PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR INTUITION

           Copyright 1994 Marcia Yudkin.  You may reproduce this
           entire electronic disk and pass it on as shareware.  All
           other rights reserved.  Excerpted from THE CREATIVE GLOW: 
           HOW TO BE MORE ORIGINAL, INSPIRED & PRODUCTIVE IN YOUR
           WORK, Volume I, #4.

               Whenever Stan, an internist, thought about continuing
           in private practice, his body felt heavy, while whenever he
           thought about becoming a corporate wellness consultant, he
           felt light. Just before she walked down the aisle to get
           married, my friend Alice heard a voice inside telling her,
           "You shouldn't be doing this." While listening to a
           consulting client, Corinne got an image of a fish flapping
           on land. In these three situations, people were
           experiencing the nudge, the call, the appearance of
           intuition.

               Call it our "sixth sense," "hunches," "gut feelings,"
           "vibes," "going on instinct" or just "knowing deep inside"
           -- intuition has been gaining credibility in world affairs,
           business and other realms where our need to know often
           outstrips available facts. Devotees include President
           George Bush, who publicly proclaimed his premonitions about
           Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War and designer Donna
           Karan, who has admitted that she guesses the fashions
           people will be ready for next season by "gut instinct."

               Although experts disagree on how to define and explain
           the phenomenon, there's near-consensus that even the most
           analytical, literal-minded folks can open up to the keener
           judgments, uncanny perception and fruitful inspiration
           possible through paying attention to our subtle intuitive
           signals.

               To add intuition to your repertoire of skills, try
           these five steps.

           1. OBSERVE YOURSELF. 
           Catalogue the times you can remember having a funny feeling
           about someone, hearing inner voices or knowing something
           that went beyond the evidence. Then stay alert for these
           phenomena in your everyday life. According to many who have
           studied intuition, its messages arrive untinged by hope or
           fear, although feelings like panic or joy may closely
           follow in reaction to the particular message. Nancy
           Rosanoff, author of Intuition Workout, offers the Law of
           Three as another guideline for recognizing intuition:  Let
           the idea go. If it comes back, let it go again. If it
           appears a third time, you're usually safe accepting it as
           genuine.

           2. PRACTICE COURTING INTUITION. 
           Just sit quietly, relax and think about a question to which
           you don't consciously know the answer. Allow an answer to
           come to you in words, an image or bodily sensations.
           Staying in your relaxed state, you can further explore
           hints you receive by writing or drawing freely or following
           your impulse to move. Don't worry if you're not sure where
           the material is coming from. In experiments at UCLA on
           receiving mental images telepathically, professional
           artists who confessed they "made it all up" proved more
           intuitive than any other subjects. Similarly, in University
           of Texas at El Paso professor Weston Agor's studies of
           military men and women, those who most discounted their
           hunches often proved most intuitive.

           3. KEEP TRACK OF YOUR FINDINGS. 
           Both Rosanoff and Agor recommend keeping an intuition
           journal, recording impressions and predictions, comparing
           them with what transpired and even tabulating your
           percentage of "hits." You might discover that messages in,
           say, images, or music, or chills down the spine, tend to be
           most trustworthy. You might also notice how easy it is to
           misinterpret intuitive messages. For instance, one woman
           had a feeling she was going to meet Ross Perot, as indeed
           she did -- in the form of a famous political impersonator
           who sat next to her on an airplane.

           4. DEVELOP PERSONAL INTUITION TRIGGERS. 
           Through trial and error, learn idiosyncratic ways to make
           yourself more receptive to intuition. What works for you
           might be a key question, like "If I were to trust my
           instincts here, what would I do?" -- suggested by Ruth
           Berger of Evanston, Illinois. Or perhaps a physical
           activity, like gardening, weight lifting or collapsing into
           a fetal position, prepares you for vital insights. For
           many, visualizations, like imagining a journey to meet an
           inner teacher, do the trick.

           5. PUT YOUR DISCOVERIES IN CONTEXT. 
           Remember that while intuition may offer a valuable source
           of information and a reliable indicator of what's best for
           you, it shouldn't be your only input on important matters. 
           Even professional intuitives don't close down their five
           senses and rational mind just because they have another
           powerful channel.  Integrate your increasingly attuned
           sixth sense with every other aspect of your creative
           process to discover a more inspired, more satisfied, more
           wholly developed you.