How might we become more intuitive?

Elizabeth Mayer writes” “Helen Palmer was the last name on my list of professional intuitives. I’d listened to a taped session she’d done with a client I knew well, and I’d been impressed by her description of people and family dynamics with which I was very familiar. She’d also written a number of best-selling books and taught courses and workshops on psychological intuition. I scheduled a phone session with her, once again telling her nothing beyond my name. She promptly focused on the fact that she saw me writing something. My first response was my familiar knee-jerk skepticism. Lots of people write, I said to myself. My voice sounds educated. It’s hardly a surprising guess. People write all the time. And if they don’t, they feel flattered when someone tells them they’re writers underneath. None of what she’s saying counts as remarkable.

“Then Helen told me precisely how I was missing the boat on an article I’d been struggling to finish. And suddenly I was hearing just what I needed in order to shift gears entirely. By the end of our conversation, I had a mental outline of a brand-new paper. Two months later, it was off to the publishers. It was precisely the paper Helen told me I was wanting to write. At the very least, she’d saved me months of unproductive work. At most, she’d salvaged a paper that was on its way to the junk heap.

“Helen Palmer has written extensively about intuition and travels all over the world through her school, which teaches people to develop intuitive abilities. How does she access that intuition?

Maybe 75 percent of the process lies in getting empty enough to watch the different inputs of my mind. I follow my abdominal breathing until thoughts and feelings recede. The emptiness feels very nourishing, very soft and intimate. You lose awareness of the room, your body, and your face. That all goes, but there’s a separate awareness that stays. I need time to get empty, so I’m not anticipating, not resisting anything that wants to appear, before I focus on anything. Otherwise I get confused about where I am inside and can’t tell the difference between an accurate impression and my own fantasy projections.

Once you’re internalized, you establish a focal object, not trying for anything. The focal object is an imagined representation of whatever you need to contact. It could be a meditation symbol that you want to unite with, or an inner picture of some real-world event. You focus, and then wait. You doubt and you stay there anyway. You just keep shifting attention back to the focal object, until it starts to capture your attention. Then you’re ready. The process is the same if you’re focused on a ‘world’ question or knowing about spiritual matters, but it takes very precise concentration for spiritual knowing.

I’ve used the same contemplative exercises for wrapping imagination around a focal object for maybe thirty years. You just keep allowing the object to enhance in your imagination until it stops fluctuating. First the emptying phase, then the focusing phase. You clear the inner space, and then target the object. I maintain concentration by imagining the object as beautiful until the picture in my mind becomes so vivid and believable that it starts to play itself out. I don’t try for content or information. I just lose a sense of separation from the impression and take in whatever it shows. I think that focused imagination connects ordinary consciousness with a greater reality, so if you keep oscillating between enhancing the focus and receiving what it shows, a close relationship forms between the observer and the observed.

Meanwhile, you are so far removed from the room and yourself and the passage of time that you become whatever that focus is, so you know it from the inside. You participate with whatever you’re reading in a certain sense. You read another person accurately because you are them; you know them from the inside because you’ve stopped being separate. Then the thing is to track how you yourself get in the way. You have to make sure your placements of attention are precise so you’re not projecting. That’s why my teaching is so focused on knowing yourself and what you’re likely to project into a reading; that’s the only way to get reliable information with intuition.

Intuition operates from a different state than ordinary consciousness: quite decisively different from ordinary consciousness. If you don’t know that, if you don’t know how to shift back and forth between states, then you can start to feel very crazy, especially when you can’t immediately verify what you know. You need a conceptual framework that keeps you feeling normal. That’s essential. I did feel unstable early on, not about the states I went into, which were comforting, actually, but I felt such a terrible loneliness. I felt like a freak.

As I learned more, I realized the amazing thing was to be so located. My clairvoyance could locate people at a distance or at different points in time, so any accuracy on my part automatically located us both in a greater reality that people need to know is kindly and real. Clairvoyance isn’t a mind-to-mind thing, like reading people’s thoughts. It lets us see a much larger pattern of existence.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 43-55.

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