How to Rule the World from Your Couch
Autor Laura Dayen Limba Engleză Paperback – 8 dec 2010
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781439123584
ISBN-10: 1439123586
Pagini: 288
Ilustrații: 2-C thru-out
Dimensiuni: 140 x 210 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.26 kg
Editura: ATRIA
Colecția Atria Books
ISBN-10: 1439123586
Pagini: 288
Ilustrații: 2-C thru-out
Dimensiuni: 140 x 210 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.26 kg
Editura: ATRIA
Colecția Atria Books
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Notă biografică
Laura Day is the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Intuition and has spent over two decades helping companies as well as individuals use the power of intuition to achieve their dreams. Her global clientele includes celebrities, scientists, business executives, and other professionals. She speaks regularly both here and abroad, and has appeared in numerous publications (Marie Claire, People Magazine, Newsweek) and on television including CNN, The View, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Fox News, and Good Morning America.
Extras
How to Rule the World from Your CouchCHAPTER 1
He whom the ancients called an expert in battle gained victory where victory was easily gained. Thus the battle of an expert is never an exceptional victory, nor does it win him reputation for wisdom or credit for courage. His victories in battle are unerring. unerring means that he acts where victory is certain, and conquers an enemy that has already lost.
—SUN TZU
How to Rule the World from Your Couch is meant to inspire you to be fully aware, conscious, active, dynamic, and alive in every single moment of your life. Much of this can be done in your pajamas, in total comfort, from wherever you want to be and with the people you want to be with, as you move through what we all know as “normal life.” The “normal life” you want. You do not have to be full of get-up-and-go to have success, find love, or earn a living. There are tools, innate tools that permit you to do much of the heavy lifting without your feet even touching the floor.
For more than twenty years, I have used and taught these tools to make businesses stronger, to help people find love, heal their own bodies, communicate with loved ones from afar, talk to their children when their children were unwilling to listen, to make better decisions to change the future in the immediate present, and to help people understand how to create their own dreams. Some of these dreams seemed impossible to achieve at the outset. From challenges such as these, techniques were developed to create dazzling results in less time with less work. As I will explain, most of the techniques can be initiated from your couch—by using every human being’s ability to utilize the common field in which we all live to transmit and receive information and motivation and to build a reality that others share. In these pages are the compiled experiences of what works. Many of these practices will not fit into your concept of reality. Try them first, and then judge for yourself. Good scientists are always skeptics, but they do not allow their skepticism to keep them from committing 100 percent to a hypothesis. Commit yourself 100 percent for the length of a single exercise, and then, like a good scientist, document everything. You will be astounded by the results that you are able to create.
Living as we do in a culture of “experts,” my greatest pleasure is to make you become your own best expert. In doing so, you also become an expert for your families, friends, companies, and culture. Pardon the cliché, but together, we really can create a better world. This world really, truly starts from your personal and individual experience—your very own power and ability to create the world that you want. When you know how easy it is to create this unique world, what is born is not insatiable desire, but rather unstoppable generosity.
I am an introvert. Although I have now, after fifty years of life, trained myself to look comfortable and animated in public, I am my happiest and most productive on my couch, surrounded by my life and loved ones, where, in my own domain of peace, I can direct my intuitive ability to create and direct the changes that I want, as well as attract the things/people/experiences I want without having to go out into the world. I am now thankful to be gifted in skills that allow me to have a full life, replete with friends, love, work, and entertainment, which is all made possible, for the most part, right from my couch. Now I pass down these skills to you.
In my first book, Practical Intuition, I presented practical techniques to help readers develop their intuitive abilities. In my next two books, Practical Intuition for Success and Practical Intuition in Love, I showed readers how to apply these techniques in their professional and romantic lives, while developing a variety of advanced intuitive skills such as telepathy and precognition. In How to Rule the World from Your Couch, I introduce and explain the various levels on which pure intuition can operate and demonstrate how they are always applicable and alive—even when (especially when!) you’re just sitting there.
Let me hit you with something else: Have you ever experienced, in a fully visceral, soul-talking-directly-to-you kind of way, a shockingly clear, unbelievably useful piece of intuitive information, a tiny morsel of data that you simply, for the life of you, could not explain away? Have you ever just known something not just because you knew it, but more because you sensed it? Many of my students and clients (from doctors, engineers, and market analysts to businesspeople of all varieties, scientists, lawyers, and beyond) have come to their own sense of intuition just this way—through some unexplainable flash of insight, or perhaps triggered by something I said that worked for them. Regardless of how or under what circumstances it occurs, when tapped into purely, intuition and insight become the breath of life. My clients may have been skeptical, but as pragmatists, they knew they could not ignore what they themselves had experienced firsthand. I believe that intuitively they knew they had tapped into a new way of navigating. This sense made them hungry to know more and perhaps even led them to me. Though they may still be skeptics, guess what: they use these skills regularly anyway.
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military sage, said, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought”—and this wise and profound message is exactly what this book is about. Engaging in battle is a waste of time. Goals can be achieved and, in fact, are achieved effectively only when you use your intuition to map the way before you start the journey, anticipating and avoiding obstacles, arriving at landmarks in the right order with proper timing, and, when you can, following the scenic route.
We live in a world of constant activity, always doing, in motion, on task. The reality is that your truest successes come not only from what you do, but more so from your preparedness and ability to gather needed information in advance. The doing piece is actually tiny, but only if you have laid down the proper foundation of readiness. Everything is available. Your only task at hand is to position yourself properly to receive it. Think of yourself as a perfectly designed state-of-the-art radio. You may be able to send and receive all the right signals—but only if your power is on.
Everything you learn in this book will make your decisions better, your relationships stronger, your actions more effective, and your life easier. Each of these abilities can become part and parcel of every decision you make. You will notice that as you hone your intuition, you will be engaged in a lot of inner work. Try to remember that your subconscious can use your intuition to punish you, just as it can attempt to help you. That is why it is so important to be as conscious of your process and motivation as possible, which is why I believe documentation of your work is critical. Remember that you have the ability, through intuition, to know what is coming and how to prepare. Your history, patterns, areas of self-sabotage, reactions, and even your beliefs are what cause you to take the painful path, ignore the obvious, and create bothersome or even disastrous challenges. Think of it this way: even in the most war-torn countries there are people who survive and thrive and help others do the same—and they are the truest intuitives among us.
