My guest today is New York Times best-selling author Laura Day. Laura is an intuitionist and the first person I have met who talks about developing your intuition practically and matter-of-factly. She has been hired by 30 different companies, police trying to solve crimes, and individuals looking for love, but she swears it is something we can all develop better within ourselves. Maybe not to the level she can, but certainly better to help us navigate our personal and professional lives. She has also worked with some of Hollywoods’ biggest stars and has been featured on Oprah for her intuitive work.
This was a fun interview because I came out of it looking at intuition and “psychic ” completely differently. I’m happy to suspend my beliefs but it is made easier when someone explains things in a way that makes a lot of sense and has a 40 year track record. Laura doesn’t love guesswork; she wants real-life feedback and proof that what she sees and feels is accurate. Laura knows how to communicate ways to help people organize a real strategy around figuring out and getting what they desire. Enjoy.
Listen to the episode here:
[podcast_subscribe id=”5950″]
Key Topics:
- Developing and Proving Intuition [00:04:21]
- Goal as an Organizing Tool [00:14:06]
- Intuition as a Gift and Disability [00:24:51]
- Laura’s Marriage Life Dynamic [00:27:08]
- On Parenting [00:31:49]
- Mindfulness and Boundaries [00:36:52]
- Change and Adaptability [00:45:02]
- Writing Books [00:46:50]
- Laura’s Circle [00:56:06]
- Intuition is not a Gender Thing [00:59:19]
- Healing and Moving Towards the Goal [01:04:33]
- Start by Being Present [01:10:00]
- Intuition and Anxiety [01:19:50]
- Sleep Work [01:25:06]
- Vigilance for Anxiety [01:30:59]
- Patterns and Rituals [01:37:32]
- Addressing Life and Technology [01:49:39]
- Intuition Development Hazing Weekend [01:56:06]
- Luck, Fate and Intuition [02:03:40]
- Granting Three Wishes [02:06:17]
#192 Practical Intuition Mastery: ‘Wall Street Psychic’ Laura Day Shares Strategies for Optimal Goal Setting and Unlocking Your Inner Power to Help Navigate Decision Making, Healing Trauma, Parenting, Marriage & Life
“It’s important to realize that the thing that you’re ashamed of, the thing that maybe didn’t make you the best in school, the thing that makes you not know what to say at a dinner party or not be able to read an environment and be quirky and fun like everyone else, your superpower is in there. To survive, we need to find it, to thrive, we certainly do.
—
“We spend too much time intellectualizing the search for our goals instead of noticing what we’re doing that’s important to us. I would get it out of the messy mind and set it as targets, these are my targets. Without what the mind does, which is, “Is this reasonable? Is this rational?” I didn’t graduate college. My only useful skill was a brain injury. The year after I left my husband, I made $4 million. I sat down, I bumped into an agent while I was doing my work on myself, and she said, “Let me see those pages.” I said, “No.” She said, “Come on.” I said, “Fine.” She looked at them and said, “This is a book,” and sold it a couple of weeks later for one of the highest prices ever paid for an unknown author.
—
My guest is New York Times Bestselling Author and Intuitionist, Laura Day. This conversation is the first of its kind for me. I had so much fun with it but I’ll give you an idea of how it started. Laura says to me that she’s figured out and had some people talk to her like doctors about ligaments and bone density and that it’d be a good time to start working out. You get the idea. I love this conversation.
Number one, Laura is brilliant and energetic. She’ll say, “I have ADHD.” She’s pinging all over the place. However, when it comes to talking about developing your intuition, she is practical and matter-of-fact. She has written so many books and one is called Practical Intuition and Welcome to Your Crisis. She had a difficult childhood, which also accentuated probably this ability to do this, How to Rule the World from Your Couch. She says she never likes to leave her house. Many other books. She’s worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Oprah Winfrey has talked about her.
The most unique and special thing about her is this gift to take something that we all think is out there and ethereal and bring it into focus and say, “What do you want professionally?” Other people are looking for love or what’s the next move? She breaks it down and reminds us and teaches us how to simplify so that we can tune up that intuition.
It’s not just about people who are spending time in nature or a mother’s intuition but she’s talking about ways that you can apply this in many areas of your life. For example, she gives you techniques of what you can do before you go to bed but you shouldn’t do it all the time because it’s hard on your sleep to let your intuition go to work for you.
She put a framework around something that usually seems out there. She has 30 companies that hire her to talk about if they’re launching new products or packaging. She’s worked with police departments helping solve crimes if you will and individuals who have certain things that they’re looking for. I love this conversation with Laura Day. I hope you have as much fun and enjoy it as much as I did.
—
Laura Day, welcome to the show. I appreciate you coming all the way here. You were joking but serious about being more of a homebody.
Yes, on my couch.
You came up on my winding road. Sometimes you hear people talk about intuition. I live with Laird. You have no idea but Laird is a surfer and he is deeply connected to his intuition. I always joke that he’s like a dog. You can be completely rough around the edges but if your core is pretty solid, Laird can sense it. You can be the greatest guy in the room supposedly and he’s like, “Something’s wrong with that guy.” When I was getting prepared to talk to you, I was interested to hear your approach to intuition, developing intuition, and trusting intuition.
We don’t trust intuition, we develop it, and we prove it. We don’t trust it. Trust is for the woo-woo.
I want to start with you. I don’t want to say gloss over but you went through a lot of heavy things when you were young.
And old. I have two siblings who didn’t make it, who suicided, which is why I love teaching and speaking about this stuff because it does help you find your own path, and not be a victim of what’s happened.
A lot of people have gone through things. I don’t know if you ever experienced this but the older I get, the more I think that if you didn’t go through something when you were young, that is unusual.
That’s true and it doesn’t always prepare you for what you do go through in getting older, loving, and aging. I know you’re an athlete and the different phases of that when you have loss and gain.
What catapulted you from going through a hard time as a child and anything that you’re comfortable sharing?
I’m comfortable sharing it all. First of all, I want to define intuition. Intuition is a non-local perception. Sitting here now with you, I can feel you and smell you, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I can almost taste you, see you, and hear you. My perceptions are connected to my senses and my senses extend to a certain boundary.
[bctt tweet=”With evolution, you’re adaptive. If you make a mistake, you adapt to the other direction.”]
What we found and what science has now demonstrated is that our senses extend much further than we realize. I could see you even if I were in my apartment in New York and you were here. I could hear you sometime in the future having a conversation about a relationship between us that doesn’t exist yet. Our senses can move in time and space and that’s Einstein and not someone with a purple-colored book. That is non-local perception, intuition. How can we perceive at different points and from different perspectives? It’s as simple as that.
The best intuitive, who don’t like my siblings’ suicide, are people who have had an early trauma, brain injury, or seizure disorders where the brain doesn’t limit because your brain is a limiting organ and that’s a good thing. We’re meant to be mindful and present in our lives. When you are traumatized, and I forget whose quote it was, it’s the cracks where the light gets through. When you’re traumatized, if you survive the trauma, often, what leads you through is the crack where the light got through, where you are injured.
I was lucky because, genetically, I was born with this ADHD brain that can’t locate itself in time and space. Many of the traumas I’ve had, I’ve been raped, I’ve been molested, I had a manic depressive mother and a violent father, and the eldest of four children living in a separate apartment from our adults, which looked snazzy from the outside but it wasn’t.
When you say living separately, is it that you have to fend for yourself versus getting to avoid some of the chaos that was your parents?
No, because chaotic parents create chaotic children. When my mother was not in the hospital, we were fed. When she was in the hospital, we would figure out which neighbors put on dinner at which time. I was lucky because I was dissociative. First of all, I was the first child so I probably got a year of good ego development, good support, and love. Also, I experienced myself from a distance. An ego structure, which is what the book I’m working on, was something I developed later in life. Because that traumatized not being there to avoid the assault of pain was present, it also led to intuition, although I didn’t know what that was at the time.
I was fortunate in my early 20s. I was a math and science nerd. I went to a school called Stuyvesant in New York, which is a Petri dish for math and science nerds. I didn’t want to go into that as a field. I knew I wanted to be a writer, that’s what I knew. I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew I wanted to own a cat. I knew that I never wanted to eat anything but dessert ever again. I lived those three things, I wrote every day, I got a cat, and I lived on chocolate Éclairs.
I was watching TV one day on a nerd channel because I’m from three generations of physicians and I love science. Science is my religion, it’s proof or disproof for beliefs that don’t serve us. I was watching a TV show and there were a group of researchers who were talking about the extended capacities of the human mind and they were pontificating, and I thought, “Doesn’t everybody do that?” At the time, remote viewing was big, which is the ability for someone to give you coordinates, for example, and for you to be able to see metaphorically what’s there and describe it accurately.
I called this place and I said, “I can do what you’re talking about.” I hunted down the number, this is before the internet, in a phone book. I went in and the person pontificated more and was a little disappointed. Here’s a 5’5” and 95-pound little long-haired girl who looks like a little Manson girl in my blue skirt, my white shirt, and my long hair, and a little bit rigid because people who are dissociative are rigid. They’re vigilant because they’re not in their bodies enough to protect them.
He is talking to me and I said, “Why don’t you put a name in an envelope?” I’d never done this before. It came to me, “Put a name in an envelope.” He put a name in the envelope and I said, “Now seal it.” He sealed it and I said, “Now hand it to me.” I wanted him to stop talking. I have an auditory processing problem. I wanted him to stop talking. I like to talk but I don’t like to listen. He gave me the envelope and I started describing this doctor who was doing all these things that who was going to have a heart attack and was going through a divorce.
I then saw the second person who I saw having MS, which is a disease that I had worked with coincidentally. I didn’t even know it was called that back then. I saw that this person was a painter. I saw two separate people and I looked at him and I said, “I’m confused because I’m bouncing between two people.”
When you say see, is it an impression that the picture shows up in your mind, the story shows up in your mind?
When I say see, and this is how we all take in information but we all have a preferred sense, is I experience it. I see it, hear it, smell it, think it, and know it. Sometimes I hop into the person and I am it, which, by the way, we all do. The first thing I do with students is psychic self-defense. How can you be in you? How can you get everyone out of you? He’d put his name, just a first name, and his best friend, who was an artist with MS, also had the same first name.
He tried to trick you and put two first names in?
No, he forgot his best friend had the same first name.
Roger that.
I was bouncing. The first thing, and this is where people make mistakes, that you need is focus and goal. You are an athlete and there is something organizing about a goal. It’s different when you’re training without a goal and when you’re training with a goal. There’s something that orders you.
You talk about that when you work with CEOs or businesses and people, it’s like, “What is your goal? You better know the destination because how are you going to get there?” What I want to say is, and we’ll start to break it down, that you have used this practice to help people in love, navigating, a loss, in business, and reaching goals. This isn’t all over the place. You found a way to organize this for people to use as a real tool.
Yes. When you think of it, we spend our lives learning about logic. We spend our lives managing emotions, we spend our lives training these things, and yet so much goes on that affects us, our intuition, and our non-local perception, we don’t order and train. Often, where it can be an amazing tool, it can also blindside us whether we are a traitor or a lover.
When someone reads this and thinks, “For my birthday, someone sent me to a psychic.” If you could maybe share because someone might be reading this and thinking, “It sounds almost like she’s psychic.”
That is what most people would call me, a psychic. A psychic doesn’t mean anything. When people talk about healing, what is healing or manifestation? When I put water in an ice tray and I put it in the freezer, I’m manifesting an ice cube. It is making something happen. We give things these words. I am a psychic. What I do for companies is tell the future and that is the fun part of intuition. There are lots of other facets of it.
I read civilians in public, and in workshops, and I read my students. I read companies because if you’re wrong, a company will fire you. It’s a good reality test. Coming from a family of psychologically and somewhat damaged people, I am the only one in my immediate family who’s never attempted suicide. Coming from trauma, it does unsettle you if you don’t order it. It’s important to reality test. We are material beings in a material world and there is a consensus reality and it is important to learn how to deal with it.
I want to rip my skin off when people say, “I want my child to be more intuitive.” No, you want your child to know the rules so they don’t get in trouble. Integrate that before expanding out to God knows where. I love teaching people to be intuitive for one another in communities more than going to an intuitive. The yardstick you should have for intuition is, first of all, does the intuitive claim to have the word or the answer? If so, run.
You’re giving us the tools for us to answer the questions, that is something that you make clear.
Although I slip a lot, but yes.
You’re like, “I’m going to save you the hassle and tell you.”
People ask questions, like, “Should I stay in this marriage?” What’s your yardstick? If you’re asking when the market is going to get to its former high, there is a yardstick, there is a yes-no answer. When you’re working with people, a lot of the questions and a lot of the interpretations of your answers are subjective. When you’re going to a professional, it’s important to have some objective proof that this is functional for you. It doesn’t even have to be correct but it has to be functional.
In the case of intuition, it should be accurate and actionable. If someone is telling you you’re going to be in a car crash, unless they tell you when, what model car, or how to avoid it, that’s not actionable. What do you do with that? You don’t digest your food. Skepticism is a wonderful thing. My favorite quote is, “The good scientist suspends disbelief and runs the experiment anyway.” Suspends disbelief, however.
This is interesting for me because you’re this interesting blend. A lot of times, people would associate someone who’s intuitive or has a psychic element to that communication as off, floating, and feeling. You have this interesting blend of yes, that, and this linear factual process.
Nobody sees the floaty in me and I’m offended.
I see the floaty in you.
That’s nice.
I see some floaty.
I see the intuitive in you because you create products that are functional and you can verify their worth. All the things you described to me, I know the research on them because I’m a research junkie. Intuition should function the same way. If you put it in you, it should do something for you. What people do is chase their tails, it’s OCD food. What’s important is your own mastery.
I try hard not with my companies. I like that my companies need me. I am the person outside the fold. They all have the data. I don’t follow the data. I don’t even know what year it is half the time. They have the data and they’re in that paradigm. I’m some little piece of thing floating around but who can see what’s outside of it and can call it for them and save them time and money.
What does that look like? In a way, starting with the business part, because of course, I want to get into the love and some of these other nuances.
It’s all the same. People say, “You’re a corporate psychic.” Every person is a corporation. Don’t you have a bottom line? Don’t you have to market? You teach your children to market. You don’t want to overexpose your market. A person is a company and a company is a person. A company has an ego. How many companies have tanked because they’re in love with their own message?
That’s such an interesting thing. I always say that when you have a company, you have to act like every day nobody cares because we get attached to, “This is good.” It’s like, “You feel that way. You have to get that distance.” Without giving us names because all of that stuff is confidential, let’s say an example of a company you work with that maybe they say, “Can you check in with us once or twice a year?”
I don’t do that.? In the old days, I did that. I’ve worked for the same companies for 30 years and I don’t take new ones. They have books so they remember my every conquest and my every mistake and it’s all documented, which is great reality testing for me. No one is 100% but my batting average is pretty good. What it looks like is they get an hour of my time a month and they can do it in two-minute segments and I don’t measure it.
You’re not a lawyer, you mean?
I’m not a lawyer. One of the kids is having a crisis and I will do not business and deal with it and figure it out and predict it absolutely. Business-wise, what it looks like is if you could ask a crystal ball any question, “If we bring this product to market in January, what does that look like? If we bring it in July, what does it look like?” I also get the questions they’re not asking, “You bring it to market in February.” “February is easier than July. In July, there’s going to be a competing two products on the market but your packaging isn’t going to work.”
I’ll then jump into the market and say, “Your packaging doesn’t work because, on the shelf, the corners gathered dirt so it looks shabby. Because it’s never been on a shelf yet, you don’t know that. When I’m in the future, as your market, that’s why I’m not picking your product.” A lot of times, the financial company I work with will want to know, “Is this company a good investment?”Before a company is public, people invest in it to develop their products. “Is this medical machine or is this drug?” I will first look at it. I won’t answer whether it’s a good investment unless I’m tired and then I’ll slip.
Is it because you have to restrain yourself? You see certain things that you can’t.
I do but I could be wrong. I’m working with someone who has billions and has done well for themself. I don’t work with people who would yield their judgment to me because I don’t want to work with disempowered people.
They’re gathering input.
I want to be input. I don’t want to influence their already successful process of making a decision. I will find data points and say, “First, I often do past. This company started two years ago, shut down, and then restarted with a new president.” I’ll sense a timeline so that they can tell if I’m intuitive or just need a sandwich.
By the way, everyone does this all the time. Notice the times when someone asks you a question, like, “Is this guy right for me?” You see things you wish you weren’t seeing and you see all kinds of details but you brush them off because it’s not your metaphor for life. I don’t brush it off. When I see that a company is going to fire their CEO, get a new one in March. The March one is well connected to the market. The company, even though it doesn’t look great now, is going to do well. If I see a company is going to keep sucking investment, their management isn’t good. By the time they get a product out, it’s going to cost too much and there’s going to be too many points along the way. That’s the thing that I do.
My clients don’t talk, they ask a question, and do not give me information. Although even after 30 years, some of them feel compelled to tell me the story and say, “Stop.” I follow my attention. What is attention? It’s all of your senses moving around in time and space. I love the companies I work for as I have for 30 years. What I love doing is then training other people to do it.
Let’s go there because anyone reading is like, “Clearly, Laura has a natural gift.”
I do want to stop you there. My most important message is I am the sole survivor of an abusive childhood. Of course, when nobody’s watching, other people take advantage of children. I am truly the sole survivor. A gift is something you get. Beauty is a gift and maybe you don’t have to work for it but if you want to do anything with it, you do have to work for it. Athleticism is a gift. I couldn’t have had your career. You have to work for it.
This is a gift and it’s also a disability. In school, I would’ve had an IEP if I had been born ten years later. I would’ve gotten special services. I have what is not a properly functioning brain. I can tell the future but I’ll walk into a wall literally. It’s important to realize that the thing that you’re ashamed of, the thing that maybe didn’t make you the best in school, the thing that makes you not know what to say at a dinner party or not be able to read an environment and be quirky and fun like everyone else, you’re superpower is in there. To survive, we need to find it, to thrive, we certainly do.
[bctt tweet=”Change is something that we have to negotiate compassionately both with ourselves, with others around us, and with our world.”]
That’s such a good point. You do talk about developing this. Even though it’s with us to help us survive, it is the opportunity to develop the skill. You’re also saying, “Everybody has intuition that they can develop more, even though you might have a heightened talent for it or antenna.”
In the same way, I can’t remember anybody’s name in this room. Yes, I have a heightened antenna for some things and not for others.
I have to ask you because I know you’ve been married for over twelve years. How did your husband woo you, keep your attention, date you, and get you to marry him with this dynamic? It must be amazing.
My husband, I have to give my husband credit, is an amazing person. A lot of men of my generation shut down. He channels his energy into performance in the world, he’s an award-winning journalist, he’s an award-winning screenwriter, and he is an award-winning TV writer. Living with somebody who has the kind of brain I do, especially for the typical male who often represses that thing, I, certainly in my generation, did, it’s intrusive. It’s knowing what’s going on.
He doesn’t express everything, he takes it on the chin. Our arguments often sound like, “You are upset I did this and I’m sorry.” He hasn’t said a word and I’m doing both sides of the conversation. At the end of it, I love him. I am not a crier but he gets moist eyes, which is sweet. He does not express a lot of motion but his body does it. It’s intrusive and it is probably often also one of the first times in his life he’s felt truly safe, known, seen, and loved.
When I’m angry, like a lot of people with ADHD, there are no stops for me so I say every horrible thing I’ve seen. I love him. I feel that way about him too because intuitives don’t tend to mask, we don’t have that ability because we assume everybody sees as much as we do. You have an intuitive bent of mind. How did we meet? I decided the one place intuition wasn’t working was choosing partners. My subconscious was choosing my father and my mother and not something I should replicate.
I asked my two best girlfriends to set me up with men they’d known for at least ten years who were good to their ex-wives but had to have ex-wives and good to their children, good fathers, and had to be age-appropriate, and nothing to do with Hollywood that I didn’t get. Also, no artists, no musicians, and no actors. I wanted a dentist, something that was nice and grounded. These two wonderful friendships are amazing. We’re all looking for love and we forget that we have it in our friendships. They set me up with these incredible men.
I met Stephen and he had no deep-seated rage, he loved his family, and he had a job. I called my friend and said, “He’s not my type.” She said, “Honey, maybe that’s a good thing.” I had a three-day rule. He was very handsy. By the third day, even though he was not my type, somehow he had become my type. I was never going to get married again and I did. When people ask me at a party what I do, I say I’m a writer. Otherwise, people say things, like, “Tell me my name.” It’s like, “I don’t care what your name is and I’ll forget it. I have ADHD, why should I even bother asking?”
