-coloured ribbons, preferably plain coloured ribbons. Patterns can get too complicated. You need to sit in a circle and choose one person to be the leader of the group. The leader is simply the person in charge of the bag! A very responsible job. Work round the circle so that everyone gets a turn with the ribbons. The leader chooses the first person to have a go. The person who is chosen must close their eyes. The leader of the group gives them the bag of ribbons and lets them pull out one ribbon. The leader must take the bag away, leaving the person sitting in their chair with their eyes closed and a ribbon in their hands. The leader asks the question: “What colour is the ribbon in your hands and what does that colour mean for and to you?” The person holding the ribbon can take their time before they answer. They can explore the ribbon with their fingers or simply hold it. The person holding the ribbon might be comfortable accessing a relaxed and meditative trance state before attempting to answer. It doesn’t really matter how they go about the deductive process itself, or indeed what they answer. The beauty of the exercise is that there is no right or wrong answer. For example: the person holding the ribbon might take a few moments to answer before saying that the ribbon is green and that the reason that they have picked it is because they need to face a situation in their life where they are feeling jealousy. If they open their eyes and the ribbon is red, this in no way invalidates the previous statement. Their intuitive voice has given them the colour green for the very reason they have stated. Their unconscious mind has also enabled them to pick a red ribbon, which simply means that there is more than one message, or more than one part to the message they already picked up. If the colour of the ribbon is different from the colour they chose the leader must then ask them what they think the colour of the actual ribbon signifies to them. It may be that they see the red as a sign that in order to combat the jealous feelings they are experiencing they need bravery and vitality. Practical Intuition www.saladltd.co.uk

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What is important here is that we are encouraging people to engage at a meaningful and practically communicative level with their intuitive, symbolic language patterns. You will find that as each person takes a ribbon and interprets it that there might be two people who pull the same coloured ribbon from the bag and interpret it in two totally different and equally valid ways. It is a beautiful example of how our individual interpretive languages can exist side by side harmoniously, and a reminder that we cannot take it for granted that just because we all speak the same language we are all saying the same thing. Always make sure that everybody has had a go including the leader at the end.

Levels of communication This exercise can be used for lots of different purposes, including showing the different kinds of levels the brain is capable of processing different types of information. Here I have used it to act as a direct reference to the ‘no failure’ idea. The closed eye processing exercise which follows is a logical continuation of the ribbon exercise. Here you work with people rather than ribbons but in pretty much the same way. It can be amazing to see how much direct, correct and relevant information you pick up for each other. Exercise 4 - Closed eye processing You will need to do this exercise with a partner, preferably somebody you don’t know very well, if at all. You need to decide which of you will be person A and which of you will be person B, just for the purposes of the exercise. Person B needs a notepad and pen with which to take notes for person A. The purpose of the exercise is to see how much ‘pure’ intuitive information we can pick up from another person without trying too hard. Take the two most comfortable chairs you can find and sit facing opposite each other. Take a few minutes to relax in whatever way feels most appropriate, focus on your breathing, or releasing tension from your body by thinking about separate body parts, hands, neck etc. and imagining any tightness or discomfort melting away. Once relaxed, person A needs to close their eyes and focus their attention on person B. Imagine yourself receiving information from person B in

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whatever way seems most appropriate for you. Believe that you can ‘read’ person B like a book. All person B needs to do is stay still, calm and relaxed with pen and paper ready. Although person A must focus on person B, try to make it a relaxed focus, not a scrunched up laser-like intensity! Believe it or not, the harder the thinking the less likely you are to pick up anything intuitive. Intuition usually comes fairly effortlessly. Person A - Once you are focused on person B allow any thoughts, sensations or images to come to you without trying to order or make sense of them. As they appear to you say them out loud. An example would be: “I see a red car, my knee feels sore, I am thinking of the word apple…” The only thing you have to do is keep focusing your attention on person B. Person B – Write down as much of what person A is saying as possible. Person A – after a couple of minutes, imagine that you are disengaging your attention from person B and bringing your focus back to yourself and your presence in the room. Open your eyes and sit for a moment to gather your thoughts. Once Person A is completely back in the room, have a look at what person B has written and spend a couple of minutes working with person B trying to make sense of what the information you received was telling you about them. Once you have finished the process, repeat the exercise but swap the roles so that person A becomes person B and vice versa.