The goal of this book is to make me, and books like this, obsolete. As you work through each chapter, you will find that your intuition will start to give you a more accurate view of your targets, and you will become a clearer, more powerful, and more direct person. Intuition itself, as I will explain, gives you the power, the questions, and the answers. It gives you the tools to create, to change, and to teach others, as well as the ability to be taught effectively by those around you. The main problem that everyone seems to share is the inability to understand that less work can yield more results. By “work,” I mean the energy that we expend on the wrong things, creating the layers of complexity that we (as human beings with elaborate psyches) tend to (unconsciously) add to the different scenarios in our lives. Think about it: how can adding complexity to a situation possibly be effective? For this reason, I don’t advocate the “no pain no gain” philosophy of life. Pain consumes time, energy, resources, and attention. I hope for you to be able to refine your intuition to simplify, enrich, and energize your life, so that reaching your goals becomes an organic part of living every day.
The problem is that we are not even conscious half the time that we are adding complexity to our lives, but as you will see, by learning to access our intuition we can start to clear the fog of these self-imposed challenges. In this way, we can learn to simplify the complex in order to find the shortest or most pleasurable line between you and your goals—whatever they may be.
Intuition, you see, is innate. It is part of our human hard-wiring, to the point that two-year-olds rely on it to survive and accomplish incredible things, mostly because they do not yet have access to things like intellect, wisdom, or experience. Intuition is so simple that if you merely do the exercises at the beginning of each chapter (even without first reading the chapter), over time, through firsthand experience your intuition will start to fill in some of the blanks. I, as your guide through this process, have created and organized a program of experiences and tools in the form of the book’s chapters to speed up your subconscious process—but it is for the sole purpose of helping you to access and allow your intuition to take over. You will see that as you start to let go of the thinking, and actually start intuiting, you will have more time, energy, and wherewithal to really enjoy this process and your life by easily creating success.
The process, in theory, is very straightforward and will be laid out at the beginning of each chapter. The real challenge will be to apply these techniques efficiently to your life, simply because you are complex and the world is complex, and because what you potentially are able to do and what your beliefs, patterns, and subconscious will allow you to do are two markedly different things. Part of the work of this book will be to give you a direct experience of intuition in a way that has a verifiable and palpable effect on your life. It will do so by helping you to ask the right questions and by engaging you in effective practices that will help to bring these simple, innate abilities to life. To your life.
My goal is that the advice written in this book will prove itself to you, once applied. I’ll give you an example: the best first-time student I ever had told me that he didn’t believe in intuition. He attended my workshop as a favor to his wife and scared himself silly when, within thirty minutes, he got detailed, accurate information about someone he had never met just from holding the person’s name in a blank, sealed envelope.
If I can leave my students with any bottom line, it is this: do not complicate intuition. Just practice accessing it, document the process, and it will do the rest. Don’t worry about doing it right. There is no right. I will start off with broad and somewhat non-linear abstract exercises at the beginning of each chapter, and we will get more detailed as the chapter progresses. You may even find that my details are unnecessary. You will see that if you keep working through the exercises in each chapter, you will quite naturally find your own way.
Typically, self-help authors have insight because they were forced to find it to survive. Survival is a powerful motivator. I remember being nine years old; my parents had separated and my mother was lying in a coma in a hospital. I was not allowed into intensive care. Unbelievable as it may seem, my father was not notified for days and my grandmother, who couldn’t bear the public hospital, had gone home. I was essentially alone, sitting outside intensive care, treating the indigents to coffee and snacks from a vending machine to keep myself distracted.
I “communicated” with my mother the only way that I could: I sent her my energy in the form of breath, thoughts, feelings, pictures, and memories—and in this way brought her back to me. I could tell her that I needed her with all of my senses, pleading with her to live. As I did this I could experience her body. I could feel my attention doing things inside her to fix her. Some of what I “saw” confused me. There was a hole in her neck, tubes coming out of her arms, and bed sores forming on her bottom, shoulders, and legs. I hadn’t actually seen my mother or received any information about her other than the fact that she was in intensive care; however, in some effortlessly concrete manner, deep inside me, I somehow knew that these were her circumstances and saw the full reality of what that could mean.
Someone noticed me wandering around the halls and sent a chaplain over to speak with me. I didn’t want to hear what I knew he was going to say. He began, “Your mother’s brain is badly damaged and it is unlikely that she will ever wake up. If she does wake up she won’t ever be the person you knew again.” To get him to stop speaking so I could keep from crying I asked him questions about facts I “saw.” I asked him about the tubes, the sores, and the machines I had seen in my mind’s eye. He answered me calmly, and then he looked at me and said that it was unfair to me that they had let me into the intensive care ward. I corrected him and explained that I had not been in the ICU. He asked me how I saw all of these things if I hadn’t been in there. I didn’t know how to answer him; I only knew that my intuition had been right.
I also felt and heard her and her future. I knew that this time, she would live and fully recover (as she did), but also that I wouldn’t have her forever. Did I have the emotional maturity to understand all of this information? No. But whatever I did understand intuitively helped me to help her survive and gave me enough information to prepare for her suicide a few years later (fortunately, I didn’t get the whole picture, which would have devastated me). I spent the next few years filling myself up with her and treasuring every moment. I also spent the next few years with my “sight” so closely upon her that my intuition became sharper and more accurate (how she was, what she was doing, what I could do to make it easier). The day she died she was in Kansas (with her parents after my parents’ divorce), and I was in Philadelphia with a friend at a table tennis tournament. As a child I didn’t have enough information to know to call the police there, in an unfamiliar city, as I would have done in New York when I felt something bad happening to her. I called my relatives in the area (from a pay phone, using all the money I had on me) and no one was home. I was extremely anxious that whole afternoon, and when I returned home to New York that night my father told me that my mother was dead.
Now, did my intuition tell me that my mother was dying? No. That would have been too much information for my subconscious to handle. My intuition told me something might be very wrong, and I felt the need to try to check it out.
You will never see what is too much to bear, even if it is correct. That is why you need to constantly work on your own empowerment so that you know that you have the capacity and tools to survive and thrive even when what you “see” is initially devastating. The good news is that intuition works just as effectively during (and in creating) a positive experience. I have spent decades learning how to uncover this amazing tool in its various iterations and possibilities, so that it can be naturally used in daily life—and not only when the chips are down.
One of the most important aspects of understanding intuition is that it comes in a variety of related but distinct perceptual skills that we use haphazardly—and usually unconsciously—all of the time, which include:
• Gathering information—the flashes of insight gained without using traditional sources of information.
• Mediumship—the ability to become someone or something else with all of your senses and perceptions and to experience the world from that perspective, which allows you to work from within a person or situation—which for this purpose we will call a “target”—and to experience that perspective directly. When you experience something through mediumship, you are aware of the subtleties that can be perceived only from the inside looking out. What you lose in your own perspective, you gain in your target’s experience and opinion. You understand in subjective detail an evolving comprehension of your target as itself—how your target decides to move and change, what its biases may be, its needs, discomforts, and history—and you begin to see how all of this data that lives in its awareness can be useful to guide behavior. When my students first do a paired mediumship exercise, they are completely thrown off by the stark difference between such internal (personal) and external experiences. They begin to understand the significance of rechanneling their focus when they witness sweet, gentle-seeming people enraged during a mediumship exercise or irritable individuals, through mediumship, experiencing a calm.
