Louise - Client Journey
“Your ability to be intuitive and see what’s in the way is extraordinary to me. You’re able to see it and describe it, which also enables me to understand it, this is a really extraordinary combination. ”
Louise is a professor (name changed for privacy) who came to me for support with developing her relationship with her intuition as she wanted to live more intuitively. Our work together has been a blend of Intuitive Healing to begin with, which has then evolved into Soul Mission support and Intuitive mentoring.
What brought you to Intuitive healing / Intuitive Mentoring?
It was actually a long process, which I think started when I got very ill in 2005 and because it was a chronic antibiotic poisoning there wasn't a lot that conventional medicine could do. Although I had a great consultant and they were very attentive, it became clear very quickly that there were no conventional solutions to it. The GP actually suggested I see an acupuncturist and then it was interesting that the support that I needed sort of arrived.
After a couple of years someone recommended Shiatsu which I started and it was blissful as it is so mothering. That opened up a lot of things that were really deep that I'd been carrying around since I was really little. I then realised I'd been living in my rational head for most of my life as my dominant coping strategy and that there were just limits to that really. Shiatsu over time gave me the experience of really coming back into my body and noticing things more intuitively.
The more my health improved, the more fascinated I became by the intuitive power of the Shiatsu practitioners. I then realised I was beginning to get into notions of my own intuitive ability. It was like discovering a muscle you didn’t know you had, not a skill but an attribute, I didn't know I had. Then Dinah John recommended seeing you as this was all opening up - she said I know the person who could help guide you into this and become comfortable with it.
It’s an 18 year journey and it’s lovely. It's a journey, that never stops, you don’t reach a stage where ‘everything becomes clear’ and you don't impose on yourself fear or over rationalisation. The least you learn is that there is a stillness in yourself and you just need to trust it, which is a huge discovery for me, I hadn’t been in that condition since I was very little.
How did the sessions help you?
I could feel I had a different self underneath, that in some way my life was performative, not that I was performing for anyone else in particular… but I was very driven and striving. I felt increasingly a sense of conflict between my intuitive self and rational self.
I realised that I needed to reconcile those things. Particularly where I was working, as this was very academic and rational, very analytical. In order to feel more comfortable in my own skin, I was going to have to make some drastic changes to the work I did which felt huge as I have been doing that work for decades. That frightened me.
I felt that it was something I was going to need support with. Also, it was a bit like the learning I experienced when I started Shiatsu, in that by seeing the extraordinary power of your intuition in our sessions it made me trust in what ‘it’ is. I still can feel fearful, thinking is it safe to be in the ‘intuitive realm’, ‘the feminine realm’ rather than in the rationalist, vigilant, ‘watching the world around me 24 hours a day’, is that change a safe thing for me to do.
I realised that I wasn’t going to get to that balanced place without a fair bit of help and teaching, as well as the experience of it which I couldn't navigate for myself, because the whole thing felt so new.
What were the most powerful aspects of the sessions for you?
I actually think one of the most powerful things is realising that empathy and intuition are so powerful that one can be ‘read’ by someone else. To experience that sense of being completely seen and there have been things that you have seen that have felt so absolutely true that it lets you ‘land’ in yourself in a way that is an enormous relief - ‘Oh, that's where I am I can feel that 100%, that is where I am’. It stops the world spinning past you, when you get a sense of that sort of clarity. It’s very grounding.
There's something about the experience of feeling so completely grounded, that for me, it gives me a magnetic north in itself. It gives me a sense of when I'm far away from it, that I'm spiralling off into some compulsive thought process and I recognise I'm getting anxious about something. So if you don't know what magnetic north of yourself feels like, then you don't know how it feels to be far away from it. So when you experience it, if only for the duration of the session and an hour later - it feels like beginning to lay down a path, so it becomes easier for myself to find my way back to it, as I know what that space feels like. Just that sense of orientation is massively helpful and feels very different.
I have also had huge realisations - like, I have come to the end of the season of doing the work that I do and instead of feeling terrified by that and completely lost by that, I do feel a little bit lost and a little bit scared by that, but I also feel really excited by it and curious about what comes next in a way I wouldn’t have been able to contemplate even a year ago I shouldn’t think. So that’s huge.