Filter systems Now you have seen how easy it is for the brain to pick up information about the self and others it begs the question of what we are going to do with that information and how appropriate it is to have that information all the time. The brain takes in every single piece of information transmitted towards it at every single second of the day. The fact that we are not overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of it, especially in this day and age is down to the fact that the brain puts chemical filters in place which allow it to block, reroute, delete and sort all the incoming information. An example is a person living near a busy motorway. When they move in they are aware of every car that passes. Within three weeks they will not hear any noise at all and only become aware of it when somebody else comments on it or when there is a significant fluctuation or change in

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noise levels. The brain deletes the noise when it realizes that hearing it or not hearing it doesn’t make any difference to our survival. These filters can malfunction or be knocked out during certain types of human experience including: exhaustion and drug and alcohol intake. Scientists experimenting with LSD in the sixties found that the drug was capable of shutting down the filter systems in the brain, meaning that all incoming information was treated as equally important, which explains the hallucinations, distortions and dissociations commonly experienced by those taking the drugs. These examples highlight our unconscious behaviour around such filters but it is also possible to learn how we filter and then use it at a conscious level to manipulate the type, quality and quantity of information that we are receiving. Exercise 5 - Controlled eavesdropping This works best with a group of people, six or more is good. If you want to practice this out and about, a good place to do this is on a bus journey when there’s lots of chattering people on board. Just try listening to what the person in the seat next to you is saying as well as what someone else further along the bus is saying and see if you can keep track of both conversations at once. Scatter round the room in pairs. You need to be close enough together as a group that everyone can hear everyone else, but not so that you are too close together. The optimum is to recreate a fairly typical party situation. Start talking to your partner and engage them directly in conversation. As you are talking to them I want you to try and allow your consciousness and hearing to drift from what you and your partner are saying to each other and zone in on what someone else in the room is saying. It is important that you keep talking to your partner, and that you do it in an intelligent and coherent way. They need to know that the majority of your attention is clearly with them and is responding sensibly to what they are saying. At the same time I want you to be aware enough of the conversation of the other person in the room that you are focusing on to be able to clearly understand at least some of what they are saying. After five minutes the group should gather together and feed back their experiences. Each individual should be able to recount what they were talking about with their direct partner and what the person they had chosen to eavesdrop on was talking about.

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Getting rid of rubbish The eavesdropping exercise shows that it is entirely possible to set external/internal filter balances ourselves. This is a good thing, because as we become aware of the power of our minds to ‘read’ other people we will need to be able to turn this power on and off as is appropriate. We do not always want to respond to someone else’s emotional state as if it were our own, and we do not always want to know what somebody else is thinking about, regardless of how appealing it seems at first! Using psychic protection exercises can be an excellent way of filtering junk. Lots of people think it is unnecessary, but a powerful analogy is that of going to clean out the toilet without using rubber gloves and a toilet brush. Most of us would never do it, so why do we think it’s safe to go rummaging around in people’s heads without the same kind of protection in place? Most people want to keep their joy, not transmit it, but make them angry and they can’t wait to offload it on someone. Similarly, psychic protection is crucial if you are going to work intuitively with people for a job. People do not come to see therapists, counsellors, life coaches or psychics because their lives are great. They come because they have problems. We want to help with those problems, but not to the extent of taking them on board and keeping them for ourselves. Exercise 6 - Psychic protection part 1 I want you to split into pairs. What we are going to do is elicit from each other information about when we were able to access an intuitive state. I’ve already told you how we can all do this naturally anyway, so you should have plenty of experience to draw from even if you can’t think of any right now. Here are a few examples: Did you ever think of somebody and then have them call you within minutes? Did you ever just know that you were going to bump into somebody you hadn’t seen for years? Have you ever picked the phone up to call someone at the same time they were trying to call you? Have you ever known that your child needed you, if they had an accident or were in trouble? Have you ever woken minutes before your child cried, knowing they would wake?