He didn’t care what I did. He came to my home because I never leave so he saw that I was fairly normal. For someone who talks to things that aren’t there at different points in space and time, I was fairly normal. I had a lovely home. You fall in love by the sense of smell, you liked the way I smelled. I wasn’t convinced for a while because he’s not normal, he’s extraordinary, but he’s not damaged in a way that makes me feel safe and useful.
He said to me at a certain point, “I’m not going to stalk you. If you tell me to go away, I’ll leave. If you don’t tell me to go away, I’m going to be here.” He was. I was lucky. Being the child of suicide and a sister of suicide, I wake up every morning, and the first thing I do is make sure he’s breathing. I thank whatever good luck brought him into my life.
What about with your son? I can’t imagine. Parenting is tricky and such a moving target. With this added awareness that you have, that must have been interesting to be a parent with these talents. Also, you’re the son of someone.
It gave my son incredible boundaries. My mind, my body, and my life, I don’t care if you’re right, I’m not interested in hearing any of it. It gave him some good boundaries. Also, my son is easily as intuitive as I am. Because he had a different experience and a better education and all those things, he also has those brilliant life skills.
Because he got DNA from his father, who is an incredible artist, I look at my son and think, “You wouldn’t even have sat with me at a lunch table. You would’ve because you’re a nice guy but it would’ve been an act of charity.” I cannot believe that this person came from me. He’s got good boundaries. I respect that about him although sometimes I deeply resent it too because I have no boundaries. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. He has boundaries.
Did he tell you when he was a teenager? Maybe you would’ve sensed something or if he brought his new girlfriend home or something. Did you have to keep it to yourself or did he tell you, “I don’t want to hear it, mom.” How did that work?
When he was younger, he did, and then he realized that his own mastery of his own life was what was important. Also, my son always knows if I’m not telling the truth. My son always knows how I’m doing. He used to call me from school and say, “Don’t worry, I’m about to take a French test,” because he could feel me worrying about something completely different. It forced him for survival to form good boundaries. One of them is I shouldn’t be talking about it.
We’re not getting into details about him. I’m curious about your point of view about being a parent.
As parents, we all have something wonderful, something not, and some things that are not wonderful. It’s the same thing as spouses. I’m helpful to my husband in business because I can see price points and how much someone will pay and what will happen. It’s not that he always listens to me but he should. I’m not so useful in letting him have respectful personal space. Everyone has their upsides and their downsides.
They’re connected. I always think about that in marriage. I’ve been in a long relationship. I always say it is a complete line that’s tethered from the thing that is the magic. It is tethered to something that generates that incredible point that usually is tricky. I don’t want to say the grownup thing but let’s say the realistic thing is to remember that tension exists in everything all the time. You said the crack and the light coming through. People think, “I just want the light.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s not how it works.”
Also, if you just had the light, you’d be burnt and bored.
That’s true.
I go on Instagram live every morning, it started during COVID because I was worried that people were depressed and were suicidal or without Pampers or soap. We came together as a community not just to read each other and do healing but also like, “I’ve got extra money, who needs it?” “Do you need Pampers?” “I can’t get my medicine.” This community was and is still quite amazing. They stay at each other’s houses. It’s an amazing community.
One of the things we’ve been working on is how we love the fourth ego center, how we were valued, how we are of use to the world around us, how we experience dignity, and how our dignity is experienced by others. In matters of love, certainly in the human world, it is imperfect beings loving you imperfectly and accepting your imperfect offerings. It’s that constant negotiation. We’ve made love into something that it’s not. If you’re not breaking a sweat, you’re not loving, and that’s not just in the physical arena.
Sometimes when people talk about marriage, they go, “It’s hard all the time.” It is but it’s within what it would be. It’s a reasonable amount of work. It’s not like, “This is harder than everything else.” That always interests me because I feel like if you have two people that say, “We’re here and we’re going to show up and we’re going to do our best.” It’s like everything, work is hard, and relationships have a hardness to the elements that are harder, but people always sound so surprised.
One of the things that I remind myself of is that I have a person, this is my person, and I’m this person’s person by choice. I’m fortunate. Also, being the mother of some, this is mother and son. Not to sound like a new age self-help author but the sanctity of love, friendship, and parenthood in US children toward your parents, the sanctity of that sharing, resource, space, and caring, I’m happy that I have someone who cares about what happened today in my life.
I do hear a lot of complaints about a partner and often they’re valid. Sometimes people are living with a depressed spouse but that calls you to have better boundaries and that calls you to be more mindful. Mindfulness has begun to mean meditation and it’s not. Mindfulness means where are you in time and space? Are you in your body? What else and who else is in there with you because you should be in there alone?
The other thing is mediumship and that’s something you can use if you want to evaluate something intuitively but you should be the one in your body and you are responsible. If it’s all your fault, then you are the one who can fix it or decide it’s not fixable. When people are complaining, it’s that they have a hidden agenda, a need they’re not willing to take care of for themself. If they did, perhaps what would happen was they would either be happy with their spouse or they’d get out of dodge.
That’s the other interesting thing when you go, “If I got to that point, I’d either have to leave or I’d have to go all the way in.” It seems hard sometimes for people to do that.
We project a lot. It’s easy to forget. I do this too sometimes, I forget my husband is not a chair. My husband is completely another human being and I have to acknowledge that as I am completely another human being. It’s funny, one of my dearest friends made me come out to LA alone for a week because he said, “When you’re with your husband, you’re all about him, and you need to be physically separate to put yourself back on track.” He’s right because it is easy. This is true for all of us, it’s easy to merge into that dynamic instead of staying separate and having a relationship.
You project who you are and it becomes one thing but a relationship can only be had between two separate entities. It’s not that there aren’t those wonderful moments or horrible moments of merging and joining but it has to be between two separate entities. Boundaries are not my strong suit. My students always say, “How do we work on having better boundaries?” I say, “I’ll have a therapist on to give you a lecture on that because I am not the person.”
It’s true. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing but I feel like as a female and then having a partner or if you have a family, I often say it’s interesting. People ask me, “What are you going to be doing now?” I go, “I’m going to get busier and work more. My kids are bigger, they don’t need me as much.” It is interesting to keep creating that space, especially when people get accustomed to you being merged. There’s something nice about it also or comforting or whatever but it is an interesting thing where you have to diligently keep your real estate. It’s a dance.
It’s a hard one. Especially as women, we feel unkind. Someone in my group today said, “I realized no is a complete sentence.” I thought, “That’s a good one.” Young people are doing this less but certainly, years ago, there was all this idea of soulmates. There are thousands of soulmates out there for you every day. Go to the mall, there are thousands of soulmates walking around there.
A relationship is because you find a person who is of value and who considers you of value. You make a commitment to that you renew that commitment every day. We magicalize things thinking we’re giving them beauty but we’re taking their power away. Real life is more magic. The intense loyalty of friendship, love, making a company work, creating an ethical product, and being a good person as you walk down the street, that’s the magic.
It’s quiet. Especially if people are caught up or distracted, they don’t experience it. If we do have that presence like you’re talking about, it’s subtle though. We think everything’s supposed to hit us in the face but the magic is pretty quiet usually and deep. I used to say that when your kids are little and they run from room to room and you hear those steps and if you can pay attention like that, there are not many things better than that.
That’s true. I miss that.
They go into nature and you hear water going over rocks.
I’m not big on that.
You’re an indoor girl.
I’m an indoor and city girl. It’s asphalt, for me, sparkling in the night with little bits of mica. What is more beautiful than that? The moment when the street lamps go on and the day ends and night begins. Would you rather have ticks, bears, deer, coyotes, or dirt? I don’t. I grew up in New York City and Rome, Italy, and I am a complete city girl. I do have a house in the country that I bought after 9/11 because I wanted to have a place where my son could get his own water, burn wood for heat, trap rabbits, and kill deer. We joke that we go in May to turn the water on and in October to turn it off and that’s about it. It’s great storage.
You live in New York, you need storage.
Where I walk in nature is when I connect with people. For me, that’s my matrix. I have never found a person uninteresting. I’ve never not been inspired. I’ve never not learned something. Sometimes I’ve wanted to beat them over the head with a club but they have never not stirred something in me. For me, that is my matrix, that’s my earth.
Going back to your message, it’s knowing yourself. It isn’t us sh trying to pretend or be where we think, “I love going out on walks on beaches.” If you don’t, you don’t. The other thing I appreciate about your message and your books is you have to answer those questions for yourself, you need to know for yourself, and part of that would be knowing, “I’m a city girl.”
That answer might change, who knows? Maybe five years from now, I come on and say, “I have discovered putting my feet on moist ground.” I can’t imagine it, there are bugs and dirt there, but who knows? One thing that is a guarantee is change and it is one of the hardest things for a mammal. We have no choice. Resisting change gives it all the power. The power is in our adaptability and that’s what intuition helps us with. Intuition does help you predict in an organic way what’s ahead and prepare at the moment.
I’m sure all of you have found yourself doing something. Many people stock toilet paper before COVID without knowing why they were suddenly buying 36 rolls. COVID hit and they had toilet paper to share. I was in London and my whole building, the super let them in my apartment because I had ordered all of these paper towels, toilet paper, and masks. I had ordered all this stuff and I said, “Go in my apartment and get it.” We couldn’t get back from London, it was COVID.
You would be a great person. It softens the blow. It’s not the blow but having this idea that something is happening is helpful. You’re in your 20s and you read the same name twice between the doctor and the artist. How does the journey lead you to write all of these books and work with people in Hollywood and working with companies and teach people how to connect and develop better their intuition?
[bctt tweet=”We don’t trust intuition, we develop it, and we prove it. We don’t trust it. Trust is for the woo-woo.”]
Often, we walk into our lives and that’s what happened to me. After this period, they did this a few more times, and then they called all of these related programs and journalists but the agreement was that I would be anonymous. I’m from a family of scientists. I didn’t even have a word for what it is I could do except for mental illness, which I did not want to identify with.
They got this group together and they would have these sessions where they would structure these experiments and I would perform them. This is 1982 maybe, I don’t know if they were filmed. I don’t remember if videotape was even around then or if it was filmed. They were filmed for research purposes and for journalists to be able to go over the information but I’m supposed to be anonymous. Man plans and God laughs.