• Telepathy—the ability to send and receive information from a distance, which allows you to engage in a comprehensive and unlimited dialogue with your environment and the people in it. This vital skill helps you negotiate, understand, attract, convince, and be present even at a distance. If telepathy is too “out there” for you, think of it simply as a form of positive “messaging”: your thoughts and focus become vital messengers to whatever or whomever it is that you wish to affect.
• Body heat telepathy—the ability to connect physically and emotionally with another from a distance.
• Remote viewing—the ability to perceive a physical location or person at a distance, which allows you to experience how a person or situation is structured and how to change that structure in a desired way. Although remote viewing can make you miss some of the details you might obtain from other modalities such as intuition or mediumship, it does give you the diagram in context, which in many situations is exactly the information that you need. Details can sometimes be misleading, as can perspective, when taken out of context. Remote viewing shows you the framework, along with its influences and relevant circumstances.
• Precognition—the ability to move a person or situation forward in time and accurately experience what will happen, which allows you to employ all of the skills above to predict possible outcomes with some level of accuracy and to make changes that will create the best possible scenario.
• Healing—the remote transfer of energy to produce a desired influence on a person or situation. You can do a healing on pretty much anything—to the point of even directing your energy to start your stalled car engine. When you perform healing, your primary goal is not to obtain data but to focus on an outcome and marshal all resources to create it. Healing uses all the spokes of your intuitive umbrella for the purpose of creating change in the physical world. When you do healing, you may be less aware or completely unaware of the information you are working with. Your practice is to impose an outcome, a specific energetic dynamic, on yourself, another person, or a situation. Healing requires a kind of singular focus that is the reverse of the “ask a question and allow the periphery in” model that will be discussed in the next chapter. You will notice, however, when performing a healing that the periphery of your attention will give you much intuitive information about your goal and how to create it.
As a practitioner, you can do a healing without ever reporting the information you are getting directly to your subject. However, you will find yourself telepathically negotiating with the subject the whole time. When your own body is the healing subject, a meet-and-greet called a “symptom dialogue” is helpful to separate the issue or illness from yourself, so that you have the leverage to move it toward healing. In this personal assessment, you lay out all your physical indicators, your blueprint for change. Just remember, the goal of any kind of healing is to change something to a desired state of functioning.
To learn to use these skills effectively, we will deal with each one separately. We’ll begin with intuition, since it is at the base of all the other skills. Afterward, you can feel free to skip to any of the other skills. The beauty of intuition is that as you work through each chapter you will find improvement in the area of your life where you use that particular skill (albeit unconsciously) the most.
I believe it is important to learn the individual spokes on the wheel of intuition as unique and separate skills, so that you can use them to verify one another’s information and perfect each skill to have a more accurate total process. The reality is that most people depend on one of the skills alone, almost to the exclusion of all the others, and sometimes you even become defined by a crutch—which, in turn, disables you from integrating the whole of your intuitive abilities to their fullest expression. You may, for example, start to see that you need to work on being less remote or less influenced by others’ thoughts. Or you may realize that you are abusing medium-ship because every time you are with someone, his or her needs feel like yours. You may be too engaged in perceiving what everyone else is thinking, or what is happening at a distance or in the future, to be grounded in the now, where you can plan and execute what you need to be whole, successful, and useful. Your intuitive abilities are senses that need to be regulated, directed, and managed like any other sense, because the power of intuition is such that it can go out of kilter and perhaps work against you. Feeling someone else’s opinion as your own is confusing, and reacting to what people are thinking or doing without being consciously aware of what you are reacting to can be disastrous.
As you refine your intuitive skills you will also be making timely and useful changes in the way you perceive and function in the world.
So, how do we learn that we possess these abilities? The answer is simple: need. When we need them, we intuitively call upon them, whether we are aware of it or not. The gift of unbearable need is such that those who have suffered a loss, especially in childhood, are especially gifted in unusual ways. The unfathomable makes you reach for tools you did not know existed, could not even have conceived of, and lets you use those tools to create safety and harmony.
But if you are working outside the parameters of extreme need, it is important to keep aware of what is in your field of control, what is at its edge, and what is out of your control. (I’m reminded of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”) This way you spend your energy wisely. You want intuition to be as reliable a tool as it can be, and to do this you need to have a sense of what you can influence or create most easily.
I will use the word effective a lot in this book. When you are effective in being healthy, having dynamic relationships, creating enough wealth, managing your day, your week, your year, your life, you have more time to experience the positive side of being alive.
Depression is rampant in our society, and it is often because we have a lot to do, and not enough time to do it. We never feel complete. There is always something missing, something off. When your needs, dreams, and goals aren’t met because you are exhausted and, therefore, not functioning effectively, you can either be downtrodden or, as I would like to argue, decide to live more effectively. You receive so much media “input” (to add to the influence of your history, parents, peer group, and community) about what you should want and who you should be, that it distracts you from getting what you really want, believe, and value. When you turn back inside and know what you really value and want, you get it. You cannot move in a hundred directions with success, but you can move in one powerful, single, integrated direction and fill a hundred needs effectively. When you put all of these intuitive skills together, that is exactly what you will be doing. Your health will help your relationship will create pleasure will create wealth will create community will create...
It doesn’t matter where you start. Intuition has the potential of being a circular chain of progress and positivity, one where you can jump right in whenever you want.
Intuition allows you to experience yourself and the world in its totality. Your actions (when guided by the various realms of your intuition) become commensurate with your skills, your skills then find the information to improve, and you will start to make choices to create and achieve goals. You will save time by predicting mistakes and avoiding them, as intuition works on your past to create a happier, better-functioning present, poising you for a more peaceful future—all of your separate parts working together to the benefit of the whole.
What exactly is this “whole”? The whole is comprised of your inner life and abilities; your outer life and achievements; your interpersonal life, past, present, and future; and your community life, or who you are in the world and how you can powerfully affect the world. Of course, this is a mouthful to describe the totality of the human condition, but if you try to understand it as an integrated essence of being, you can start to see it as an almost effortless, experiential, pleasurable, and conscious way to live.
Think of your life as the game board for this book. I also encourage you to consider that every technique is applicable to your business, your clients, your relationships, and all the parts of your existence. In every chapter, I include language and exercises to compel your family, colleagues, and friends to use their own intuitions as well. I have also included group exercises for those of you who wish to teach these techniques or experiment with them in your company training programs, as well as “initiations” to use as class icebreakers, training evenings, or community experiences. Intuition is a powerful way to demonstrate to people how useful we all are to one another.
Remember that the exercises are intended to teach you (experientially) how to integrate the intuitive skills you learn in each chapter into your life, until they are second nature for you. I know, life is busy. However, a little chunk of daily practice will be necessary for you to plug into the flow of intuition, and when you do, I guarantee you will be glad you did. I have included exercises that you can easily structure into each day, in ways that will make your thoughts and actions more effective. I hope that my suggestions will streamline your practice, and the positive results you experience will encourage you to use more intuition. Your practice will become your process. The exercises have also been structured to help you resolve issues in yourself and in your life that may get in the way of your success.
If you want to rule the world from your couch, I do need to point out some experiences and pitfalls that you may meet along the way as you attempt to integrate this book, and these skills, into your life. If you are aware of these impending snags, you will more easily be able to avoid them. Awareness is, in and of itself, a powerful and useful tool. The moment you become aware, you are already engaged with the world in a different way.
Here are the top ten ways to get in your own way:
1. Not keeping notes
2. Trying to remember every word in the instructions instead of simply experiencing the process
3. Not doing the exercises
4. Not applying the exercises to any real goals in your life
5. Engaging in mental debates with me about theory instead of doing the practice
6. Evaluating the usefulness of what you are learning before you learn it
7. Looking to others for immediate feedback and validation of your abilities
8. Not verifying the information that your intuition provides
9. Judging yourself and your ability as you work
10. Not knowing your goals
We tend to be our own worst enemy, which inevitably shuts us down and stunts our ability to use our most basic, innate intuitive abilities. We have subconscious goals that drive our mistakes, creating trouble, pain, and a sense of total failure. We work against ourselves, swimming upstream, struggling for the lead and falling behind. The exercises you do and the personal workbook you create will be ongoing tools to train your attention and heal the parts of you that block accurate intuitive information and cause you pain.
A note of caution regarding the abuse, or misunderstanding, of intuition: do not get carried away and think that intuition is a way for you to will your desires into actuality. You do actually have to play things out, take the necessary course of action in any given scenario, and not use intuition as an excuse for idleness and self-deception. My point is that you should not wait for intuition to solve your problems. Your process should become an active, engaging, hands-on, hearts-open progression that you will embark upon, a journey not unlike life itself. Don’t overmystify or romanticize intuition—any more than you would overmystify your sense of smell or hearing.
If you live life as a gamble, you don’t have to be an intuitive to know that at some point you are going to lose. That’s just how the math works. Life is an interactive crapshoot, but intuition gives you an edge. The trick is that you have to use it for it to work. Act on it and be courageous about addressing the parts of you, your expectations, and your illusions that get in the way. I have rarely met a person who, no matter how fantastic she thinks she is, knows how fantastic she really is. You are a lot more able than you think. No matter how together you think you have it now, no matter how successful you are, you cannot imagine, really imagine, being all that you can be. Intuition, however, can show you the reality of all that you can be and guide you on the path to getting there while still having time to read the paper and have a nice brunch.
What if your couch isn’t perfect, metaphorically speaking? What if your life, your relationships, your business, and your mind are all a fine mess? I say you can still rule the world, but you simply have to start with that first goal, perhaps acquiring a better couch, or a futon, or whatever that space of safety and success means for you. You have to know that order, discipline, and integrity will be necessary for any consistent or worthwhile result. You don’t even need to have faith when you have an effective process that you follow without fail. That process will differ for each of you according to your preferences, needs, character, and goals. Whoever you are, at whatever stage of life, you can always rule the world from your couch—or from any other place you may be perched.
I find that people often want a guru, and this is probably because we are conditioned to obey and accept others’ perceptions of the world and what they believe is correct/moral/the way. The truth is that everyone has access to all of his or her own answers, resources, and truth. There are no secrets or experts. When you use intuition, you are your own guru.
Most important, and if nothing else, please have fun with this book. Although these are powerful tools that should be used responsibly, they place you in direct communion with the part of you that is alive in the world, charting your own course, blazing your own trail.
In the beginning of each chapter, I ask you to do a process that will show you how to apply each chapter’s skill on a daily basis. These exercises are meant to put you in a situation where you do something without understanding it very well. They will tap into your innate ability to use the chapter’s skill, and you will begin to develop your own unique process of accessing data intuitively. Do whatever you understand and do it quickly, without overthinking it. You will feel off balance, confused, unsure. Intuition is not a linear process, and you have been raised in a linear environment.
The Quick Hits are very important training on reporting your data before you understand and evaluate it. The explanations will follow. Remember that intuition is not intended to be a long, complex process. It is designed by evolution to give us immediate, accurate, effective tools. Although you may not understand the way the Quick Hit works at first, after you have done it, you will have intuitively sketched out a process for yourself that by the end of the chapter you will understand.
You may find that you want to cull the perfect exercises from different chapters to build your own personal daily routine. I encourage you to create a personal workbook, unique to you and your life’s needs, which can become a personal template for you to document your experiences. Feel free to get creative with when and how you employ the exercises, knowing that the mere action of dipping into this domain lets you access the point where total consciousness meets unconsciousness, and begin the journey of knowing your true self.
If you are using this book for business or for another specific goal, it will help you find the power within and lead you toward answers in the world around you to create success. Intuition will create a map to get you to the goals that you want to achieve. The more detailed the map, the easier the journey will be, and intuition, when properly performed, will give great detail about the path. Remember that as you document all your perceptions, you have to be willing to risk being “wrong” in order to have the verifiable detail to prove you are right.
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Intuition has saved my skin a thousand times. When I have lacked clarity, intelligence, conviction, or even plain good sense to find my way, intuition has led me, eyes closed, to safety. Like many of you, it is sometimes hard for me to revisit the many desperate situations I have led myself into. It is with the deepest of gratitude that I acknowledge that instant knowing, the tug in the right direction: scenarios where I walked “accidentally” into loving arms as I was headed for a wall or tripped on the pot of gold just soon enough to save me. Life is full of miracles, this I have learned in fifty years, but they do not happen to us, they are of our own creation. We live in an interconnected universe, and when we guide ourselves into the fabric in the correct way, we live in abundance and community. Pain hurts. Whether your company is stumbling or your family at odds, your body unwell or your loneliness a burden—all pain hurts. All pain is agonizing. That we become tolerant of it is not a good thing. Throughout this unique process of healing, I wish to be a balm for you.
