Gifted natural intuitives are able to sense what others are thinking and feeling, to perceive bioenergy imbalances or blocks, to identify illnesses, to see human and nature spirits and angels, and to look into the past and future of a situation.

For most of us with lesser gifts, it may take a while to discover and develop confidence in intuitive perceptions, especially if we open to these awarenesses after years of focusing primarily on outer world perceptions.

Quieting and focusing the mind through imagery or meditation are common ways of shutting off outer distractions and increasing inner focus, facilitating greater access to intuition. You might picture a blank screen in your mind, inviting intuitive images to appear on the screen, in answer to questions that you focus on. You might enter a quiet meditation after pondering a question, inviting images or ideas to surface during or after the meditation. Sleeping on a problem, after programming your mind to search for ideas can produce dramatic results.

Kinesiology is another aid to accessing intuition. It is estimated that only 5% of the capacity of the mind is within conscious awareness. Your body can help you access the other 95% through communication with your unconscious mind. Here is an experiential exercise that illustrates this process.

Rub your first finger across the thumbnail of the same hand (like a bow across the strings of a violin), as you ask yourself, “What does YES feel like?” Repeat this, asking, “What does NO feel like?”

Play with your intuition, make it your friend. Use it to help you solve problems small and large. Stay open to let it speak even when it is uninvited. Those may be the most important times for it to help you.

We must be cautious, however, in using these methods - remembering that our expectations, wishes and fears may influence the answers that our unconscious mind brings forth. These will introduce errors. The degree to which we achieve correct answers is a reflection of the degree to which we are able to stay centered and clear of all anticipations for outcomes.

Spiritual healing and intuition
Healers often have well developed intuitive abilities. They may know intuitively what the problems are, physical and psychological factors that contributed to the development of the problems, where to put their hands and how long to hold them there during healings, what resistances in the healee may block the progress of healings, and whether various treatments are likely to be helpful.

“Charlotte,” a gifted healer, can hold a medicine or vibrational remedy in her hand and know whether it is right for a given healee. She can scan a shelf full of remedies and her eye or hand will be guided to the ones that are appropriate for a healee. (She also finds this gift helpful in scanning menus in restaurants for the tastiest and nutritionally best options.)

Ethics of intuitive assessments
People worry that intuitives may be able to read their minds like a book, with a potential for invading their privacy. Intuition simply doesn’t work that way. When intuitives do readings on a person, they may get some specific information relating to the questions the person being read is wanting to have answered. As we have found through surveys and laboratory studies, the information often arrives in imagery that is meaningless to the intuitive but highly meaningful to the person.

Having said this, there remain instances in which detailed information can be read by intuitives. This would seem to be the stuff that spy stories are made of, and indeed there is evidence that the US has explored psychic spying (Targ and Harrary 1984).