“I Think I Already Knew That”

As you can imagine, people consult with intuitives, psychics and energy workers for a wide variety of reasons.  Obviously, the common thread is that they want help with things that they haven’t been able to do anything about through other means.  Intuitive work is the red-headed stepchild of the healing arts world; after psychotherapy and medicine don’t produce the results they want, they decide to give more… ephemeral methods a try.

A problem occurs when they bring with them certain preconceptions about how intuitive consulting actually works.  People go to doctors and therapists and counselors expecting to be “fixed” – to have the professional examine them, come up with a diagnosis, and provide a cure for what ails them.  And when they go outside those conventional, “scientific” frameworks, they carry along those notions of having an expert “fix” them.

But that’ s not how it works.

The fact is that we’re all intuitive – we all have access to all that’s out there floating around, just waiting for us to extract it from the universal field of information.  Really, “extract” isn’t quite the right image; it’s more like what we need to know is always there like information on an internal hard drive, and we need only take notice of it.  Where we mostly fail is in that noticing.  You are being constantly being bombarded with intuitive “hits”, but you don’t trust them because they come as thoughts that you can’t separate from what you consider regular everyday mind-chatter.  Or, the information comes to you so often and is so repetitive that you dismiss it.  You are much more likely to dismiss your own internal intuitive stream of guidance if you never take action on it, because there is no validation.  You can’t possibly know what good guidance is until you test it.

So you engage the services of a practitioner who is able to parse out the source of the information.  You’re pretty sure that they can help because you’ve seen testimonials, gotten recommendations, read articles like this and you come to the conclusion that they have a talent or gift that you don’t – at least not to the degree that is actually useful.

So you book a session or a reading, and some of what they tell you is very strange…things that perhaps happened in a past life that are still affecting you, or things from your half-forgotten childhood that planted the seeds of some ongoing situation.  But when it’s explained to you…when the dots are connected in the story of why things are the way they are for you…it makes sense.

Often in the course of a session, you’re told something that’s occurred to you many times before, all on your own.  In that case you might think that because you “already knew that”, there’s no value in having it told to you.  Why pay someone to hear what, to you, is already obvious?

The answer is validation.  What you’re getting in a case like that is verification that you’ve already been receiving intuitive guidance…you simply haven’t been recognizing it as such.  Depending on your expectations, you might come away disappointed, thinking that you’ve wasted your time and money on advice that you didn’t need.  But remember that the universal field of information is available to everyone to one extent or another.  The fact that you were told something you “already knew” is simply an indication that both you and the intuitive reached into the pool and grabbed what was needed – the only difference being that you didn’t realize that that mundane piece of information was important.  And, knowing is not doing.  Again, you might have had a thought a thousand times, but until you take action on it… it remains just an untested thought.

There’s another side to the experience of intuitive consultations that is equally important: not only your expectations, but your intentions for the work will affect the outcome.  In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say that your intentions not only affect, but actually determine almost entirely how much benefit you’ll get from working with an intuitive or energy worker.

Let’s say that you book a session out of desperation.  You feel as though you have exhausted the alternatives and so you grudgingly pay the fee to talk to an intuitive.  Judging by your previous experiences, i.e. the lack of results, you’re pessimistic that the intuitive work will help much.  You’re just giving it a try “just in case” it might help some.  You’re looking for someone to fix things for you, but you have low expectations.  In a case like this, you really are wasting your money.  Like it or not, for better or worse you create your own reality.  This is true of the hard-copy, physical part of your life…so how much more true is it of more ephemeral things like your inner life and thoughts?  Your pessimism and low expectations create no focused intention and that will almost ensure that you’ll dismiss whatever help you do get from an intuitive consultation… and so get little benefit.

All of this is to say that you, as the one seeking help, are the one who ultimately determines the outcome of any kind of intuitive or energy work.  If you approach it as you would a stage act or a coin-operated fortunetelling machine, you’ll get exactly what you expect (not much).  But if you bring an open mind, hope, good expectations and hold a firm intention that you’re going to wring the most benefit possible from the work…that’s when the magic happens.  Just remember that the practitioner is nothing but the channel through which the guidance will come – you’re the one who sets the tone and determines how beneficial the outcome will be.