I have had the honor of training so many different kinds of people, from surgeons, engineers, psychologists, and college students needing a clear path, to teachers, future authors, and artists. When they are trained, they know that they can do things that the day before they didn’t believe in, or even entertain trying. Still, for many years my students and the companies I train have asked me for the linear intuitive steps: the one, two, three of using intuitive skills. I have complained that intuition—the instant flash of knowing, the impulse in the right direction against all logic, that turn on a dime that saves the day or the serendipitous miracle that sets everything right—is not linear, but I am nothing if not someone who desperately wants to give to others what they ask of me. So here it is. This is my tool kit for using your intuition every day in your life and business.
CHAPTER 1
An Overview
He whom the ancients called an expert in battle gained victory where victory was easily gained. Thus the battle of an expert is never an exceptional victory, nor does it win him reputation for wisdom or credit for courage. His victories in battle are unerring. unerring means that he acts where victory is certain, and conquers an enemy that has already lost.
—SUN TZU
How to Rule the World from Your Couch is meant to inspire you to be fully aware, conscious, active, dynamic, and alive in every single moment of your life. Much of this can be done in your pajamas, in total comfort, from wherever you want to be and with the people you want to be with, as you move through what we all know as “normal life.” The “normal life” you want. You do not have to be full of get-up-and-go to have success, find love, or earn a living. There are tools, innate tools that permit you to do much of the heavy lifting without your feet even touching the floor.
For more than twenty years, I have used and taught these tools to make businesses stronger, to help people find love, heal their own bodies, communicate with loved ones from afar, talk to their children when their children were unwilling to listen, to make better decisions to change the future in the immediate present, and to help people understand how to create their own dreams. Some of these dreams seemed impossible to achieve at the outset. From challenges such as these, techniques were developed to create dazzling results in less time with less work. As I will explain, most of the techniques can be initiated from your couch—by using every human being’s ability to utilize the common field in which we all live to transmit and receive information and motivation and to build a reality that others share. In these pages are the compiled experiences of what works. Many of these practices will not fit into your concept of reality. Try them first, and then judge for yourself. Good scientists are always skeptics, but they do not allow their skepticism to keep them from committing 100 percent to a hypothesis. Commit yourself 100 percent for the length of a single exercise, and then, like a good scientist, document everything. You will be astounded by the results that you are able to create.
Living as we do in a culture of “experts,” my greatest pleasure is to make you become your own best expert. In doing so, you also become an expert for your families, friends, companies, and culture. Pardon the cliché, but together, we really can create a better world. This world really, truly starts from your personal and individual experience—your very own power and ability to create the world that you want. When you know how easy it is to create this unique world, what is born is not insatiable desire, but rather unstoppable generosity.
I am an introvert. Although I have now, after fifty years of life, trained myself to look comfortable and animated in public, I am my happiest and most productive on my couch, surrounded by my life and loved ones, where, in my own domain of peace, I can direct my intuitive ability to create and direct the changes that I want, as well as attract the things/people/experiences I want without having to go out into the world. I am now thankful to be gifted in skills that allow me to have a full life, replete with friends, love, work, and entertainment, which is all made possible, for the most part, right from my couch. Now I pass down these skills to you.
In my first book, Practical Intuition, I presented practical techniques to help readers develop their intuitive abilities. In my next two books, Practical Intuition for Success and Practical Intuition in Love, I showed readers how to apply these techniques in their professional and romantic lives, while developing a variety of advanced intuitive skills such as telepathy and precognition. In How to Rule the World from Your Couch, I introduce and explain the various levels on which pure intuition can operate and demonstrate how they are always applicable and alive—even when (especially when!) you’re just sitting there.
Let me hit you with something else: Have you ever experienced, in a fully visceral, soul-talking-directly-to-you kind of way, a shockingly clear, unbelievably useful piece of intuitive information, a tiny morsel of data that you simply, for the life of you, could not explain away? Have you ever just known something not just because you knew it, but more because you sensed it? Many of my students and clients (from doctors, engineers, and market analysts to businesspeople of all varieties, scientists, lawyers, and beyond) have come to their own sense of intuition just this way—through some unexplainable flash of insight, or perhaps triggered by something I said that worked for them. Regardless of how or under what circumstances it occurs, when tapped into purely, intuition and insight become the breath of life. My clients may have been skeptical, but as pragmatists, they knew they could not ignore what they themselves had experienced firsthand. I believe that intuitively they knew they had tapped into a new way of navigating. This sense made them hungry to know more and perhaps even led them to me. Though they may still be skeptics, guess what: they use these skills regularly anyway.
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military sage, said, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought”—and this wise and profound message is exactly what this book is about. Engaging in battle is a waste of time. Goals can be achieved and, in fact, are achieved effectively only when you use your intuition to map the way before you start the journey, anticipating and avoiding obstacles, arriving at landmarks in the right order with proper timing, and, when you can, following the scenic route.
We live in a world of constant activity, always doing, in motion, on task. The reality is that your truest successes come not only from what you do, but more so from your preparedness and ability to gather needed information in advance. The doing piece is actually tiny, but only if you have laid down the proper foundation of readiness. Everything is available. Your only task at hand is to position yourself properly to receive it. Think of yourself as a perfectly designed state-of-the-art radio. You may be able to send and receive all the right signals—but only if your power is on.
Everything you learn in this book will make your decisions better, your relationships stronger, your actions more effective, and your life easier. Each of these abilities can become part and parcel of every decision you make. You will notice that as you hone your intuition, you will be engaged in a lot of inner work. Try to remember that your subconscious can use your intuition to punish you, just as it can attempt to help you. That is why it is so important to be as conscious of your process and motivation as possible, which is why I believe documentation of your work is critical. Remember that you have the ability, through intuition, to know what is coming and how to prepare. Your history, patterns, areas of self-sabotage, reactions, and even your beliefs are what cause you to take the painful path, ignore the obvious, and create bothersome or even disastrous challenges. Think of it this way: even in the most war-torn countries there are people who survive and thrive and help others do the same—and they are the truest intuitives among us.
The goal of this book is to make me, and books like this, obsolete. As you work through each chapter, you will find that your intuition will start to give you a more accurate view of your targets, and you will become a clearer, more powerful, and more direct person. Intuition itself, as I will explain, gives you the power, the questions, and the answers. It gives you the tools to create, to change, and to teach others, as well as the ability to be taught effectively by those around you. The main problem that everyone seems to share is the inability to understand that less work can yield more results. By “work,” I mean the energy that we expend on the wrong things, creating the layers of complexity that we (as human beings with elaborate psyches) tend to (unconsciously) add to the different scenarios in our lives. Think about it: how can adding complexity to a situation possibly be effective? For this reason, I don’t advocate the “no pain no gain” philosophy of life. Pain consumes time, energy, resources, and attention. I hope for you to be able to refine your intuition to simplify, enrich, and energize your life, so that reaching your goals becomes an organic part of living every day.
