If you can't hear your own intuition, it's because something is standing at the gate in front of your intuition on purpose, and that something thinks it's saving your life. Your intuition isn't weak.
Once you can see what's in the way, you can thank it for trying to protect you and then step around it. Being able to step around it is the difference between someone who gets in touch with their intuition once a year and someone who is able to access their intuition on demand.
There's a Monroe Institute essay from 2022 that I keep coming back to. The essay is by Joseph Felser, a philosophy professor who's been writing in the Institute's journal for twenty years, and it's about why the door to your own knowing keeps shutting.
He puts it like this: Some people get a dramatic opening - an out-of-body experience, a near-death experience, something that "rend[s] the curtain of amnesia once and for all." Most of us get glimpses instead. For those of us who get glimpses, "the sheer weight of the curtain shuts itself each time." Then he talks about what shuts the curtain: "The mechanism which closes the curtain, after we enjoy what philosopher Bernardo Kastrup calls our 'brief peeks beyond,' is the fear instinct: the sheer terror of annihilation."
He's careful about which fear he means, too - less the fear of dying, he says, than the fear of "the loss of our illusions of being small, powerless, separate beings."
I'd put it even more plainly. What's blocking your intuition is a bodyguard, and the bodyguard has been on the job for a long time. Somewhere early on, a part of you learned that knowing too much, too fast, was dangerous, and that part of you has been standing in front of the door ever since. It's loyal, and it thinks it's helping you.
The therapist Donald Kalsched wrote a whole book about this protector, and what's stayed with me is that you can't reason with it. It is, in his words, "not educable." So you won't argue the protector out of the way, no matter how good your argument is. All you can do is show it, over and over, that the door opens and nothing terrible comes through.
In another essay, Felser names what Monroe program attendees are taught to reach behind that door. "Monroe program attendees are taught methods of accessing 'Guidance' or 'The Inner Self Helper,'" he writes, and then: "Call it what you will, there is an inner source of information and knowledge that displays greater intelligence and creativity than 'I' do." He wrote that line after a diagnosis that didn't surprise him, because something in him already knew and had been sending him warnings. That something in him is the voice behind the bodyguard.
Try this once this week: When you get a feeling about something and a second voice jumps right in to tell you you're being silly, write them both down side by side - the feeling and the objection. Then ask the objection what it's protecting you from. It'll tell you, and the answer is almost never what you thought it would be. The objection is the protector talking, and once the protector has been thanked, it steps aside more easily.
Starfire Signals is where I teach people to tell those two voices apart.
In class, you put on stereo headphones and I stream a Hemi-Sync track. If you haven't heard of Hemi-Sync before, it combines an audio technique called binaural beats, in which you are played a slightly different tone in each ear and your brain reconciles these by producing a third tone which is the difference between the two, with other brainwave altering frequencies and tones layered in, to shift you into a state of synchronization between the hemispheres of your brain. This induces a calm, open, focused state from which you can access expanded awareness. Your body settles into deep rest while your mind stays awake. Fear lives in the body, and a body in deep rest isn't afraid, so the bodyguard relaxes. Whatever comes through in that state, you write it down before you talk yourself out of it. Then we share as a group, and you get to hear how the same signal sounds when it comes through other people, which is what teaches you to trust your own.
The next class is tomorrow, Tuesday, November 3, 10 AM to noon Eastern, live on Zoom. A session is $22, and BMC Starfire Codes Members get their discount automatically.
Every month you spend making decisions with the protector standing in the way is a month of decisions that fear made for you and you signed off on.
Click here to reserve your spot.
Further Reading
Atwater, F. H. (c. 1987). The Monroe Institute's Hemi-Sync Process. The Monroe Institute.
Felser, J. M. (2020). Life at the Edge: Beyond the Great Barrier. The Monroe Institute Blog, April 2020.
Felser, J. M. (2022). Don't Forget, There Is Only Remembering. The Monroe Institute Blog, October 2022.
Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge.