Why do you do this?

Today, I was working with a new client who took advantage of my free reading offer. “Why do you do this?” she asked, “most people charge.”
I explained how I’m transitioning from my full-time teaching job into my intuitive practice and the free readings serve multiple purposes: they introduce people to my services, allow people who cannot afford a reading to have one, give me more meditation time, and help me to keep my skills sharp.

But the most important “why” is that I feel I’m helping people in the most direct way possible.

The bulk of my professional life was spent in the hospitality industry, specifically, I was a bartender, and then I was a manager. In many ways, I loved what I did …

… okay, okay … people who know me will tell you how I complained viciously about my restaurant work. The service industry is rough. The general public is rough. On more than one occasion, I, like many of my coworkers, found myself sobbing uncontrollably in the kitchen because the stress of service had become too much.

But there is also great pleasure in giving people an enjoyable dining experience. I thrived off other people’s happiness … I’m selfish, I know.

Eventually, I began to feel that providing a pleasurable dining experience wasn’t enough. I wanted to do more. I went back to school, and armed with my shiny new diplomas, I went in search of teaching jobs.

This is how I became a college writing instructor, and I love it!

Writing is an intensely personal endeavor. When students write for me, they share a part of themselves, and I’m touched that they trust me with the things they don’t express to just anyone. Sometimes they come to me for advice; as an instructor, I can do only so much for them, and then I hear my intuition calling to me …

“I’m here! I’m here! Use me!”

Of course, I can’t go spouting psychic communication to my students, so what to do?

Be a professional intuitive! And so here I am. And yes, I love it … I feel useful and productive and I get plenty of meditation time … yeah, there’s that selfish thing again … 😉

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Free reading? What?

Yes … it’s true … I’m offering free readings to first-time clients. Interested? Come armed with your question … it generally takes about twenty minutes … you can see what I do and decide if you like the service I offer.

What do you have to lose?

Intuition is real.

Gut feeling. Hunch. That little voice. Intuition. Inkling. We have many words to express that unknown sense that we all get from time-to-time, that sense that we are often too quick to dismiss because it doesn’t come from anywhere logical.

I was cruising around on Reddit the other day … because I do that … and a headline caught my eye. It said something to the effect of “psychic or mental illness?”

I didn’t click  on it because … squirrel! … another headline seemed more interesting, but later that day, my brain kept going with that first idea: psychic or crazy?

One of my friends and I laugh about this. She is on her own spiritual journey and occasionally she shares what she sees with me. She also confides that her insights often cause her to question her sanity.

Likewise, despite how many people I’ve read for, I still have the occasional experience where I think, “Huh … did I really just receive that communication or is that completely crazy?”

Interestingly enough, when I voice a strange insight to a client, “Um, so … I see an iguana rowing a canoe … does that mean anything to you?” the client will frequently say, “Oh, yeah …” and then go on to explain it to me.

Cool, I’m not just making that up …

In their book, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein report the words of Albert Einstein to his colleague, Jacques Hadamard, in respect to his weak math skills and his physics research:

The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined … The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. (3)

Einstein goes on to explain how he used his intuition, and through clairvoyance and kinetic sense, imagined he was a photon, cruising around at the speed of light. As that photon, he observed how he moved and what he experienced. He then imagined he was a second photon and observed what he could of the first photon. He was unable to explain how he did this, he only knew that he did and that this inexplicable insight informed his understanding of his subject matter.

In their book, the Root-Bernsteins report the intuitive experiences of many other thinkers, artists and scientists. I used to take this book into my Creative Problem Solving class and read various passages from it to my classes … trust your gut, I would tell my students. It will take you to interesting places.

Intuition is real, if not necessarily completely understood by those who use it, so, the next time your gut tells you something, consider taking it seriously … look what Einstein accomplished with his.