The problem is that we are not even conscious half the time that we are adding complexity to our lives, but as you will see, by learning to access our intuition we can start to clear the fog of these self-imposed challenges. In this way, we can learn to simplify the complex in order to find the shortest or most pleasurable line between you and your goals—whatever they may be.
Intuition, you see, is innate. It is part of our human hard-wiring, to the point that two-year-olds rely on it to survive and accomplish incredible things, mostly because they do not yet have access to things like intellect, wisdom, or experience. Intuition is so simple that if you merely do the exercises at the beginning of each chapter (even without first reading the chapter), over time, through firsthand experience your intuition will start to fill in some of the blanks. I, as your guide through this process, have created and organized a program of experiences and tools in the form of the book’s chapters to speed up your subconscious process—but it is for the sole purpose of helping you to access and allow your intuition to take over. You will see that as you start to let go of the thinking, and actually start intuiting, you will have more time, energy, and wherewithal to really enjoy this process and your life by easily creating success.
The process, in theory, is very straightforward and will be laid out at the beginning of each chapter. The real challenge will be to apply these techniques efficiently to your life, simply because you are complex and the world is complex, and because what you potentially are able to do and what your beliefs, patterns, and subconscious will allow you to do are two markedly different things. Part of the work of this book will be to give you a direct experience of intuition in a way that has a verifiable and palpable effect on your life. It will do so by helping you to ask the right questions and by engaging you in effective practices that will help to bring these simple, innate abilities to life. To your life.
My goal is that the advice written in this book will prove itself to you, once applied. I’ll give you an example: the best first-time student I ever had told me that he didn’t believe in intuition. He attended my workshop as a favor to his wife and scared himself silly when, within thirty minutes, he got detailed, accurate information about someone he had never met just from holding the person’s name in a blank, sealed envelope.
If I can leave my students with any bottom line, it is this: do not complicate intuition. Just practice accessing it, document the process, and it will do the rest. Don’t worry about doing it right. There is no right. I will start off with broad and somewhat non-linear abstract exercises at the beginning of each chapter, and we will get more detailed as the chapter progresses. You may even find that my details are unnecessary. You will see that if you keep working through the exercises in each chapter, you will quite naturally find your own way.
Typically, self-help authors have insight because they were forced to find it to survive. Survival is a powerful motivator. I remember being nine years old; my parents had separated and my mother was lying in a coma in a hospital. I was not allowed into intensive care. Unbelievable as it may seem, my father was not notified for days and my grandmother, who couldn’t bear the public hospital, had gone home. I was essentially alone, sitting outside intensive care, treating the indigents to coffee and snacks from a vending machine to keep myself distracted.
I “communicated” with my mother the only way that I could: I sent her my energy in the form of breath, thoughts, feelings, pictures, and memories—and in this way brought her back to me. I could tell her that I needed her with all of my senses, pleading with her to live. As I did this I could experience her body. I could feel my attention doing things inside her to fix her. Some of what I “saw” confused me. There was a hole in her neck, tubes coming out of her arms, and bed sores forming on her bottom, shoulders, and legs. I hadn’t actually seen my mother or received any information about her other than the fact that she was in intensive care; however, in some effortlessly concrete manner, deep inside me, I somehow knew that these were her circumstances and saw the full reality of what that could mean.
Someone noticed me wandering around the halls and sent a chaplain over to speak with me. I didn’t want to hear what I knew he was going to say. He began, “Your mother’s brain is badly damaged and it is unlikely that she will ever wake up. If she does wake up she won’t ever be the person you knew again.” To get him to stop speaking so I could keep from crying I asked him questions about facts I “saw.” I asked him about the tubes, the sores, and the machines I had seen in my mind’s eye. He answered me calmly, and then he looked at me and said that it was unfair to me that they had let me into the intensive care ward. I corrected him and explained that I had not been in the ICU. He asked me how I saw all of these things if I hadn’t been in there. I didn’t know how to answer him; I only knew that my intuition had been right.
I also felt and heard her and her future. I knew that this time, she would live and fully recover (as she did), but also that I wouldn’t have her forever. Did I have the emotional maturity to understand all of this information? No. But whatever I did understand intuitively helped me to help her survive and gave me enough information to prepare for her suicide a few years later (fortunately, I didn’t get the whole picture, which would have devastated me). I spent the next few years filling myself up with her and treasuring every moment. I also spent the next few years with my “sight” so closely upon her that my intuition became sharper and more accurate (how she was, what she was doing, what I could do to make it easier). The day she died she was in Kansas (with her parents after my parents’ divorce), and I was in Philadelphia with a friend at a table tennis tournament. As a child I didn’t have enough information to know to call the police there, in an unfamiliar city, as I would have done in New York when I felt something bad happening to her. I called my relatives in the area (from a pay phone, using all the money I had on me) and no one was home. I was extremely anxious that whole afternoon, and when I returned home to New York that night my father told me that my mother was dead.
Now, did my intuition tell me that my mother was dying? No. That would have been too much information for my subconscious to handle. My intuition told me something might be very wrong, and I felt the need to try to check it out.
You will never see what is too much to bear, even if it is correct. That is why you need to constantly work on your own empowerment so that you know that you have the capacity and tools to survive and thrive even when what you “see” is initially devastating. The good news is that intuition works just as effectively during (and in creating) a positive experience. I have spent decades learning how to uncover this amazing tool in its various iterations and possibilities, so that it can be naturally used in daily life—and not only when the chips are down.
One of the most important aspects of understanding intuition is that it comes in a variety of related but distinct perceptual skills that we use haphazardly—and usually unconsciously—all of the time, which include:
• Gathering information—the flashes of insight gained without using traditional sources of information.
• Mediumship—the ability to become someone or something else with all of your senses and perceptions and to experience the world from that perspective, which allows you to work from within a person or situation—which for this purpose we will call a “target”—and to experience that perspective directly. When you experience something through mediumship, you are aware of the subtleties that can be perceived only from the inside looking out. What you lose in your own perspective, you gain in your target’s experience and opinion. You understand in subjective detail an evolving comprehension of your target as itself—how your target decides to move and change, what its biases may be, its needs, discomforts, and history—and you begin to see how all of this data that lives in its awareness can be useful to guide behavior. When my students first do a paired mediumship exercise, they are completely thrown off by the stark difference between such internal (personal) and external experiences. They begin to understand the significance of rechanneling their focus when they witness sweet, gentle-seeming people enraged during a mediumship exercise or irritable individuals, through mediumship, experiencing a calm.
• Telepathy—the ability to send and receive information from a distance, which allows you to engage in a comprehensive and unlimited dialogue with your environment and the people in it. This vital skill helps you negotiate, understand, attract, convince, and be present even at a distance. If telepathy is too “out there” for you, think of it simply as a form of positive “messaging”: your thoughts and focus become vital messengers to whatever or whomever it is that you wish to affect.