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Have you ever said the same thing as somebody at exactly the same time as them, or finished somebody else’s sentences or even thought said something only to have someone else tell you that that was what they were just thinking about? All these are instances of intuitive behaviour. Person A needs to elicit (find out) from Person B exactly what happened, and how it happened. As Person A is asking Person B they need to monitor Person B carefully and note how they behave as they are telling you the story. By this I mean: Where do they put their eyes when they tell you? What about blink rate? What happens to their breathing? Do they use their hands a lot to gesture when they speak? Do they turn their head as if they are listening to something? Are you aware that they are making a picture of the story they are telling you? How do they use language patterns? Are they using lots of visual, kinaesthetic, auditory words like: It felt like, I knew in my gut, I was touched I saw it so clearly, the picture became clear, I heard it, there was a funny noise. If you are having trouble interpreting ask them specific questions about their story: When that happened how did you feel? Where in your body was the feeling? Did it move around? Did the picture get clearer or duller? After you have elicited the information, swap roles and do the process again. We will then feedback to the group

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Primary communication mode This exercise is a way of eliciting by which methods our brains like to communicate best. It is valuable information because it is generally the case that this is the way that our intuitive language likes to communicate too. That is not to say that our brain only communicates at this level, it communicates on many levels, but this elicited mode is probably our primary default setting.

Methods of protection Even though the group don’t know each other well this exercise is a clear indication that you can pick up and decode somebody’s primary operating criteria in about ten minutes flat. You are probably doing this all the time at an unconscious level. When we think about those times when we are in deep rapport with someone it is usually because we have picked up and matched the other person’s primary communication tool and either mimicked it or found that it matches our own. What happens if you don’t want someone to gain rapport with you? What happens if you want to be private? What happens if you really don’t want to know something about somebody else? What happens if you are in a difficult situation where what you really need is to stay focussed on your own needs and your own stuff so that you can stay firm over something where somebody else usually gets you to do what they want instead of what you want? Well, this is where psychic protection comes in. Exercise 7 - Psychic protection part 2 I want you to repeat the exercise again in exactly the same way. If you want you can choose a different story or stick with the same one, it’s up to you. The only difference will be that before we start, Person B needs to imagine themselves encased in a protective bubble. You can make the bubble any colour you like. I prefer to make it transparent, like a real soap bubble. Make the bubble big enough to encase you completely. Remember to make sure it goes under the soles of your feet as well as over your head. If there are any gaps it won’t work. You can make it squishy and flexible so that it moves with your movement without breaking or tearing.

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If you want you can fill the bubble with coloured light. Some people like white light, some like pink – you can decide what suits you best. The idea is that the bubble is a layer of protection between you and the outside world. It is your safe space, so make it as comfortable for yourself as possible. When you have created your bubble (take a couple of minutes at most), indicate to Person A that you are ready to start the exercise Person A’s job is to proceed exactly as before in the first part of the exercise. When you have finished the process, Person B needs to remove their bubble, switch roles and start again.

Other methods of protection This is just one way of protecting the self from others or putting barriers and filters in place. Bubbles can be an extreme way of doing things because they do not allow anything in or out. Some people find this very disconcerting as they miss that sense of ‘connection’ with the world that makes them feel safe. I recommend that you use bubbles only if you want to feel very isolated or if you are in a really traumatic situation where nothing else has worked. It can be an excellent emergency measure that just allows for a few minutes of quiet thought in a time of chaos. Always remember to take them off when you have finished the process. Bubbles can be altered to suit your needs. If I ever use them I will always spend time adjusting them so that they are actually porous. I set the filter levels myself so I am in control of exactly what is coming in and what is going out. Other methods which can be more comfortable for people to use are dropping grounding roots from the root or base chakra and the sub chakras on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet and grounding negativity into the earth through them. I also suggest putting up a temporary living barrier (like a plant), visualised in front of the vulnerable area (face and solar plexus are two key areas of vulnerability) and monitoring what happens when you come into contact with difficult people or situations. If the plant keels over and dies I suggest that a bubble might be the next appropriate move.

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Thinker/Prover Part of our internal filter system is the thinker/prover. This, to make more sense is the phrase: “what the thinker thinks, the prover proves”. What it means is that if you think the world is a friendly place then your brain will find evidence to prove that it is. If you think the world is an alien, harsh place, the brain will find equal amounts of evidence to prove that that is the case. We have to be careful that we are not using our intuition to simply prove what we already believe to be true about the world. This is another layer to the pre-conception exercise we did earlier. One of the things that we find very easy as adults is to think that we are ‘bad’ or ‘broken’ people. Our brain will find every way it can to make that seem true to us and that means that we have a much harder time accepting our own intuitive judgements about things, because our intuitive voice generally comes from within, and inside us is where we generally think of that badness as coming from. What the thinker thinks the prover proves. It can often be helpful to have an objective, external opinion when these internal filters kick in. This allows us to step back from problems and make the space to resolve them in a conflict free way.

Observer self The other thing about accessing this objectivity is that it is not always helpful to get this from other people, as they usually have their own map of the world through which to filter our problems or they simply care about us too much to be fully objective. Finding people who really are objective can be either very costly (therapists) or uncomfortable (because we don’t know them from Adam). Utilizing the observer self can be a great resource in these situations. The observer self is traditionally used in meditation and visualisation practices. It is just a way of personifying our unconscious or intuitive self so that we can enter into dialogue and conflict resolution with it. It is just a model for accessing positive beliefs and behaviours, it is not actually true, so if creating a separate sense of self doesn’t seem useful to you then don’t do it. It is something we do anyway, at the unconscious level plenty of times, we can all be aware of certain ‘voices’ in our head, commenting about our activities and the rightness of them, or that sense of detachment that can come in moments of extreme emotion where we feel we are ‘watching’ ourselves doing things from outside our body.

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The observer self is an amalgamation of the best parts of who we are. It embodies our sense of unconditional love for self, the part of each of us that is of the highest and the best (the divine self) and is never, ever harsh or judgemental. If you ever enter into dialogue with the observer self and find these kinds of negative patterns running simply break off the dialogue and try again later because this is not actually what the observer self would ever do. Once we start to build a relationship with the observer self it can be one of the quickest and most comfortable ways to access intuitive information that we have. Exercise 8 - Observer self visualisation Sit comfortably in a straight backed chair with your legs slightly apart, feet flat on the floor. Rest your hands comfortably on your lap. Relax your shoulders and make sure that your head feels comfortable on your neck. Allow your breathing rate to become comfortably relaxed at a rate that suits you best. Imagine a golden thread starting at a point in the air about a hands breadth above your head. Now see it running through the top of your head, down through your spine and into the floor between your legs. This thread is what will support you through the meditation, keeping you comfortably in alignment. It connects you to the air you were born to breathe and the spirit that still inhabits and informs who you are. Now that it is in place you can completely relax your body to its care. Now I want you to imagine strong roots growing from the base of your spine and the soles of your feet dropping down into the floor. Like tree roots they stretch and grow through the ground, spreading wherever they need to in order to give you the most stability and comfort. These roots are your grounding roots. These take care of your emotional balance for you. Imagine the roots curling deeper and deeper into the earth until they reach its core. As they spread they give you a greater and greater feeling of comfort and belonging where you are. When you are aware of your grounding roots reaching the earth’s core imagine a glowing ball of light spinning gently in the middle of the earth. It can be whatever colour is most comfortable for you, white, pink or gold can be comfortable colours. Now send the grounding roots into the glowing ball. Imagine the roots questing their way through the ball until they become a part of it. Now you are completely at one with the earth that supports you. Feel the light from the ball pulsing through the roots, the warmth and colour start to spread upwards through the layers of the earth, back

