There is an unfortunate misunderstanding in our culture about the nature of intuition. Let me first address what intuition isn’t.

• Intuition is not having visions

Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying that you can’t have intuitive visions, or visionary intuition, but that intuition is not, fundamentally, either of those things.

• Intuition is not precognitions of doom

It’s quite possible to have intuitive “hits” about upcoming disasters, misfortunes, and otherwise doomful things, but this is the exception, and not the rule.

• Intuition is not an emotional sense

Intuition, real intuition, is not a sudden experience of fear when thinking about your mother dying. It’s not looking at someone you care about and suddenly being grief-stricken knowing that they have an incurable illness that they don’t know they have yet but you miraculously do.

• Intuition is rarely direct

My experience of my intuition is that it rarely is a bell ringing followed by the voice of God telling me something that’s true in no uncertain terms. “Your sister is going to have a baby!” says God, and “Oh!” says I - is not how it tends to work.

Intuition is, in fact, a very dry experience. It’s not emotionally loaded; emotional weight is a good sign that you’re having an imaginative experience and not an intuitive one. Let me reiterate: if you look at a friend and suddenly experience fear that they’re going to die in a plane crash tonight, you can be relatively confident that you’re not getting an intuitive hit on their death, just subjecting yourself to an emotional flight of fancy.

If, on the other hand, you look at a stranger and have a sudden thought about them having a baby soon, and you just don’t care in the slightest and can’t even figure out why you’d have that thought, that may well be an intuitive data point. But referring to my last bullet point above about the indirectness of intuition, I want to add that that thought about the stranger having a baby does not necessarily mean that that stranger is going to have a baby in a literal sense. It might. It might also mean that that stranger is about to birth a new creative endeavor, is starting a new business venture, is close to reclaiming his or her childlike wonder of the world… who knows!

Only you can or do. No one else can interpret your intuitive symbolism for you, any more than someone else can really accurately interpret your dreams; or if they can, it’s only because they have practice interpreting other people’s symbolic sets. The symbolic meanings of dreams, like intuitive data points, are based entirely on the experiencer’s internal metaphorical and symbolic languages. This means you need to practice associating intuitive symbolism and understanding with its physical-world correlate if you want to improve your intuitive abilities.

This brings me to the major point. We’re all intuitive. We’re born screamingly intuitive, with massive amounts of information flooding our tiny post-natal brains constantly until we develop functional filters based on the types of information our parents and others around us are interacting with. We have gut instincts and hunches that tell us how to survive, first, and then lead us, if we let them, into doing what we were born to do.

If your intuition isn’t a regular and steady presence in your life, if you don’t feel like you know what your intuition feels like when it lands, how to interpret it, or how to get intuitive guidance without feeling like a flaky new ager who has to carry crystals around everywhere in order to figure out what to order for lunch, or even if your intuition does guide and lead you, but you want to develop it and take it to the next level, may I very strongly recommend the following:

• Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss
• Energy Anatomy, by Carline Myss