In retrospect, as an adult, I see they wanted to raise money for different things and this was a way to do it so they used this dumb 22-year-old to do it and leaked one. I was overwhelmed with requests. Because I am a conservative person and I’m not a hugely adaptable or open person, I picked an industry to work with. I worked, for example, on some new HIV drugs. My contribution was tiny to Dr. Larry Waites who was an amazing HIV researcher.
I would work with politicians until I realized how scary it was in France. I picked technology businesses because it was interesting. The quickness of technology and the way it can communicate remotely mimics intuition beautifully. I was wary about working with people because I was a dumb 22-year-old and I knew it. I wasn’t a therapist or doctor. I didn’t have a lot of life experience that anyone would’ve wanted to replicate.
I was wary of working with people so I tended toward business. In Hollywood, people think of celebrities but celebrities are a business. An actor is a business. We’re all businesses. That was a community that I was in touch with before. Because we didn’t have a TV in the house and I never had money to go to a movie I wasn’t aware. I’m still not aware because I also have no memory. I started working and people would say, “Can I ask you a question? Engineering firms would say, “Can you use intuition to do this?” I’d say, “I don’t know but I’ll try.” That’s how I learned.
I got this huge amount of skills by being tested because people would come up with a paradigm. How do we accurately see if this is a hit or a miss? Also, different kinds of companies, endeavors, or people saying, “Can you find my watch?” “I don’t know. Let me try just.” Intuition would guide my senses in a way to be able to give a correct answer. It helps that I’m an uptight perfectionist. There is always that drive for precision. I also always wanted to be a writer. I was pregnant and left my husband at the same time.
Did you say leave him at the same time?
Yes. After sixteen years, I met him when I was 16. This is what happens to abandoned children. All of a sudden, I had to make a living and I didn’t connect that the reason people were flying me places and sending me all this stuff and taking me out and celebrating me was that I had a marketable skill. I had a new baby, I realized I was going to have a divorce, I didn’t have money to pay for it, and I said to this man who I predicted currencies for back before the Euro every morning for fifteen minutes while nursing my child, I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to have to find a job.” He said, “I’ll pay you for what you do for me.”
You were doing it for free at that point?
Yeah. I hadn’t needed the money before and people would hand me money. People would give me things, they’d fly me places, and they’d invite me everywhere. When nobody values you as a child, you don’t take yourself seriously as an adult. It’s not that 28 years old was an adult. I didn’t take it seriously. I knew that people were interested in weird me and celebrated me and took me everywhere. When I had to make money, someone offered me a high salary.
I remember I had Guardian Life insurance as part of my package. I was on payroll, health insurance, and all of these things that I didn’t know existed and didn’t know I could get. I had never had a job. When I was using my own techniques, which I had been teaching since I was 22, different Universities or different groups would ask me, “Can you train our traders to do this? Can you train our people to do this? Can you come to talk to our halfway house?” I would say, “Yes, of course,” Because I didn’t know no was a complete sentence. I didn’t have anything better to do, frankly.
It’s fascinating to me that people thought that this is something that you could teach other people and that you thought that too.
I may not be Renoir but I can paint something. I can pick up a brush. I’m not a chef but I can put dinner for twelve on the table. A lot of groups for their own reasons wanted to make me Guru Maharaji Day. As much as I wanted to believe that, even I was not ungrounded enough to believe that I could do something that nobody else could do.
Also, there was always the risk because I do come from a family of brilliant but doomed people. Because of trauma and because of this brain style, I like reality testing. I didn’t want to be special in the wrong way. Also, when I ask you, “Am I okay?” I don’t want your opinion, I want you to go through my entire body and notice if anything is wrong, and then go through my entire life and notice if anything’s out of place, and I want you to give me data.
I wanted from other people who were asking that of me, I wanted the same thing back because here I am, a young woman lost in the world, not having a family, and unanchored. A lot of groups want you not so much to teach but they want to make you a fundraising freak and talk about what it is you do and what your brain does. I remember the first time I said a real no was when a group from a big white-glove university came down to New York and I had a nursing infant.
I’m nursing on the couch and they’re six men sitting around and they’re explaining what their test is. I’m nursing my infant at my bosom and their test is to put radioactive dye into me and then notice when my brain gets a hit or a miss on an intuitive task. I’m thinking, “Are they not seeing that this milk goes into this baby?”
They’re not being intuitive.
I thought, “I’ve done this for thirteen years. No.” I stopped there.
When a company comes to you and says, “I want you to train our traders,” versus maybe now working with your group, you have this circle that you’ve created, it feels like you’re more about not working with individuals but a collective. It’s like, “Who’s interested?”
They then work with each other.
Is it different how you teach both of them to do it from a business point of view and from life?
Not really. I use different languages to express it.
Those East Coast trader guys must love all this. Did they look at you side-eyed at first?
Not at all.
For a chance of making more money, they’re open to it or what?
Business traders give people jobs and they make the economy.
I’m kidding.
I’m going to tell you something. It’s the woman who does too much Pilates or the man who does too much Pilates and gets too many high colonics who’s the one who owes us the value or not. Businesses and medicine use what works, that’s the bottom line. There’s no like, “I don’t believe in this.” There’s no belief involved. You’re either accurate or not and if you’re not, they don’t hire you. I have worked with medical professionals and companies now for nearly 40 years and I’ve never had an issue with them of belief.
I’ve had people come into my workshops and wanted to be seen and heard and say, “I don’t know if I believe in this or I don’t know if I have faith in this.” I’m like, “Good because it’s not a belief for faith and feel free to take another workshop.” This is not even something I’m willing to debate. I’m teaching you how to do a task effectively, I want you to do it. If you can’t, I don’t care how you feel about doing it, that’s a therapy workshop in another place.
I love therapy but that’s not what intuition is about. Intuition is data gathering, that’s what intuition is about. Feeling and intuition are opposite ends of the spectrum. You may feel something and it may be that you’re responding to a smell. People always say, “I knew he was the one.” Every time I knew he was the one, they resembled my character-disordered parents. That’s not intuition, that’s pathology.
How does that start? It’s interesting, you’re reframing it for me because you think of intuition and you go, “I’ve got that intuition.”
It’s that gut feeling, which could be that you need a sandwich.
You like sandwiches.
I don’t. I had never eaten sandwiches. I don’t particularly like bread.
You don’t eat bagels?
I don’t like it. I’m someone who will sit down with a pound of bacon but I don’t want the bagel around it or the wrap. I want the tomatoes, I want the salad, I want the bacon, and I want mayonnaise all over it.
Intuition, let’s drill down on that. Most of us think, “It’s my instincts.” Women’s intuition versus man’s intuition, can we even start there? Is there such a thing or is that total bollocks?
No. You are intuitive about the things you’re focused on. You’re most intuitive in two areas, your area of expertise, assuming you’re successful, a doctor, a trader, whether or not you believe in intuition, and your area of neurotic preoccupation. If you’re neurotically preoccupied with being abandoned, you’ll be intuitive about occasions to put yourself in situations where you can be abandoned, any sign of abandonment, or any abandonment coming up. Those are usually the two areas, your area of greatest neurotic preoccupation and your area of expertise and everything else is a gray zone.
One thing I teach people is to channel. You don’t want to use your intellect for everything. I don’t want to use my intellect to understand and investigate the etymology of cartoon characters, for example, that would be boring. I want to use my intellect to understand words better. I want to use my intellect to understand scientific research better and apply it. You need to do the same thing with intuition. What are your goals?
The most important thing and the hardest thing in intuition and what everybody needs to do to engage intuition more than even reading the books or going through the program or whatever, what are your goals? Write them down and not a laundry list because multitasking is a myth. The efficiency of multitasking is a myth. It’s been debunked. What are your top three? What are your goals? Once you have your goals, then your intuition organically begins to find information to create it and then of course, you have to do something with it.
I love going back to psychics, “You will meet someone, the love of your life, in March.” It would help if you went out of your house. Often, we use a lot of these soft skills. Intuition isn’t a soft skill, it’s a hard skill but it’s been adapted to be a soft skill. We use all these soft skills as ways of not changing, not taking action, and not dealing with, “If I go out, I’m going to feel that my last relationship is over. If I go out, I’m going to have to deal with the trauma of abuse.”
My students are always looking to understand their traumas. I’m like, “Don’t look back there. Right here in front of you, what are you having trouble doing?” There is your trauma. Don’t worry about how it happened or who did it to you. Deal with it, “What do I do to reach my goal now? These are the obstacles I’m encountering, it’s probably related to some past trauma, but let’s not spend 20 years on that.” Deal with the obstacles there, that’s what self-help should be. Those are physical resources.
You were talking about protein bars. I’m certainly hearing that older women don’t get enough protein. Yes, I can say, “My stomach, this and that.” The important thing is to get more protein. It’s easier the more we simplify it down. I put in a lot of esoterica because it makes the pill easier to swallow for people who are having a hard time. I started doing that during COVID especially when people needed a little holding along with their data.
Although I always pushed them to look for the can-do, I’m not interested in your can’t-do, that’s your therapist. I’m interested in the can-do and let’s figure out the resources. It is hard to take our vulnerable parts for a ride to find resources. Self-help is there to help you do it. Look for the people you are envious of and learn from them. We are chameleons, we are alchemists as human beings. People can say, “Society doesn’t accept me.” A millimeter to the side, there’s a whole new society that will, or be an activist in the society. There’s always a way to work with what is to create.
What you’re saying about looking forward also is the healing happening simultaneously. I often thought exercise for me and sport was the therapy that helped me deal with whatever was back there from a different and more empowered point of view. A lot of times people think they’re going to figure it out.
Somebody said to me once, “You are expecting your mother to come and take accountability and apologize and all these things.” They’re like, “You have to have that conversation within yourself. Get on with it.” This thing that you’re talking about moving towards the goals, there is so much healing that happens and a better perspective to look back and go, “Yes, this did happen,” and the moving on of it. Getting on and not letting that keep you from what you want.
Some things cannot be metabolized and what the body does is encapsulate them and puts them aside. Some things can be metabolized and they’re riches to be found in metabolizing them. If your whole life is about that metabolism, spirituality, trauma, experience, and all those, that’s fuel. We are the car but then we need to drive somewhere. Sitting idle, the best scenery gets boring.
We have learned to be disempowered. In a sense, many of the conveniences of our culture disempower us. If I couldn’t go to the supermarket, I would starve, and that would be it. Whereas my grandmother would probably look for edible herbs. She wasn’t a nature girl, she graduated from Vassar in 1927 with a degree in literature. These are not nature girls but they knew these things because it was part of the culture, which it is no longer.