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towards your body as quickly or slowly as you are completely comfortable with. When the light reaches your feet you can feel it travelling through your body, energising you and filling you with a sense of enormous well being. Imagine a glowing ball of green light right in the centre of your chest. This is your heart chakra. It is an energy centre at the very core of who you are. It’s job is to store all the information about you and the way you relate to the world and the people in it. It is the very essence of you. As the light from the core of the earth connects with the light at the core of who you are, I want you to imagine a new spark igniting in the centre of the heart chakra where the two colours of light connect. Feel the spark starts spinning slowly. Feel the glow filling the centre of your chest and expanding to envelop you in a feeling of complete safety and the knowledge that you are always loved and protected. You are completely anchored to the safety of the earth beneath your feet and the air above your head. You are at one with the world that you inhabit. Now that you have your protection in place you are ready to meet your observer self. You are totally safe now and you can dismiss the idea of the roots you have created from your mind. Know that your unconscious is taking care of these support systems in the same way that it takes care of your breathing and the way it supports your physical body. It is time to focus on your breathing now. Your in breath is bringing in all the goodness the world has to offer you and your out breath is breathing out all discomfort and bodily stress. As you breathe in, imagine beads of light moving down your spine, following the golden thread from the top of your head to the base of your spine. This cleansing energy is refreshing and renewing your central nervous system, revitalising you and giving you strength and replenished vitality for life. As you breathe out imagine your out breath forming a pathway in front of you. As the breath progresses for its natural length the pathway lengthens and all the stresses and strains your body has stored up fall away from you. As you see the pathway in front of you, you can begin to become aware of another you, standing just beyond the end of it, a you that is cleansed, whole and full of the rich vitality of life. This you that you can see is your observer self. At the end of every out breath there is a tiny natural pause before the in breath occurs. Every time you reach this tiny pause, your awareness of your observer self can become greater. Know as you stand there, watching that you, that the observer self is a perfect embodiment of everything you are, the best you have to give.

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Your observer self is radiant and joyous, replete in the knowledge that you are a divine work of the highest order. Understand that no matter what you do in your life, what you think of yourself in your darkest moments, that this being, this divine spark, within you and yet outside of you, always knows the truth about you and that the truth about you is that you are a perfect example of humanity. Know too, that your observer self is a complete embodiment of your ability to be unconditionally loving towards yourself. You deserve the highest love at every moment of every day. Know that you are worthy of this love and be proud of the fact that there is the truest part of yourself that knows this at every second of every day no matter what. Once you have spent enough time with your observer self, thank it and allow yourself to become more fully aware of your body, safe in the knowledge that you can access your observer self whenever you want to, in an instant or in a deep meditation like this. When you are comfortable I want you to come back into a full awareness of the room around you, complete with all the positive feelings that the visualisation has given you.

Acceptance of self The more we can accept that the observer self is a key part of who we are and that we can access it whenever we like, the easier it will be to access and the more we will find that we are capable of practicing selfacceptance. Self-acceptance is one of the primary ways of ensuring quality intuitive information both in terms of receiving it and also in terms of being able to communicate it clearly to others. If we are able to unconditionally love ourselves exactly the way we are then we are much more likely to be able to give that love and acceptance to others. When other people come to us for help being able to accept them means that we can gain their trust, their acceptance of us and their ability to act on the advice or guidance we give with little or no effort. Most people already have enough negative voices in their lives, both from within and without. They do not need us to tell them how bad or wrong they are, they know that better than most. What they are not used to is somebody saying: “you are absolutely fine just the way you are” and this is the most powerful tool for enabling change that we can give them. Tying the work on the observer self together with the work on acceptance can provide an excellent way of understanding just how brilliant our intuitive communication states can be.