• Body heat telepathy—the ability to connect physically and emotionally with another from a distance.
• Remote viewing—the ability to perceive a physical location or person at a distance, which allows you to experience how a person or situation is structured and how to change that structure in a desired way. Although remote viewing can make you miss some of the details you might obtain from other modalities such as intuition or mediumship, it does give you the diagram in context, which in many situations is exactly the information that you need. Details can sometimes be misleading, as can perspective, when taken out of context. Remote viewing shows you the framework, along with its influences and relevant circumstances.
• Precognition—the ability to move a person or situation forward in time and accurately experience what will happen, which allows you to employ all of the skills above to predict possible outcomes with some level of accuracy and to make changes that will create the best possible scenario.
• Healing—the remote transfer of energy to produce a desired influence on a person or situation. You can do a healing on pretty much anything—to the point of even directing your energy to start your stalled car engine. When you perform healing, your primary goal is not to obtain data but to focus on an outcome and marshal all resources to create it. Healing uses all the spokes of your intuitive umbrella for the purpose of creating change in the physical world. When you do healing, you may be less aware or completely unaware of the information you are working with. Your practice is to impose an outcome, a specific energetic dynamic, on yourself, another person, or a situation. Healing requires a kind of singular focus that is the reverse of the “ask a question and allow the periphery in” model that will be discussed in the next chapter. You will notice, however, when performing a healing that the periphery of your attention will give you much intuitive information about your goal and how to create it.
As a practitioner, you can do a healing without ever reporting the information you are getting directly to your subject. However, you will find yourself telepathically negotiating with the subject the whole time. When your own body is the healing subject, a meet-and-greet called a “symptom dialogue” is helpful to separate the issue or illness from yourself, so that you have the leverage to move it toward healing. In this personal assessment, you lay out all your physical indicators, your blueprint for change. Just remember, the goal of any kind of healing is to change something to a desired state of functioning.
To learn to use these skills effectively, we will deal with each one separately. We’ll begin with intuition, since it is at the base of all the other skills. Afterward, you can feel free to skip to any of the other skills. The beauty of intuition is that as you work through each chapter you will find improvement in the area of your life where you use that particular skill (albeit unconsciously) the most.
I believe it is important to learn the individual spokes on the wheel of intuition as unique and separate skills, so that you can use them to verify one another’s information and perfect each skill to have a more accurate total process. The reality is that most people depend on one of the skills alone, almost to the exclusion of all the others, and sometimes you even become defined by a crutch—which, in turn, disables you from integrating the whole of your intuitive abilities to their fullest expression. You may, for example, start to see that you need to work on being less remote or less influenced by others’ thoughts. Or you may realize that you are abusing medium-ship because every time you are with someone, his or her needs feel like yours. You may be too engaged in perceiving what everyone else is thinking, or what is happening at a distance or in the future, to be grounded in the now, where you can plan and execute what you need to be whole, successful, and useful. Your intuitive abilities are senses that need to be regulated, directed, and managed like any other sense, because the power of intuition is such that it can go out of kilter and perhaps work against you. Feeling someone else’s opinion as your own is confusing, and reacting to what people are thinking or doing without being consciously aware of what you are reacting to can be disastrous.
As you refine your intuitive skills you will also be making timely and useful changes in the way you perceive and function in the world.
So, how do we learn that we possess these abilities? The answer is simple: need. When we need them, we intuitively call upon them, whether we are aware of it or not. The gift of unbearable need is such that those who have suffered a loss, especially in childhood, are especially gifted in unusual ways. The unfathomable makes you reach for tools you did not know existed, could not even have conceived of, and lets you use those tools to create safety and harmony.
But if you are working outside the parameters of extreme need, it is important to keep aware of what is in your field of control, what is at its edge, and what is out of your control. (I’m reminded of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”) This way you spend your energy wisely. You want intuition to be as reliable a tool as it can be, and to do this you need to have a sense of what you can influence or create most easily.
I will use the word effective a lot in this book. When you are effective in being healthy, having dynamic relationships, creating enough wealth, managing your day, your week, your year, your life, you have more time to experience the positive side of being alive.
Depression is rampant in our society, and it is often because we have a lot to do, and not enough time to do it. We never feel complete. There is always something missing, something off. When your needs, dreams, and goals aren’t met because you are exhausted and, therefore, not functioning effectively, you can either be downtrodden or, as I would like to argue, decide to live more effectively. You receive so much media “input” (to add to the influence of your history, parents, peer group, and community) about what you should want and who you should be, that it distracts you from getting what you really want, believe, and value. When you turn back inside and know what you really value and want, you get it. You cannot move in a hundred directions with success, but you can move in one powerful, single, integrated direction and fill a hundred needs effectively. When you put all of these intuitive skills together, that is exactly what you will be doing. Your health will help your relationship will create pleasure will create wealth will create community will create...
It doesn’t matter where you start. Intuition has the potential of being a circular chain of progress and positivity, one where you can jump right in whenever you want.
Intuition allows you to experience yourself and the world in its totality. Your actions (when guided by the various realms of your intuition) become commensurate with your skills, your skills then find the information to improve, and you will start to make choices to create and achieve goals. You will save time by predicting mistakes and avoiding them, as intuition works on your past to create a happier, better-functioning present, poising you for a more peaceful future—all of your separate parts working together to the benefit of the whole.
What exactly is this “whole”? The whole is comprised of your inner life and abilities; your outer life and achievements; your interpersonal life, past, present, and future; and your community life, or who you are in the world and how you can powerfully affect the world. Of course, this is a mouthful to describe the totality of the human condition, but if you try to understand it as an integrated essence of being, you can start to see it as an almost effortless, experiential, pleasurable, and conscious way to live.
Think of your life as the game board for this book. I also encourage you to consider that every technique is applicable to your business, your clients, your relationships, and all the parts of your existence. In every chapter, I include language and exercises to compel your family, colleagues, and friends to use their own intuitions as well. I have also included group exercises for those of you who wish to teach these techniques or experiment with them in your company training programs, as well as “initiations” to use as class icebreakers, training evenings, or community experiences. Intuition is a powerful way to demonstrate to people how useful we all are to one another.
Remember that the exercises are intended to teach you (experientially) how to integrate the intuitive skills you learn in each chapter into your life, until they are second nature for you. I know, life is busy. However, a little chunk of daily practice will be necessary for you to plug into the flow of intuition, and when you do, I guarantee you will be glad you did. I have included exercises that you can easily structure into each day, in ways that will make your thoughts and actions more effective. I hope that my suggestions will streamline your practice, and the positive results you experience will encourage you to use more intuition. Your practice will become your process. The exercises have also been structured to help you resolve issues in yourself and in your life that may get in the way of your success.
