The Crystal Workshop: A Journey into the Healing Power of Crystals - Azalea Lee 2020

How to Tap into Your Intuition

MOVIES SHOW PSYCHIC ABILITY in grandiose ways. Suddenly, a psychic is struck by a vision. Frozen in a trance, with the back of one hand on their forehead, they begin seeing visions of people and objects in graphic detail. A ghost speaks to a psychic, and the psychic hears the ghost’s words in coherent linear sentences. Or a psychic knocks books off of shelves, slides cars across the street, and throws people off cliffs solely with her powers of telekinesis!

Like so much of real life, intuition is nothing like what’s shown in movies. But because TV and films are the way most people are exposed to “psychic” ability, their understanding of it can be distorted. While these portrayals make for entertaining, dramatic scenes, they create misconceptions of how one actually receives intuitive impressions and how psychic ability truly works. Although the depictions have a small grain of truth, compared to reality, they are massive exaggerations. Like the famous filmmaking adage “Movies are life with the boring parts cut out,” true intuitive ability contains lots of “boring” parts. So if you have been looking for your intuition to present itself in a big, intense way, you’ve been missing it, for the majority of intuitive impressions are quiet and seemingly mundane. Thus, getting in touch with your intuition means letting go of expectations that your psychic ability will be anything like what you’ve seen on the big screen. Instead, it requires you to shift your focus into a subtle frequency where information often comes in glimpses and segments. And because you are unique, the way the intuitive information presents itself to you will be unique as well.

Though the word clairvoyant has been used as a catchall for psychic ability, the combination of its root words actually means “clear sight.” But clairvoyance specifically applies to the ability to “see” psychic impressions; that is, to get intuitive impressions visually through images and pictures. There is also clairaudience, meaning “clear hearing,” which is the ability to receive intuitive impressions through your psychic ears. Clairsentience refers to receiving intuitive information via your physical body through feelings, emotions, and other bodily sensations. Being empathic is a more specific form of clairsentience; you are intuiting the feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations that another person or being is experiencing. Claircognizance applies to those who just “know” information without any influence of outside information, facts, or logic. You can even be clairgustant, which means you get psychic information from smelling or tasting things, or clairalient, which means you can smell or taste things psychically!

Just as some people are naturally talented singers while others are gifted mechanics, athletes, or doctors, you too have natural intuitive talents. Though one of these sixth senses will be your strongest, it won’t be your only one. You will always have other “clairs” supporting you. And it is this unique combination of senses that gives you a fuller range of intuitive perception.

YOU ARE INTUITIVE

I cannot emphasize this enough: Everyone has intuitive ability. But the key to developing your abilities is understanding how your intuition works. Whereas some people have been born fully aware of their intuitive talents, others are karmically born into families, societies, or situations that actively suppress their intuitive abilities. Others are born into circumstances where intuitive abilities are not believed to exist. So until these people are able to access the information and training to develop their talents, their abilities will lie hidden, waiting to be discovered.

At this moment you may already know which sixth sense you favor. However, to make this ability more distinct and the information you receive from it clearer, you have to strengthen it. And then by developing your strongest intuitive ability, you will strengthen your other intuitive senses as well. The more you practice, the more skilled you will become, and you will gain abilities that you can never lose. Like wisdom, they will stay with you forever.

UNDERSTANDING HOW YOUR INTUITION SPEAKS TO YOU

Core to developing your intuition is understanding symbology.

A symbol can be interpreted through its universal meaning. For instance, the symbol of a heart universally represents love. The symbol of a house universally represents home or life at home. The color white often represents perfection, cleanliness, and the angelic realm. These examples are symbols with generally agreed-upon meanings, the kind of descriptions listed in dream dictionaries.

However, these are only generalized meanings of the symbols. Your personal relationship with each and every symbol is far deeper and more nuanced than any explanation that can be found in a book. For example, most people would agree that the butterfly is a symbol of transformation, but I have a cousin who loathes butterflies because of how erratically they fly. When she sees a butterfly, she sees something that is out of control. Thus, the symbol of a butterfly has a different personal meaning to her than it would for most.

Another example: The cross is known as the symbol of the Christian religion. But depending on your take on Christianity, the cross can represent the overwhelming love and grace of Christ consciousness or the energy of judgment, intolerance, and extreme dogma. If you were a medieval Mongol, the Christian cross would represent the sacred directions of north, south, east, and west.

Thus the personal meanings of your symbols are influenced by your own experience and the culture you grew up in. For instance, if you were born into a Western culture, a white house could symbolize cleanliness and perfection within a home, while if you grew up in an Asian culture, the color white might mean mourning and death, making your interpretation of the symbol of a white house “home of death.” If you happen to be someone with both cultures influencing your life, a closer look at the details of the symbol can offer clues to help you determine if the white color is in reference to Asian or Western culture or, perhaps, to your own personal symbolism. For example, the white house may be Chinese in style, or perhaps midcentury California modern, or the color of a dollhouse you once had. In each case, your personal relationship to the symbol would greatly influence its meaning. And noticing how the different details interact provides additional information to glean from the symbol as well.