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Exercise 9 - Drawing the observer self There are various ways to get into contact with the observer or intuitive self. Meditation and visualisation are the most popular. For those of you who don’t feel that comfortable with those methods or would like an alternative that doesn’t take so much time I would also recommend a very simple process involving you, a packet of felt tip pens or pencils, a piece of paper and some quiet thinking time. Take a few minutes to imagine what your observer self is like and draw a representation of him/her on your paper. I often find in these situations that my mind goes blank when I have to do an exercise like this. The best thing to do in these cases is tell yourself that you are going to draw your observer self first. Once you have decided that this is what will happen, put pen to paper and start drawing. You don’t have to think about what you are drawing and why because you have already told yourself what is going to take place. After a few minutes you may find that you want to take more control of the drawing process, which is absolutely fine. If you don’t, just carry on, trusting that what you draw will be an interpretation of your observer self, even if it doesn’t look right! When you have finished your drawing take a few minutes to look at it and think about what you have drawn actually means to you. It might seem childish, but can actually be very illuminating. Think about the colours and shapes you have drawn and ask yourself what they mean. Is your observer self a man or a woman? Why did you choose one over the other. Is your observer self human? What are they and why did you choose that? The smallest things can have meaning if we let them. Doing this process, you set out with a purpose in mind. That means that everything that you have put on paper has meaning related to that purpose. It can be reassuring to do this sort of work in a group setting. It somehow makes it seem less silly if everybody is doing the same thing. Remember, you are not in a competition. It is not about the quality of the art, it is about what the art means to you, and nobody can decide and decipher that better than yourself.

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Right and wrong Remember the ribbon exercise from earlier? This is the same kind of thing. There is no right or wrong here. Who else could possibly know what your observer self looks like but you? Yet, I bet there were some of you who found this a challenging exercise because of the fear of getting it wrong or because you think you can’t draw? We know what is right and what is wrong in the same way we know most other things. We learn it from our parents, from our peers and from those in positions of authority to us. As we have already explored in part, a lot of this information comes from fear based responses and cultural expectations which have little or nothing to do with our actual intuitive reality. Very young children do not have this fear or they would never learn to walk or talk. Babies have the most flexible learning states of us all and are consequently the most brilliant learning machines. They learn in the spirit of adventure and fun and fearlessness which means that they learn quickly and easily and brilliantly. Exercise 10 - Child like visualisation I want you to sit comfortably in the chair, feet flat on the floor, legs slightly apart, hands relaxed in your lap. Close your eyes and make sure your head is comfortably positioned on your neck. Take a moment to slow your breathing to an even pace that suits your relaxed mood. I want you to imagine one of your happiest childhood moments. Take a minute to think back over the years and find a time somewhere between your being born and you being five years old. It doesn’t have to be the happiest moment you’ve ever experienced, just allow yourself to call up one of the times you can remember easily. Relax into the memory. It doesn’t have to be a vivid recollection. It can be a sensation of joy and well being filling you from within, or a great feeling of happiness. You may be aware of a feeling of the carpet under your toes. You can see things through your child eyes. You can drink in the amazing visions of the world unfolding before you. You may be able to remember a smell that you can’t help linking with your best childhood memories: baking, play-doh, your mother’s perfume. How about the warm smell of red brick as your fingers feel the texture of stone when you run your hand along the wall? Whatever the sensations are that come to you, allow them to move you further into that wonderful experience of happiness.

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Just allow yourself to rediscover the excitement of anticipation that comes with newness. Remember every happy birthday, a celebration of the day you’re born, eagerly awaited and arriving as the most amazing miracle. Remember when Christmas was a feast of magical possibility just for you. As a child parcels and letters always bring exciting things. Your presents here, belonging to you, special and exciting. You see, when you are that small, learning is exquisitely easy for you and you are eager for new learnings, and speaking to you as a child, everything you do is in the spirit of play and exploration. Your ability to learn is so rapid that you are not even aware of what an amazing job of learning new things you are doing. Know that you are safe and protected from all the things that could have frightened you as a child. You see, being able to access your childhood now, with the experience and wisdom that being an adult brings, gives you the best of both worlds. The things that you didn’t understand then become so simple to understand now, and the things that cause you difficulty can melt away now under the new awareness that fresh perspective brings. Now you have the understanding of age and the fabulous learning flexibility of your most positive childhood experience to help your awareness of the world blossom. You can easily understand now, that the world is a supportive and caring place where you are doing just fine. In that moment I want you to understand that you are completely at ease in your environment. You feel at one with the world. You have a place in existence and you can claim it as rightfully yours because you belong here. You have every right to be you, just as you are. You are a perfect, joyful human being with a whole wealth of exciting learning experiences before you to enjoy. As you take that knowledge on board at the deepest level of conscious awareness I know that you fully understand now what an amazing job you are doing and will continue to do, now and for the rest of your life. Whenever you are ready take a few deep breaths and prepare to join the rest of the group, relaxed and ready to learn.