It’s also made sexy a little bit being disempowered. Being a little bit victim right now, it’s like, “You’re brave. You’re the victim.” There seems to be, at least right now, this overcorrection of certain things because now people are talking about their feelings.
There’s always been that. I remember years ago, people would come into a workshop and before emails, I get letters saying, “Nobody can wear perfume because I’m sensitive.” I would write back, “Either don’t take the workshop or wear a mask because the world will not adapt to you.” “I’m an adult survivor of X, Y, and Z.” If that’s the reality you want to live, that’s the wrong workshop. This workshop is about you are an adult responsible for your boundaries.
[bctt tweet=”We’re meant to be mindful and present in our lives.”]
If you don’t want to be touched, you don’t want to work with the opposite sex, and you’re threatened by working with the same sex, don’t. I’m not saying real injury doesn’t occur, it does. I’ve earned a right to a voice by having sustained many of the forms of injury available. You make a choice to live through that injury or to move on.
It doesn’t matter if someone broke your leg and you’re limping. You may limp but limp well, limp to where you want to go, make limping fashionable, and do whatever. It’s up to you to do with it as an adult now. That is not true for children. We are all responsible for children and that is a different thing. I do agree that in our culture now, we are acting as if adults capable of making choices have the same license as children. That’s an empowering thing for the adult. It’s not for the culture but not for the adult.
I’ve watched you in some of your lives and such and it’s interesting because you’re compassionate and soft.
I don’t think my students would describe me as that.
Your delivery, there’s femininity like you versus me.
Thank you.
You have these zingers, which I‘m intrigued by. Let’s say me, I’ll take myself, I’m in a long marriage, and I love my husband.
He’s a cutie. He’s lovely. He was welcoming. I didn’t quite know what to do with it.
A beefcake? Your intuition didn’t know what to do. Could you read it?
I didn’t know what to do with that warmth and openness. First of all, I’m also a New Yorker. He was warm, welcoming, and conversed with me. I was a little put-off, frankly. It’s not my paradigm. I didn’t quite know what to do with that. It was lovely. He’s a sweetheart.
I feel, overall, pretty good. My kids are all doing as they should, whatever their ages that they’re at. I’m listening to your message and I think, “I could do more.” I’m not coming in looking for love. I would always talk about business. What would be some of the starting points to get dialed in? If it’s not a specific thing, let’s start there.
First of all, it’s mindfulness, and being present in yourself. We spend too much time intellectualizing the search for our goals instead of noticing what we’re doing that’s important to us. I would get it out of the messy mind and set it as targets, these are my targets. Without what the mind does, which is, “Is this reasonable? Is this rational?”
I didn’t graduate college. My only useful skill was a brain injury. The year after I left my husband, I made $4 million. I sat down and bumped into an agent while I was doing my work on myself and she said, “Let me see those pages.” I said, “No.” She said, “Come on.” I said, “Fine.” She looked at them and said, “This is a book,” and sold it a couple of weeks later for one of the highest prices ever paid for an unknown author and then it became a best seller. I happen to know the wonderful Demi Moore who went on wonderful Oprah with me for an hour. All of a sudden, it was sold out.
That’s when you had a real impact too back then.
All synchronicities. Those were all complete coincidences. I would say, “What is it you’re doing?” What I was doing at the time is, “How am I going to not lose custody of my son having no money and fighting against a man who has a trust fund, which is not community property in the state of New York? How am I going to afford school for him? How am I going to feed us? How am I going to buy back my apartment?”
I turned that into a goal and that’s what The Circle is. The Circle was one of the first books I ever wrote as a process for myself. Practical Intuition is stolen from the experiments that were done on me. The circle was given to me as my useful process to get myself out of the mess that my patterning had put me into. What The Circle demanded was, “What’s your goal?” My goal was to be a full-time stay-at-home mother with my son. What would that even feel like? How can you do that without support, without a partner, or without a home at the time? I got my home back when he was a year old.
You set a goal and then you notice your environment, you notice where your attention goes. It’s not your brain, not your thinking. Thinking is highly overrated. A lot of thinking is neurotic and patterned and not intellectual, not data-oriented, and not healthy. What are the new rituals? A new ritual, for me, even before I had sold a book or any of this happened, my new ritual was what I have been showing others to do, I’m going to now do it for myself.
I read myself every morning and I created ways to read myself that avoided what I already knew or wanted to see, which became practical intuition. Out of roadblocks, what do I have to confront in the outer world in a roadblock? What keeps me from doing it? Making space, what do I have to let go of? I had to let go of a marriage to a man who I love very much but that was not functional and I knew I couldn’t raise a child with him.
Also, community, where is my new community? Any of you who have ever left a long-term relationship or even left home or your parent remarries and you’re young, all of a sudden, your community isn’t yours anymore. You’re on the bridge between who you were and who you were with and who you are becoming. Allowing yourself to notice where that community is. Those are all those elements that engage intuition.
The reason I called it The Circle is you don’t always start with a goal, sometimes you start with an outer roadblock, like, “I’m going to lose my house if I don’t make enough money to pay this mortgage payment.” Sometimes you start with an inner roadblock, “I’m anxious that I can’t get out of bed,” or, “I’ve been diagnosed with something and I’m not sure I want to heal it.” There are so many. Sometimes you’re forced into making space.
It’s interesting that it’s all happening at our work at the Heart Center. In our group, a lot of people have been left by their longtime spouses and making space. Sometimes space is made for you and then you need to decide what to do with it because you don’t want to fill it with the same old junk. All those nine elements of the circle are how you take anything that you want to do in life. Add intellect, add intuition, add awareness, and add the natural framework of the material world and create through it. You’ve seen me be tough with people too.
There are some people who are stuck in their rah-rah or in their boohoo or in their dynamic of their mother and they’re my age. Sometimes we are injured and we do get stuck but we are adults now. I’m my own adult. The difference between me and my son is that no one loved me. I could sit there or I could say, “I need to do a little extra work on not only loving myself but taking in the love my husband offers me, taking in the love that the people on the morning Instagram offer me, taking in the love my son offers me, taking the love my friends offer me and taking in the love I offer myself.
It’s interesting because I had some stuff when I was a kid. It’s interesting because I used to say, “I’d have those bumpy seventeen years for this opportunity to have this life all day long.” Whatever it is that I was able to learn or skills that I developed to survive some of that was a great blessing even though it was uncomfortable. Also, it could have been so much worse. It is interesting because we get stuck there but, to your point, there’s so much goodness and beauty.
You have been effective and part of it is that you are genetically programmed to use every muscle and part of your body and be effective. There are a lot of people who are at my stage or your stage in life and they’re back living with their elderly parents or they’re not happy where they were. It is a natural thing to feel angry, robbed, and all of those horrible things. I can go there with two ounces of alcohol but it’s not effective for creating.
Even if you are between homes, find the resources, and be the person that can convince the social worker. In marshaling not just your intuition but those abilities that you haven’t used to create functionality, you’ll find that other things fall into place. You fall in love with the state-appointed attorney. You bump into the career as a court reporter. Synchronicity is amazing but we have to engage and be present in order to have synchronous lives. Intuition is important.
I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before but we are held together by our patterns. It’s important to be open enough to input, to allow not just intuition but experience, which we find the experiences that we either need or that punish us, which is why you need to have a goal at some point. Also, the interactions that will recreate us. We do recreate each other all the time. There are a lot of people who say, “I’m going to go to a healer.” I’m like, “I’m going to a healer now. I’m having a conversation with someone who’s in the healing professions and who has abilities I don’t have.” It’s reminding myself that I should work out more than an hour and a half a week.
We talked about how it would make sense based on the ways that we grew up or the timings that we grew up if messages were encouraged or not. It makes sense. To your point, being open to there is also an athlete or whatever version of that is inside of you that’s going to be lifting weights three times a week.
There’s no athlete inside of me. There is someone who doesn’t want bone loss inside of me but there is absolutely no athlete inside of me.
I beg to differ. I’m curious that when you’re on the ropes, because when people fell on the ropes, “How am I going to survive, money, stress, or whatever it is.” When you are getting in touch with your intuition, you talked about outer worldly barricades and then the inner, how do you not let that taint or dictate when you’re setting the goals? Do you know what I mean?
I know what you mean. People live in fear. People live in anxiety. It takes over.
How did you get past that a little bit? When you have a new baby and you have all that, that’s a lot, and people feel that way.
I’m luckily codependent. The urge to protect and make a life for my son overrode anything. It’s not that I didn’t wake up after two hours of sleep in a sweat and panic. I wrote a book called Welcome to Your Crisis. I do a lot of free work for psychiatrists and I certainly did for drug research. I called in all the favors. When you’re in crisis, intuition is great but I want to make sure the process works because that’s not a time that you have a lot of fat to burn and make a mistake with.
Everyone has a different fix. Some people get anxious, some people get angry, some people get depressed, and some people go into denial. Unfortunately, the world punishes all of them.The thing that I’ve noticed in over 40 years of working with people is when people are worried, a sense is going to happen, and it almost never happens. Usually, it’s the elephant they didn’t see who sits on them. Doing things to get you out of an emotional state is important for intuition, which is why it’s easier to read somebody else than yourself.
My particular poison is anxiety, my husband’s is denial. Denial and anxiety often get together. What anxious person needs to do is put themselves a little bit enough in denial to function. What a denial person needs to do is put themselves through enough anxiety to function. The same thing with rage and depression, they tend to pair up. For an anxiety type, when you have fears, first of all, is this fear justified?
I had a friend who had something happen that triggered her. She called me in complete panic and I said, “First, what part of this fear is justified? Let’s not just make you unafraid. Fear is a signal. Now let’s do the work on that.” It took us a day. I’m telling you as a psychic, there’s nothing to be afraid of and you’ve done the work. You need to go organize your sock drawer, you need to distract, or exercise. Exercise is a wonderful way, especially for rage types, of discharging emotion.
Dumping your electricity.
You need to do something else because we believe feeling. Feeling is accurate about how you’re feeling. It’s not accurate, most of the time, about what’s going on around you. Intuition is a detached perception, it has no juice. A lot of us have worked for police departments at different times and we’ve seen awful things.
In retrospect, I realize how shocking it probably was to see this little blonde girl saying, “Yes, after the murder that was done with this I feel that they were…” It’s as if I’m telling you I’m Goldilocks. It’s a dissociative state. Feeling isn’t fact. You do need to deal with the feeling in order to be able to experience intuition because feeling is that reptilian brain, it’s the base of all of it, and it guides us all that’s why it’s important.