Unraveling your personal meanings helps sort through the information hidden within your symbols so that you are able to see how your intuition likes to communicate with you. And by knowing your personal symbols you are able to access your talents in other divinatory arts. For example: One way crystal balls are used for divinatory readings is through symbology. Much like finding shapes in passing clouds, some crystal ball readers look for symbols in the layers of wisps, bubbles, and inclusions within the interior of the crystal ball. Once they see a symbol, they reference their own personal symbol dictionary to decipher its meaning and convey this information to the recipient. This technique of seeing symbols within a physical medium is known as scrying and is also the basis of divinatory readings that use tea leaves, coffee grounds, a fire’s flames, smoke, water, and even patterns of light dancing on walls. In every method, the reader looks for symbols. But the only symbols that will appear will be the ones that the reader has a personal connection to—otherwise the symbol will not appear to them at all.

Understanding your personal symbols is also essential to interpreting your dreams. When you are physically awake, your perception is focused on linear time. But in the dream state, time is flexible. You can move forward and backward in time with relative ease—the hallmark of multidimensional experience. But the seemingly random experiences happening in your dream state are actually multidimensional information that has been compressed to fit your linear perception. Since it is your dream, it uses your symbols, which makes you the best person to unpack it and make sense of what it was trying to tell you.

So now that you understand how important your personal symbols are, it is time to begin recording the symbols that appear in your life.

You’ve actually already done this. . . .

EXERCISE 4

Learning to Tap into Your Intuition

WARNING: If you have not done the previous exercises, stop here. Go back and do all the exercises in order!

Now that you have done the previous exercises, it’s time to take them to the next level! Remember your observation notes for exercise 1? Although it was an exercise in observation, it was also secretly an exercise in picking up symbols! Here’s what to do now:

1. Go back to your list and begin circling all the “symbols” you saw. Circle every object, color, sound, tactile experience—basically, anything that could be interpreted as a symbol. If you have adjectives that further describe something, as in the phrase “blue house,” circle that as a whole symbol.

2. On another page, create two columns. In the left-hand column, write down the list of symbols that you saw. For compound symbols (like “blue house”) write down “blue house,” “blue,” and “house” each as separate symbols.

3. In the right-hand column, write down what each corresponding symbol personally means to you. Notes to help you:

• If you’ve written down “red,” try and remember what kind of red you saw. If you don’t remember, that’s okay. But if you do, note what shade it was. Then, in column 2, do your best to clarify what the specific color means to you.

• Colors also affect the meanings of objects they are paired with. (While alone “cherry red” may mean “adolescent fun,” and “car” may represent “a way to travel from one place to another,” the combination of the two symbols into “cherry-red car” may produce an entirely different meaning, like “car for someone who likes to show off.”)

• Similarly, if you’ve written down “slate-blue house” as a symbol, elaborate further on its specific details. A “Victorian slate-blue house” will have a different meaning than a “modernist slate-blue house.”

• Add to column 2 how each individual object/symbol makes you feel. If an object makes you feel happy, ask yourself what kind of happiness you feel. “Kid on Christmas morning” happy, or “I get to sleep in on Saturday” happy—these are different kinds of happiness. You’ll get more information out of your symbol if you distinguish the exact shade of feeling you get from it.

4. Do a second pass. See if you can “squeeze out” deeper information about your symbols. Write down everything, even if it doesn’t make sense now. Notes to help you:

• One way to get into the deeper meaning of the symbol is to become the symbol. Close your eyes and inhabit the symbol. If you wrote down “pigeon,” imagine turning into the pigeon you saw. When you take its form, do you get a better sense of what it/you represent?

• Each symbol always has additional layers of information. The more you explore them, the more information you will be able to extract. One way you can do this is by free-associating your symbols with memories from your life. For instance: If you wrote down “cherry-red car,” recall any situation that it reminds you of. Perhaps it makes you think of a car that you once admired, or of a boy you knew in school who had one, or maybe even a toy car you used to play with. Then ask yourself what you associate with the circumstance. Maybe the cherry-red car you admired was one you had wanted to own, the boy with the cherry-red car was someone you had a crush on, or you got to play with a cherry-red toy car when you visited your cousins out of state. Connected to your symbols are memories that are loaded with information to glean. So if you find yourself thinking of the boy with the cherry-red car, you could think about how you felt about the boy, what about him you gravitated toward, how you felt about yourself at that time of your life, and what your takeaway is now that you can look back at your life. By connecting your symbols to past experiences, you are able to go deeper into your symbols and glean richer information from them.

Continuing the same example used in exercise 2, the following is an abbreviated excerpt of a few of the symbols deciphered by this person:

Now that you have thoroughly completed the exercises, it’s time to reveal the magic to yourself. Remember exercise 3, when you wrote down a question about your life? Pull it out and look at it alongside the list of symbols and meanings you just made.

Do you see a relationship between your question and the symbols you just deciphered?

Do you see how you answered your own question?

Can you now see how intuitive you already are?