Flexible learning state People sometimes believe that as adults we are incapable of learning new things, which if you think about it rationally, is absolutely nonsense. We spend about two thirds of our lives in the ‘adult’ classification and there is no way that all learning grinds to a halt at the end of our teens. As adults we learn all the time, just like children. The difference is in what we will accept and use. If we want to we can still be incredibly flexible and open to new learnings, particularly if we can learn to access that explorative learning state that children are so good at.

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We were all children ourselves once (believe it or not). It is impossible to unknow something which explains why people who start down the path of self-enlightenment find it difficult to either stop or go back to old ways of being. Even if we try to go back to an old way of doing something we have to then consciously block out our knowledge of the new way of doing something and it makes it so much harder to do it well and with the same sense of ease as before. Consequently our ability to access this younger, learning self is merely a rediscovery or remembering, which is always easier to do than a new learning process.

Language acquisition As children, one of the key things which signals our independence is our ability to learn and use language. These language skills are not just the ability to say a simple sentence like “the cat sat on the mat”, but to know exactly what it means in the situation in which we are using it and to communicate it clearly in different situations. An example is the simple word, ‘cat’. It seems easy to understand except when you realise that if you have a group of thirty people and you get them to try and understand and communicate what they mean by the word ‘cat’ you will get thirty different responses based on all sorts of cultural and personal markers. The amazing thing is that those thirty people will also share enough knowledge of the word to be comfortable in knowing that their communication will be understood. Knowing this also means that it can be very easy to understand where communication between individuals goes awry. A cat is an actual thing and has lots of interpretations associated with it. Love is an intangible, with no colour, shape, smell or physical shape and is the most powerful human emotion available. The possibilities for miscommunication multiply the more abstract and complex a situation becomes. When we looked at our primary modes of communication earlier we discovered a key marker in being able to interpret the way our intuitive language talks to us. We are now going to do an exercise to demonstrate just how much our mind and body want and need to communicate with us. Exercise 11 - Talking Drivel Pair up again, with different partners than you worked with previously Now I want you to have a two minute conversation with each other, but I want you to talk nonsense language to each other. Rejoin the group. What did you notice?

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Conventions of speech I expect that even though you knew that you would be speaking nonsense to each other you still found that you were actively striving to make sense of it anyway. You may have found that you were following time honoured conventions of speech like allowing each other time to speak and listening while the other person was speaking. You may have made appropriate noises and facial gestures which allowed you to put a partially intelligible conversation in place. What can be even harder is if the other person drops the odd ‘real’ word into the mix. We can latch onto that word and try to make sense of the other words around them in relation to it. This is the way the brain likes to work with communication. Understanding a word relies on every other word that surrounds it. It has to have context to make sense. The brain will always try to order and make sense of every piece of information that comes its way, no matter how silly it seems. Understanding ourselves and being understood by others is what can make the difference between life and death. Language is just another, more sophisticated survival mechanism.

Rep systems We communicate at the level of the senses, as we have already explored. These are: visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and kinaesthetic. I also like to include spatial as a sub-category of these as the space we use when gesturing can be a clear indicator of our emotional and intuitive state. As I have already explained, we use some of these most of the time, some of them some of the time, but we will all use them all at some point in our lives and most of us can experience them all at once if we want to. Exercise 12 - Chocolate Take a few minutes to eat a chocolate. Examine the wrapper Unwrap it slowly Smell it, you might even like to smell the wrapper Listen to the noise as the wrapper crinkles Listen to the sound of yourself eating it

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Taste it and savour every bit Notice how all your senses can be fully engaged in even such a simple process as eating a sweet