I obsess when I meditate but breathwork, when I’m doing something, is helpful for me. I rarely do it unless I have to and unless I’m jumping out of my skin.I do it and it’s effective. Find what’s effective to reroute the feeling because you need to be in your body. Even to know that your body isn’t safe, you need to be in your body. Intuition is very much related to your ability to say, “This is my experience and this is my intuitive experience.”
You don’t have a perspective if you don’t know what your experience is. That’s not true of injured children. When I was a young person, I didn’t have any experience, I didn’t have an eye. Thank you, 40 years of therapy. I was able to be everybody else and move around because there was no place to come back to. I was a functional being, functional because not of an integrated ego but because of a wonderfully functioning survival skill that ate all the rest of it. I then worked hard to become a human.
You talk about sleep and using sleep as a way to associate maybe with the world differently.
Sleep work, my students love it. With sleep work, you get to go to sleep, fix all your problems, and have everyone else fix them for you. You’re a vehicle here so in a day, you need to repress emotion in order to function. There’s energy going to repression. Your intuition is evaluating your environment to make sure if there’s an animal that wants to eat you that you are not in the environment to be eaten. Your intellect is evaluating your environment and planning for those of you who do have a frontal lobe. Your physicality is responding to your environment.
Most of us are lucky enough to have a safe place to sleep. If you don’t have a safe place to sleep, this is not true. When you’re asleep, your subconscious is able to fool around and process all the stuff. Your intellect is at rest, except as used by the subconscious, and your intuition can move around. You’ll often notice you’ll wake up thinking of someone and you’ll call them and they’ll say, “This happened. I can’t believe you called.”
When you are asleep, your intuition can roam but you can also direct it. There are two things for sleep work that are helpful and one is if there is an issue that you want to resolve, write down before sleep, “I am in love. I am healthy. I have found the right treatment.” You write it down. There’s no magic. Things have the power we give them. You write it down to take it out of the soup and say, “This is a potato.” You can eat it, you can dance naked around it, or you can put it on your bedside table and go to sleep. That action has channeled your subconscious and semi-conscious attention.
What you’ll notice is when you wake up, if you report, what are you thinking of? What are you noticing? How did you wake up feeling? Where were you when you woke up with your perceptions? No one writes anymore. Speak it into your iPhone, I’m sure there’s a fancy word for that. I still write with an actual pen and pencil. It will give you an enormous amount of intuitive information. Chances are that you’ll get the out-of-the-blue call from somebody who has the job you’re looking for, who wants you to meet their brother who you might be a match, or whatever it was your issue was because you’re also communicating with the world around you.
The other thing we do is, as a group, we do sleep work. In our group, we’re all doing The Circle. We all have one single goal that’s our front runner. It’s not that we don’t care about our families or our health but this is our front-runner, this is our neurotic fixation, and this is what we want. We have one goal. At night, we agree that we are going to work on each other’s goals in our sleep.
The scary thing about human beings is when they agree to something, we have to be careful of the contracts we make because, subconsciously, we often fulfill them even if consciously we think we’re not doing it. We agree to work for one another. What’s interesting is my friend got me this ring that tells me about my sleep architecture. I have beautiful sleep architecture, deep sleep, dream sleep, lights, and beautiful sleep architecture, and nothing gets in the way. If I sleep for four hours, I have beautiful sleep architecture.
However, when we do remote sleep work, it’s all light sleep. My subconscious isn’t taking the space and I’m not in deep sleep because I’m moving in time and space and negotiating for other people. Many people began looking at their eye watch, ring, or whatever, and seeing that it was the same across the board.
When we do sleep work, we are working and things resolve out of the blue and out of our field of control. My students do readings every morning online and I’m like, “Don’t tell someone what they’re feeling. Don’t be prescriptive. They don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tell them what’s happening outside of them.
When you’re doing the healing, make the person feel better but fix it in the world, fix it in their life, fix it in their matrix. There’s been too much inside. I wouldn’t want to be completely healed in a life that wasn’t and that’s impossible anyway. A healed person wouldn’t be in a rotten life, they’d go find another paradigm to live in. It’s amazing work. If you do it every night, you get sick. We do it once every month maybe.
That makes sense. From my perspective, we talk a ton about sleep on this show.
It’s important.
Even though you have your own human emotions, is there a part of you that’s practiced this so much? I don’t want to say it’s taken away the fear or anxiety of life but is there a part of you that has practiced this enough?
I wish there were. Not only am I vigilant for myself but I’m vigilant for my clients. I have bad boundaries so I’m vigilant for my students. We’ve had three students widowed. I show up at services. I’m vigilant. I’m structured to be vigilant. What is different is my level of wasteful and painful anxiety has diminished enormously. I used to be so anxious as a 25-year-old that I was surprised my heart didn’t stop beating. I thought, “How can a heart still beat?”
I hadn’t worked on having an ego, a machine to metabolize the anxiety and make it into energy. I have an enormous amount of energy and I use that energy as a healer and as a teacher. I don’t feel like I’m working but I’m working all of the time. I metabolize that energy in a better way. If I’m getting sick, the first thing that happens to me before I even realize I’m getting a cold is that I’m overcome with anxiety.
You become disorganized if you think about it, when you’re tired, when you’re hungry, when you’ve had too many bad things happen, and when you’ve said yes to too many things. It is assaulting the framework that you maintain to live your life. It’s hard for those regressive feelings not to take over. It is a point where we’re also less guarded intuitively so we tend to feel other people’s feelings without identifying them as others.
We tend to get into telepathic conversations that normally we would have a shield from because they’re not helpful and we wouldn’t listen to them in life. We’re not going to listen to them telepathically. We begin to remote view, go to the future, go to a place in the past where we shouldn’t be where there’s nothing helpful.
You go to the future to do the right thing in the present to avoid what you don’t want. When you live in that fearful future, it’s usually because your boundaries have been assaulted. It has been one straw too many. It is Women’s day so I’m allowed to be pro-woman. It’s funny because now, you can’t be anti or pro-anything. It is Women’s day. Especially as women, we are taught not to have certain boundaries. When my husband gets angry, I blow up. When my husband is depressed, I cry.
One of the things we negotiated is his being a little more aware of his own feeling state because it’s hard on my body to act it out. It’ll come, I’ll blow up, and then I‘ll say, “I was upset when you did this,” or, “I’m upset by this thing that happened.” We have to have five minutes every day where we know what you’re feeling. He’s such a high-functioning person. I take a change in weather personally so I almost always know what I’m feeling, it’s just not always mine. We carry a lot. We have wounds.
We want to try to fix it or make everybody feel better.
I want to fix everything. I have never met a person, a company, a situation, or a product that I didn’t want to fix. I am a compulsive fixer. I love it, that’s my art form. There are times when I take on things that aren’t my problem. I’m sure all of you can relate to this dynamic where you say, “Yes, let me help you,” and then you don’t do it enough or the person decides you should be doing it consistently.
That’s my favorite.
You’re not giving anymore your blood bag. We do tend to become blood bags. A neuropsychiatrist I know spoke about the female and the male brain and there are women with male brains that are able to compartmentalize and that are structurally male and there are men with female brains. I say this also as a mother of a son who has a super male brain and a mathematical brain. There are other burdens. We have ostracized men in our society and that is also not helpful. I had to tell my son’s nursery school teachers, “Please hug my child when he cries. Do you want me to sign something?”
In my workshops, one of the first things I say is because some people are of different orientations but men and women, you are responsible for your own bodies. We do a lot of hugging in this workshop, you are responsible for your safety. If you don’t feel safe, let the person know, or let me know. Maybe they don’t even realize. If they do, then they need to be called on it. Of course, it’s a teacher’s job to make a safe environment but that’s why I also don’t teach children. You’re not allowed in my workshop if you’re not 21. If you are 21, I’m watching your dynamic like a hawk. I’m watching because you’re not, in many ways, a full adult.
That’s not a knock. By the way, there’s data about even parts of the brain not even being developed still at 21, especially if you’re male. I want to touch upon a few more things because there’s so much like rituals.
We are held together by our patterns. I don’t know how many times someone will say, “This relationship is completely different.” It’s wearing different fringe, it’s exactly the same relationship. Yes, I’m doing this diet differently, I’m looking at it, and thinking, “No.” It’s the same kind of someone else telling you what to do and you’re not dealing with the fact that if you consume less than you expend, you will lose weight. If you consume more, you will gain weight. You can count those. I can eat all the bacon I want. It’s like, “You go with that. Live your reality.”
I was watching you even discuss the full moon, it moves tides, and there are things in us. You also talk about elements of rituals.
One of the wonderful things about the crisis as an adult or taking a vacation is it challenges all of these grids we have in place that keep us the same but the grids also hold us together. Change is something that we have to negotiate compassionately both with ourselves, with others around us, and with our world. Ritual is a wonderful way, especially repetitive ritual like walking to work differently on the same day.
When I wanted to fall in love, I had a child at home who laughed his head off, I set a place for my partner at the breakfast table, an empty place, and I changed the plate and I put it in the dishwasher the next day. It was interesting because it began to resemble I’m not a wine drinker, I would put a wine glass out for my husband because he’s a wine collector. When he came into it, what I’d set up resembled it, that’s intuition and pre-cognition. Rituals replace patterns.
One of the things that I’ve been trying to impart to my group and me is that discipline isn’t a punishment. Discipline, which is what ritual takes, is that repetition, it’s allocating your attention, your time, and resources to something you want, that’s what discipline is. You look at the rituals that hold something in place. I was feeling isolated but I don’t like to go out. That ritual of having everyone come to me kept all the same things and people in my environment.
I now go out. I’m here in LA alone for a week. I am doing more classes. I am saying yes to parties. My ritual is to contact and that contact has brought people in who will lovingly make something that feels like home to me. In London, because I made myself go out, I met this amazing group of women who said, “Let us make a home for you here. Take off your shoes. Curl up on my couch. What can I feed you? I have some people who’d love a workshop, let me invite them to my house.” It’s important to practice something different.
What you’re saying is important. For me, it rings true because I have a lot of discipline and sometimes I get trapped on that grid and the grid doesn’t get bigger or it needs to be different. It’s an interesting thing what you’re saying because people think, “Once you can be successful at something, whatever that is, and with success, I don’t mean attention or money, I mean good at whatever, you can die there.” I am consciously looking at myself and saying, “Yes, that is great, that discipline, and it’s also going to kill you. It’s going to make you shrivel up and shrink and make your world small.”