If you want to rule the world from your couch, I do need to point out some experiences and pitfalls that you may meet along the way as you attempt to integrate this book, and these skills, into your life. If you are aware of these impending snags, you will more easily be able to avoid them. Awareness is, in and of itself, a powerful and useful tool. The moment you become aware, you are already engaged with the world in a different way.
Here are the top ten ways to get in your own way:
1. Not keeping notes
2. Trying to remember every word in the instructions instead of simply experiencing the process
3. Not doing the exercises
4. Not applying the exercises to any real goals in your life
5. Engaging in mental debates with me about theory instead of doing the practice
6. Evaluating the usefulness of what you are learning before you learn it
7. Looking to others for immediate feedback and validation of your abilities
8. Not verifying the information that your intuition provides
9. Judging yourself and your ability as you work
10. Not knowing your goals
We tend to be our own worst enemy, which inevitably shuts us down and stunts our ability to use our most basic, innate intuitive abilities. We have subconscious goals that drive our mistakes, creating trouble, pain, and a sense of total failure. We work against ourselves, swimming upstream, struggling for the lead and falling behind. The exercises you do and the personal workbook you create will be ongoing tools to train your attention and heal the parts of you that block accurate intuitive information and cause you pain.
A note of caution regarding the abuse, or misunderstanding, of intuition: do not get carried away and think that intuition is a way for you to will your desires into actuality. You do actually have to play things out, take the necessary course of action in any given scenario, and not use intuition as an excuse for idleness and self-deception. My point is that you should not wait for intuition to solve your problems. Your process should become an active, engaging, hands-on, hearts-open progression that you will embark upon, a journey not unlike life itself. Don’t overmystify or romanticize intuition—any more than you would overmystify your sense of smell or hearing.
If you live life as a gamble, you don’t have to be an intuitive to know that at some point you are going to lose. That’s just how the math works. Life is an interactive crapshoot, but intuition gives you an edge. The trick is that you have to use it for it to work. Act on it and be courageous about addressing the parts of you, your expectations, and your illusions that get in the way. I have rarely met a person who, no matter how fantastic she thinks she is, knows how fantastic she really is. You are a lot more able than you think. No matter how together you think you have it now, no matter how successful you are, you cannot imagine, really imagine, being all that you can be. Intuition, however, can show you the reality of all that you can be and guide you on the path to getting there while still having time to read the paper and have a nice brunch.
What if your couch isn’t perfect, metaphorically speaking? What if your life, your relationships, your business, and your mind are all a fine mess? I say you can still rule the world, but you simply have to start with that first goal, perhaps acquiring a better couch, or a futon, or whatever that space of safety and success means for you. You have to know that order, discipline, and integrity will be necessary for any consistent or worthwhile result. You don’t even need to have faith when you have an effective process that you follow without fail. That process will differ for each of you according to your preferences, needs, character, and goals. Whoever you are, at whatever stage of life, you can always rule the world from your couch—or from any other place you may be perched.
I find that people often want a guru, and this is probably because we are conditioned to obey and accept others’ perceptions of the world and what they believe is correct/moral/the way. The truth is that everyone has access to all of his or her own answers, resources, and truth. There are no secrets or experts. When you use intuition, you are your own guru.
Most important, and if nothing else, please have fun with this book. Although these are powerful tools that should be used responsibly, they place you in direct communion with the part of you that is alive in the world, charting your own course, blazing your own trail.
Note about the Quick Hits
In the beginning of each chapter, I ask you to do a process that will show you how to apply each chapter’s skill on a daily basis. These exercises are meant to put you in a situation where you do something without understanding it very well. They will tap into your innate ability to use the chapter’s skill, and you will begin to develop your own unique process of accessing data intuitively. Do whatever you understand and do it quickly, without overthinking it. You will feel off balance, confused, unsure. Intuition is not a linear process, and you have been raised in a linear environment.
The Quick Hits are very important training on reporting your data before you understand and evaluate it. The explanations will follow. Remember that intuition is not intended to be a long, complex process. It is designed by evolution to give us immediate, accurate, effective tools. Although you may not understand the way the Quick Hit works at first, after you have done it, you will have intuitively sketched out a process for yourself that by the end of the chapter you will understand.
Note about Personal Workbooks
You may find that you want to cull the perfect exercises from different chapters to build your own personal daily routine. I encourage you to create a personal workbook, unique to you and your life’s needs, which can become a personal template for you to document your experiences. Feel free to get creative with when and how you employ the exercises, knowing that the mere action of dipping into this domain lets you access the point where total consciousness meets unconsciousness, and begin the journey of knowing your true self.
If you are using this book for business or for another specific goal, it will help you find the power within and lead you toward answers in the world around you to create success. Intuition will create a map to get you to the goals that you want to achieve. The more detailed the map, the easier the journey will be, and intuition, when properly performed, will give great detail about the path. Remember that as you document all your perceptions, you have to be willing to risk being “wrong” in order to have the verifiable detail to prove you are right.
Intuition has saved my skin a thousand times. When I have lacked clarity, intelligence, conviction, or even plain good sense to find my way, intuition has led me, eyes closed, to safety. Like many of you, it is sometimes hard for me to revisit the many desperate situations I have led myself into. It is with the deepest of gratitude that I acknowledge that instant knowing, the tug in the right direction: scenarios where I walked “accidentally” into loving arms as I was headed for a wall or tripped on the pot of gold just soon enough to save me. Life is full of miracles, this I have learned in fifty years, but they do not happen to us, they are of our own creation. We live in an interconnected universe, and when we guide ourselves into the fabric in the correct way, we live in abundance and community. Pain hurts. Whether your company is stumbling or your family at odds, your body unwell or your loneliness a burden—all pain hurts. All pain is agonizing. That we become tolerant of it is not a good thing. Throughout this unique process of healing, I wish to be a balm for you.
I have had the honor of training so many different kinds of people, from surgeons, engineers, psychologists, and college students needing a clear path, to teachers, future authors, and artists. When they are trained, they know that they can do things that the day before they didn’t believe in, or even entertain trying. Still, for many years my students and the companies I train have asked me for the linear intuitive steps: the one, two, three of using intuitive skills. I have complained that intuition—the instant flash of knowing, the impulse in the right direction against all logic, that turn on a dime that saves the day or the serendipitous miracle that sets everything right—is not linear, but I am nothing if not someone who desperately wants to give to others what they ask of me. So here it is. This is my tool kit for using your intuition every day in your life and business.
Descriere
Bestselling author Laura Day, demonstrates how to tap deeper into your intuition to transform your relationships, health and financial situation.