Database Noticing which part of the process was most important for you gives you more conscious information about how we process and code information within our internal value system. Even a simple thing like eating a sweet can be a highly definitive experience for most people. If you like the same sweet as somebody else then there is a part of you that thinks that they are more likable and more like you, therefore you are more likely to trust them. Sharing shared sweet eating experiences can also have the same bonding effect. If you have a shared cultural background with somebody you are more likely to trust them and allow yourself to be more vulnerable with them. If you have to make a choice between two professional people whose services you require, two doctors, for example. Even if they both have the same qualifications you are more likely to choose the one who shares your experience of other things, like childhood television programmes. This is despite the fact that it has nothing to do with their ability to make you better at all. The brain loves order and it sorts by ‘same’ and ‘difference’. When looking for a doctor it will look for somebody whose medical experience is different from mine. When making a choice between two of them it will try to find a ‘same’ sort in order to establish measurable and meaningful credibility at a level it can understand.

Decoding symbols –levels of awareness Now we have started to understand how our brains understand and communicate things we can look at translating that raw data. To start with the brain will decode information at two levels: what is practical and what is symbolic. Sometimes a spade really is a spade. If this is the case the job is done. If it isn’t it needs to look at the symbolic interpretation. This is decoded at three levels. The universal, the cultural and the symbolic. The universal is the highest level of coding information. It includes things like archetypal information (mother, father, wise man, shaman, judge etc.) and other things that are commonly held to be true everywhere,

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such as the symbolism around life and death, the two things that every single human being on the planet has a shared experience of. The cultural is to do with things like our geography, political situation, popular culture, religion and anything else that separates us from the universal at that broad level. Colour is a key indicator of a cultural symbol. White is the colour of mourning in Asia and the colour of celebration in the West. In the Hindu religion, red is the colour of celebration and orange is the colour of spirituality. This is the level where symbolism can be coded in these broad cultural sweeps. The personal is how everything affects us at the level of individual experience and understanding. It can be that as a bride I may not have chosen white to get married in because I don’t like it. I might have chosen yellow. Consequently yellow will have an entirely different meaning for me than for anyone else. It is important that when we receive intuitive information we decode it using this process. It will not always be a visual understanding, it might just as easily be a feeling or a smell for example. Nevertheless, each piece of information can be unpacked in the same way. Exercise 13 - Decoding symbols Get into pairs. Person A and Person B Person A needs to ask Person B a question about something, ideally something that is quite non-specific, so nothing like: What colour is your house?” Here are some examples: How do you feel about work? What do you think about when you feel happy? Where would you like to be in ten years time? How would you feel if I gave you a million pounds? What we need is not the actual answer, even though you probably have a perfectly logical one. What we are looking for is the first thing you feel or think or experience. Usually, before we put together a rational answer to something our intuition has already answered symbolically for us. What we are trying to achieve is a bit like what we want when we play the word association game. That split second answer before we engage our rational brain to answer logically. Take a few minutes to decode the messages at the three levels and then switch places and repeat the exercises. Now feedback to the group

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Dictionary What we are doing is building our own dictionary or database of intuitive information. Getting to know some of our core symbolic language can help us understand our intuition in moments at critical times. It is important to attempt to decode intuitive information because it may always hold more information for us than at the purely practical level. Even when a spade really is a spade there is no reason why it cannot hold symbolic meaning for us as well. These types of exercise are useful because they allow us to build a conscious framework for a predominantly unconscious behaviour.

Convincer There is another level at which we can decode and this can often be what is called the convincer. The convincer is the one piece of information that you can either receive from yourself about yourself and your situation or that you can give to somebody else that makes the difference in terms of belief in the intuitive voice. When we work with others and we can start picking up messages from others that won’t mean anything to anybody except them because they are so personal that nobody else could know that except them. When we have tried to decode information at the level of our intuitive map and gotten nowhere is often the time to understand that it may not be wrong information it may just be so personal that it is only relevant to the other person. In those situations all we need to do is give that information and allow them to decode it for us. That type of information is a godsend and can make all the difference between success and failure in terms of working with somebody else. It builds instant trust and a deep level of rapport which might otherwise take months to achieve.

Wrap up This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of intuition. There is so much more to learn and it is applicable at so many different levels. The key things I want you to take from the training is how brilliant we already are at an intuitive level, how amazingly flexible we can be at learning and how easy it is to start accessing and using our intuitive skills on a daily basis.

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