It’s not because you’re aware of it and it’s going to scare you and irritate you and you’re going to use anxiety positively and grief positively to not allow that to happen. It’s the people who aren’t aware of that where that’s a problem. What often happens to those people is get a crisis, they get an injury where they can’t practice their discipline.
They then have a choice and that choice is to sink into whatever their crisis pathology type is or to say, “Reality testing is highly underrated. This is what I’ve got to work with right now. Maybe I can make it into what I want but it starts with this is what I have to work with right now.” Maybe this moment isn’t great but, going back to what we started with, what is the can-do? I’m the opposite, I don’t know where I am in time and space. I have no discipline.
When my son left for college, I fainted on the street and thought, “I’m having a stroke.” I thought, “When was the last time I ate?” It had been a week before. I never forget coffee because that’s an addiction. It had been a week before. There are people who are balanced, who have good ego structures, and who are able to respond to change.
It is true that to be an athlete, we make choices for our goals and we all think we should be healthy in every part but it was functional for you when you were a professional athlete or you couldn’t have been the superstar that you were. The person who drove me here was like, “You have no idea who you’re going to be meeting.” I walked in with my breath held.
I sound amazing.
My driver was an actor. He knew all of this. You’ve been an example in the world but maybe it doesn’t serve you now.
That’s the whole thing, allowing ourselves to keep changing, growing, and getting rid of that one template and looking for new and others.
We’re evolving it because we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s important to evolve. With revolutions, you have to kill the revolutionaries after the revolution because they don’t tend to be good leaders. With evolution, you’re adaptive. If you make a mistake, you adapt to the other direction. There is nothing that is more instructive than a relationship. I was sitting on the couch with my best friend, I put my head on his chest and he put his arm around me.
I was soaking in feeling so good with this incredible human being who I admire so much and who reflects his admiration back to me. There isn’t that passionate structure of a love relationship. Relationships can change you if you allow them and we tend to defend our positions or lose them. They’re both ends of the spectrum. There’s the chameleon who will become everything, which we all hope our teenagers are not, and then there’s the person who is right. Both of those things are dysfunctional, although functional in certain situations.
It goes back to The Circle. What’s your target? What is your goal? We think of goals, like, “We shouldn’t be so driven.” It’s not about being driven. A goal is having a destination. Our goal is to have a good conversation here. It’s important to be able to organize energy. We live in a world where spirituality is a multi-billion-dollar industry. I often say if I had to do it for twenty minutes a day, everything that’s important to supposedly be this whole spiritual being, I would’ve no time for basic hygiene.
What we want to do is we want to take that energy and use it for whatever it is we want to do and be in this moment. The idea is to get what you want while becoming the person you want to be. We always think we have to make a choice and we don’t. Also, I’ve rarely seen happiness without a lot of antipsychotics that are not tinged with sadness. We keep wanting to merge something into one idea or color.
This is the wonderful thing about our society now, there is going overboard but everyone is saying, “We live in a rainbow. By the way, I can see colors you can’t even see. I’m a color you’ve never even met. Be open to what it is I have to offer.” Relationships are incredibly instructive and the upside of technology, which everyone demonizes.
I have to say, I saw people during COVID in my group having a conversation before they shared bodily fluids. A lot of great self-awareness and relationships came out of that. Because there was that connection on that level, we do share that we all have hopes, we all have fears, we all have injuries, we all have desires, and we all have all these different things.
Often, technology resembles intuition. The ability telepathically to get a message from here to 2000 miles away, you can do that with technology or virtual reality. A young woman was telling me about her thesis and I want to teach with her. She’s a 25-year-old and I’m thinking, “You’re 25. What have I been doing these last 40 years?” She would have virtual reality experiences for people of opposite beliefs. The empathy was off the scales. She’s smart.
I have a friend, Elijah, who did a project with Van Jones called The Empathy Project. They did a version of this where they put you in maybe a vehicle and you’re a little kid but if you look down at your hands, your hands are black and your dad is driving you and you get pulled over by the police or you’re a female waitress. It was called The Empathy Project and it was that exact thing.
The only thing I say about technology is that you’re talking about checking in with yourself. I have three daughters, my younger two are teenagers, and my youngest. It’s making sure it doesn’t distract us to the point that we don’t have the ability to know what’s going on inside so that we can figure out what are our obstacles inside of us and in our world and things like that.
If you’re addressing life and from what I’ve seen, in an hour in your, your kids are doing stuff, your kids are addressing life. If you’re addressing life, you don’t have to sit and understand it and get in touch with it. You’re dealing with it, you’re in a situation, and you have to respond. The parts of you that are not healthy, you have to deal with them because you are functioning. You don’t seem to be the kind of mother who lets your children come me all the way.
I appreciate that. I will tell you one thing that you’ll appreciate. My youngest daughter is pretty strong and she told me that she had a friend. She goes, “Do you know that there are girls I know that maybe kiss a boy because they don’t want to make him feel bad or embarrass him?”
I’ve been that girl.
She goes, “No. It’s the shortest word. It’s easy.” She’s like, “It’s about the same in every language. It’s not that deep. No.” I thought, “She’s fine.” At my time in tenth grade, because I was curious, I wanted to be “nice” and all these things, whatever that programming was. I thought, “Here’s a kid who’s already like, ‘It’s not that deep. I’m not into you.’” I thought, “She’ll be okay.”
That’s a loved child. The fact of the matter is that we have many children, adults, young adults, and even people our age who didn’t have that reflection from their parents. What the new work that we do in our group, along with intuition, is the ego is where you take that energy we all share, and you create in a material world, and you create a material body. That energy was first defined for you in those first six years of life. That’s the foundation of your caretakers. Whether it was a won’t or a can’t, there are so many people who don’t get that.
One of the things I love about both intuition, which will find you the answer, somewhere it will go and it will find it and grab it and bring that person to you or that experience to you. Also what I love about self-help and what I love about well-chosen social media. There is a dark side. Everyone thinks that they should have airbrush skin. We all have blind spots. We don’t see what we don’t see. It gives the people, the children, and the injured adults the resources to do something differently.
Often, we need to do it first as a discipline that we don’t believe in and don’t feel is working. We then notice from feedback in our environment that it is. Going back to psychics, when you go to a psychic or healer, you’re not paying for the truth, and you’re not paying to be healed, you’re paying for their time. You also want to be cautious because we are sponges and it is important to be able to verify the information you get.
Reality testing is a real magical tool. If you do this, this will happen. If this doesn’t happen, the excuse of you didn’t believe in it enough is not a good excuse. I hear that a lot in the soft healing arts, if you believe in it, it would work. Telling an anxious person, “You have to relax for this healing.” “No, I’m anxious. That’s why I’m here.” When I train healers, I tell them, “The client’s job is to do whatever messed up thing they’re doing.
Your job is to organize your attention, your information, and your energy in such a way that you are more powerful than the dysfunction.” If they could heal themselves, they’d be healed. I tell them, “Go for your shopping list if you need to, it doesn’t matter.” Obsessed, do your thing. We all feel like we have to be in this perfect state. By the way, there is no intuitive state. If you look at a functional MRI, You will see that people go in and out of that intuitive state all the time many times in five minutes, let alone an hour, or let alone a day.
With my students, when I say, “Now we’re going to do telepathy.” They take out their crystals and take a deep breath and I’m like, “No, you can’t do that in a dark alley. You can’t do that in a boardroom. You need to engage these skills in the same neurotic stress state you live your daily life.” I’m deep breathing. You’re putting your thumb in forefinger together. That’s your yoga class. That’s not intuitive training. Do you know who the good intuitives are? Not monks. Swap fly or don’t swap fly needs zero intuition.
Soldiers and ER nurses are our intuitives, people who don’t have time for well-reasoned decisions. Also, traders, who always think they’re making logical decisions because most of them are men but they’re completely intuitive decisions. You don’t have time to assemble the data and compare it to a control. You’re doing triage, that’s the intuitive state. It is hyperaware, it’s not relaxed, or it’s not while you’re chanting.
It is when you’re hyper-alert and from what left field, the question you wrote before you went to sleep last night gets an answer and it knocks you so hard. Intuition isn’t subtle because survival isn’t subtle. Running doesn’t mean, “Let us think about this and consider it and feel if it feels like it has integrity for us.” Look at different times in our past and deal with the trauma of having to run it whether it’s fair. Run or you get eaten.
Is it reasonable to say that whether it’s love, business, or medical that the process of developing your intuition is you might direct it in different ways but it is pretty similar?
Yes. I do something called boot camp and it’s a weekend training. It’s hazing.
Do you get tired?
No. I have so much energy that I don’t sleep that entire weekend. I’m electric, inspired, and I’m a completely live wire. There is no amount of ambient that will put me down.
You have a hazing weekend.
Yes. My trainings are hazings because you have to knock people off their center to allow them to see that they are intuitive all the time and then organize it in a productive way. That said, people say, “I want to be a business intuitive.” Do you know what a business intuitive is? A business intuitive is someone who can be detailed and accurate enough that a business will pay you to perform. I want to be a love intuitive.
What’s a love intuitive? You’re getting data. Intuition is an idiot’s gift. Little fat kids in famine countries are intuitives. They’re not Bodhisattvas, they’re not intellectuals, and they’re not highly trained, they are survivors. It’s the same skill no matter what. There is a framework that’s a little different. The way you structure your targets is different from business. The need to do a timeline is important for business. Not sticking to the question but noticing what happens from left field.
Someone can be asking about the future of soybeans but a drought hits you from left field that you didn’t expect and nobody else expected because irrigation techniques were so great. You find that, at the same time, it’s COVId and there’s no shipping. The reality is with business, unlike with people, with people, you have to work more carefully with their limitations. With business, you can fracture their limitations. You can bring people in. They’re both less and more moving parts.
Training is the same and then the language and what you look for in your targets and how you present them. An intuitive is not and should not be a therapist. Practicing medicine without a license is a felony. I would never give financial advice to a civilian unless I had two ounces of wine. I would never professionally give financial advice to a civilian. I’m giving financial advice to people who have already made a billion dollars in finance.
If you are in the service industry, which I am and you are also creating a product, you don’t want to create a product that’s not functional. Your job is to serve your client and community. My job is to serve my client. If I’m not the best person, I will often say no. I always read my students intrusively, I have all of their numbers. I have thousands of students and still, I’m able to intrusively read them. My boot campers sign up for it and I warn them in advance.