I have also become more forgiving of having a range of emotions as well and the reality of that. Feeling less ashamed about feeling angry or feeling shame or upset. Now I think, no they are all legit and I realise if you’re not going to feel those emotions you’re going to feel numb in general, which I probably was for a very long time. So that sense of opening up and learning that all of that is information about where you are. That you're allowed to listen to it and the sky doesn't cave in if you do. I can let myself feel what I'm feeling and actually listen to it. The more I let myself be in it, the faster it moves, the quicker, the internal emotional weather passes.
Any unexpected surprises?
That there's a whole different dimension to life and way of understanding the world (intuitive realms), which I did not know about until I got to my mid-50s. That's pretty startling, also how extraordinary it is in a way that modern life pulls you incredibly far from your own nature. That it takes stepping outside mainstream ways of thinking about things to find the thread of your own nature again, to follow it out of the maze.
Your intuition can help you figure out how to make the most of your time, it enables you to be in a space where you’re going to feel you’re living in your whole self and not a corner of yourself. Depending on how lucky and fortunate you are, you know. If you do something like being an academic as a job you get lots of external validation, that says ‘this is a good way of being, a good way of living’ and it is all of those things, but it’s not a complete way to go through the world, rationalising absolutely everything which was my whole personality. It is very shocking to discover that as well as an ability it’s also a coping strategy for avoiding your own feelings.
Sooner or later those feelings need to be integrated in order to feel simple in the world, rather than feeling like it's an enormous circus act to get through the day. I remember being a child, watching people on beaches playing and doing it with such simplicity, noticing that whilst I felt very vigilant in the world, I noticed people who weren't like that. Thinking - how do you do that? How are you not needing to take the temperature of the room that you're about to go into? How are you so easy in the world, that it's not part of your makeup? In hindsight I now realise that's what I was doing.
I have always been struck that there are people around me that are a lot more at ease and I have been fascinated by that, thinking that they were a different species. Wondering, what’s that like? Now I'm finding myself doing it. A couple of years ago, one of my students said to me you're one of the most laid-back people I've ever met, which left me laughing. I said ‘my goodness, you wouldn't have said that 10 years ago’. It was so lovely to have someone say that.
Anything different about working with me in particular?
I can imagine that it's hard to describe what you do to people - who haven’t experienced physical therapies, talk therapies, or a natural sort of ‘epiphany’, and felt that there's a peaceful space here, within. I think what is extraordinary about what you do, is that you can see it. That you can see what's clouding my focus, what is interrupting it or pushing me away from it.
So that ability to be intuitive and see what's in the way is extraordinary to me. I’ve never had that experience before. You're able to see it and describe it, which also enables me to understand it, this is a really extraordinary combination. There’s something about having that conversation with you where you're literally seeing my thought processes somehow, I feel as though it teaches me far more, in a very direct way. Also to know that I may be able to do that for myself is a revelation. That I have and we have, that ability (to be intuitive of another person's experience) - that it’s not science fiction. That in fact it turns out to be a very ancient art rather than a future art. I find it very moving.
There is something about the comedy of human life - that you go through life, getting educated and working, having all these experiences. then you discover it has taken you away from the innate capacity that we all have. It takes people who have somehow understood that and have taken a much more spiritual path, a much more counter modernity path - who are sitting with something that is just really true, it's quite amusing actually.
That you spend your life - learning science, and so on, and all those things are valid and important, but… I find it deeply comforting that you're there and you're this person that can see me so deeply and clearly. It’s wonderful. It collapses the isolate that we actually feel, it collapses the opaqueness, I'm not a mystery, how relaxing to not be mysterious.
Not keeping a connection to our intuition, leaves us like driverless cars. Listening to my intuition changes, the way I do everything, like how I listen to students. When they're feeling overwhelmed by work, the last thing I'm worried about is the work and I find it much easier to hopefully help them as well as manage their anxiety or validate them as people. When I first started teaching I would be anxious on their behalf if they couldn't manage the work, now I couldn’t care less about that, which is much more human. Also I'm not projecting my own anxiety on them which was, I now realise, the approach I used to take.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I feel as though I've got to this point where I've reached the border of a new country… That this is a whole way of being that feels new, which makes me understand how you - and the Shiatsu practitioners and the acupuncturist, who have looked after me over the years - that you’re all living in this other country. That you have an understanding of the world, more fully in all of its dimensions that I can discover - that there is this thing called ‘wisdom’ that is out there which is very comforting and reassuring.