Often, you don’t need to know what’s going to happen. You need therapy. You need to be able to deal with today. It doesn’t matter what’s coming up for you, you can’t deal with it. You don’t need more belief, you need a blood test. I love when people used to ask me and I used to get this a lot, “Am I HIV positive?” I’m like, “There’s a much more accurate test.” I grew up when that was a death sentence. There’s a much more accurate test.
I refer all my clients because I don’t take private clients. I read my companies and my students. My students take private clients. I’ll refer you to a student but their integrity is important. Your clients should not be filling your needs. Your clients pay a fee and that’s it. They shouldn’t have to invite you to their parties nor should you go to them. You shouldn’t be on their yachts. After they’re not clients anymore, that’s a choice.
If the person needs a therapist, they should have a therapist. If they need a doctor, they should have a doctor. We all want to be everything. Intuition isn’t everything, it’s another way of getting data. There are other data out there and there are other resources that are important. That’s what The Circle is about, it’s about how we integrate all of this.
I realized that nutrition was important. I’ve always been skinny and I’ve lived on fat. I realized that there are these things called fruits, which I don’t particularly like, and vegetables, which are complete strangers to me. I ran the experiment, “Let me try to eat more fruit and vegetables. Let me try to take a probiotic. Let me try to drink enough water.” I realized that my whole world changed.
You couldn’t intuitively know that the food was good for you.
You don’t see what you don’t see. Even though I work with people and even I’ve worked in setting up wellness programs, for example, I’ll say, “These nutrients are important,” but I never related to myself. I have to tell you, it was a big a-ha for me that things that are not deep-fried do make you feel better. We have blind spots, we all do.
Like there’s a lot of pressure for our kids and our public people to be perfect, there’s a lot of pressure in the self-help community to be perfect. The greatest gift that I give my students is my sloppy, messy, and reactive first thing in the morning imperfection. I do have a great life. I wasn’t destined for one. I made it with my disability or my other ability or whatever you want to call it. I have a wonderful life. My sister who killed herself used to say, “My life is wonderful. I am the problem.”
I always joke that if I run into something in a day with somebody and then if I have a second thing, it’s that joke about, “Wait a second, I’m the asshole.” It’s not happening to us. Justin, I’m going to give you a chance if you want to ask any questions.
Not what is the meaning of life because I haven’t figured that one out yet.
No.
Do you feel that luck and faith are the same things as intuition?
No. Luck and fate are a lot like pretending you’re going to grow up and marry Kendal. It’s an immature fantasy. There is no luck and there is no fate. I have observed that we create reality and we don’t always know what the moving pieces are. It’s important not to give things interpretations they don’t have. I have been both unlucky and lucky in life and most people can find their pockets of luck and pockets of bad luck.
When your intuition is targeted toward your comfort and progress, that’s luck. When your intuition is run by your subconscious and recreating the horrible experiences, that’s bad luck. When you take apart what it takes to take an action or make a decision, there are a lot of moving pieces. Sometimes we’re distracted and we miss one of the pieces and it gets us into a crapload of pain. Sometimes our timing and the different points of the world around us are a little different and it takes us a while to find where we intersect.
I don’t believe in fate and I don’t believe in luck. If I believed in fate and luck, I don’t know if I wouldn’t want to be alive, that would be like everyone else in my family. I would just enjoy my food and not try it anymore. First of all, I do have some beliefs but I don’t live by them. I live by what I have evidence for. My mantra is if I don’t have evidence for it, it is a belief. Beliefs are wonderful like fantasies are wonderful and they have a purpose but they’re not good for your structure.
That’s almost the scientist side of your family in you it seems. If you ask a scientist a question and it could be a well-thought-out hypothesis and they’re like, “That’s an interesting idea but I don’t know the science on it.” I want to finish this conversation with you talking about in your books about granting three wishes.
I have one goal or three questions.
I like that you got people thinking about that. Could we elaborate a little bit about that?
In the morning lives, I have people write down three goals, three things that are important. When you ask people what they’re working on, they tend to do a laundry list and that’s a mess. I can’t find my shoes in my shoe closet because I have many. It’s not that they’re not stacked in pairs, it’s just there are too many of them. I also have them make three goals because then I randomly pick a coin that has a number. It’s 1 of 3 so there is a high probability that it’s going to be 1 of those 3. It confuses them just enough to allow intuition to do a reading for themselves and to get data for themselves.
I ask people in The Circle and this is the work that we always do, I always contextualize everything even if I’m working with a company, “What is your goal?” You need to be able to experience it and it needs to be able to be encapsulated in a sentence. People laundry list. If you think about how powerful a laser is, a laser is powerful because it focuses considerable energy that seems impotent when it’s on 10, 20, or 30 things to one specific target.
The interesting thing about opening a door is if you want to get your couch through, you open that door, and your couch gets through but so does everything else. The Circle is teaching your machinery to work effectively, to use everything in yourself and everything in your environment to create desired change. There is no such thing as luck and there is no such thing as fate. Someone on Instagram was like, “Here’s my target. I want a loving relationship and a good this and good that. I want a great house.” That’s not a goal, that’s a scatter.
Your goal is, “My partner and I have created success from the beautiful home that we live in.” It’s like a dart game, if it’s all over the wall, where’s the bullseye? You need to have a bullseye. By the way, that bullseye will evolve because one of the things that happen when you have a goal is experiencing synchronicity. What you encounter informs that goal. It may be informed, “If I reach that goal, I take this from someone I love. Let me adapt that goal to be able to do it in a slightly different way.” Your goal evolves through experience.
I don’t like mantras except as a relaxation technique because the mantra is staying with that same pattern. It is like, “I’m in love with tall, dark, and handsome.” Maybe you find that you have a back problem and short is going to work better. You need to be able to adapt that mantra. It is important. Also, one of the things that are important with integrating data, integrating things to be able to make a change is your subconscious noes. You can’t kid yourself. By the way, you can’t kid someone else. You can do it for a while but the tail whips around.
If you tell your subconscious, “I am successful and happy,” and you’re miserable and not successful, your subconscious says, “I’m not trusting that part of you. I’m going to call BS. I’m going to go do my own thing.” You need to have affirmations. For lack of a better word, you need to have action statements and belief statements that reflect the truth. “My life may be crappy now but I have dealt with a lot successfully and I intend to do it again,” that’s a working mantra.
“I may not be perfect but I’m what I have to work with and that’s going to be good enough,” that’s a working mantra. “I’m in love with someone who is never going to freely express his feelings but I have the symbols of love every day and I accept them as nourishment,” that’s a mantra and a long one. It’s better if they’re shorter. My mantra is to never say in 10 words what you could say in 500.
Laura, can you remind everyone of all the places they can find you?
LauraDay.com. I’ve written six books that are workshops on intuition because I don’t believe in writing about intuition. I put you in the experience to be your own intuitive. @LauraDayIntuit on Instagram. You can see my pajama collection because I go on every morning and we exchange healing and we exchange readings. I would say it’s the most esoteric thing I do but I fool them into being data-oriented good intuitives by cloaking it in purple.
We do ritual, which I see as creating new discipline. I have a newsletter. Every once in a while, I remember to put my events up in the newsletter. It’s a wonderful place also. I love collaborations. I’ve decided to embrace being the crone and I want to collaborate. I answer all my emails personally so make them short. If you say, “I’m having trouble with keeping boundaries.” I may not be an expert on boundaries but I will find you the expert.
The wonderful thing about arriving at a certain point in life is that you have resources and I want to share these resources. What do you do? Sit on your resources. They’re not going to hatch, they’re not eggs. I’m inspired by the needs and interests of my community. I also am committed to sharing platforms, which we don’t do enough. I worked on my nutrition because I had a naturopath on and I thought, “I’m not going to give up weed, alcohol, and milk, but maybe there’s something here.” I started introducing some of the things she was recommending that I eat. I realized that my skin cleared up, I gained weight, which I wanted to, and I felt better.
There you go. Thank you for making your way up my windy road.
You are a fertile soil. You are amazing.
We’ll see if, offline, you’re like, “I have to tell you, when you walked in, I read all this stuff.” I’m kidding. I’m not going to hide from you.
First of all, there is no hiding from anybody. That is a myth. That’s a magical belief. Second of all, I’m the least intuitive person in the world unless I’m asked a question. Otherwise, I would be in a psych ward. I’m a complete sieve. Do you know those friends who tell you their problems? I don’t want to hear it. Ask me the question because if I hear the problem, I’m a natural medium, and I’m experiencing the problem. I don’t need that. That’s not healthy. Let me solve something.
Laura Day, thank you.
Thank you so much.
—
Thank you so much for reading this episode. Stay tuned for a bonus episode where I go deeper on one of the topics that resonated with me. If you have any questions for my guest or even myself, please send them to @GabbyReece on Instagram. If you feel inspired, please hit the follow button, and leave a rating and a comment, it not only helps me, it helps the show grow and reach new readers.
Subscribe to The Gabby Reece Show
[podcast_subscribe id=”5950″]
Resources mentioned:
- Laura Day
- Practical Intuition
- Welcome to Your Crisis
- How to Rule the World from Your Couch
- The Circle
- The Empathy Project
- @LauraDayIntuit
- @GabbyReece
About Laura Day
New York Times-bestselling author Laura Day has spent nearly four decades helping individuals, organizations, and companies harness and develop their innate intuitive abilities to create profound change. Newsweek magazine calls her “The $10,000-a-Month Psychic,” adding “When business people need a crystal ball, they turn to consultant Laura Day, the ‘intuitionist.’” The Independent dubbed her “The Psychic of Wall Street.” A-list Hollywood stars and Wall Street executives praise her ability to predict future events – including the 2008 recession – with astounding accuracy. As Brad Pitt has said, “I believe in the gut, and I believe in Laura Day.”
Laura’s work has helped demystify intuition and bring it into the mainstream. In her workshops and presentations, she demonstrates the practical, verifiable, and sometimes astonishing uses of intuition in the fields of business, science, medicine, and personal growth. Laura has trained thousands of people and companies to use their brains, perceptions, and “sixth sense” in effective ways to realize their goals. She is the author of six bestselling books: Practical Intuition, Practical Intuition in Love, Practical Intuition in Success, The Circle, Welcome to Your Crisis, and How to Rule the World from Your Couch.