“You don’t need to wait for a full blown crisis before recognizing that there is a system of guidance that is always communicating with you and ultimately serving your highest and best. Slow down and listen. When you begin to listen to your intuition you will be able to side step so many relationships, situations, and experiences that create heartache.” – Maryam Hasnaa
Can you remember the ways in which you picked up on the latest piece of intuitive guidance that came your way?
Did you receive an inner download, informing you about your next best step? Did you experience a full-body sensation that felt like you “had to” walk in a certain direction, or talk to a particular person? Did you feel called by a subtle sensation to create something very specific and unique to you?
All of these experiences are channels your soul can choose to speak to you, and there are many more ways in which you can receive your inner wisdom. You may have heard of these four:
Clairaudience
is an inner hearing which detects intuitive audio messages. When you choose to channel your soul’s guidance through your clairaudience, your inner wisdom can come to you as single words, or as whole streams of sentences, or even as songs that are playing on a loop inside your mind. That is how my clairaudience often works: It will wake me up with a song on my mind, and as the day progresses, that song will eventually answer a question for me.
Claircognizance
is an intuitive sense which downloads information from your soul straight into your conscious mind, often while using non-verbal formats. Channeling information through your claircognizance means that you “just know” things, without receiving any imagery or audible messages, per se. It can be difficult to learn how to trust in this sense, at first. Being brought up in a modern society, many of us have been overloaded with so many verbal and visible messages streaming through our physical senses that the claircognizant way of knowing seems to be too subtle, sometimes. Nevertheless, messages coming through your claircognizance are just as precise as the ones coming in on the wings of an intuitive image or via a verbal message.
Clairsentience
is a clear inner perception which helps you to understand intuitive guidance via your body’s feelings and sensations. Channeling information through your clairsentience can get tricky if you are prone to enmeshing with the sensations other people are feeling. So, using this clair sense is always an invitation to set up clear energetic boundaries. I remember how when I started out with my Energy Work practice, I would feel everything my client was feeling, which became rather difficult for me – because it meant that I wasn’t clear on where my energy fields ended and where my client’s energies started. So, I had to learn how to differentiate between the energies that had to come through in order for me do understand my own guidance, and the energies that made me feel that I was moving too close to my client’s boundaries. In other words, even if your body is able to pick up on the most subtle sensations, it doesn’t mean you absolutely need to make yourself available to feel everything that is coming through. Allow yourself to set clear boundaries when it comes to this channel, and to limit the ways in which you want to receive messages through it, e.g. by stating that you do not want to channel through pain, or through physical tension.
Clairvoyance
is an inner seeing, and it means that your soul is communicating with you by sending images into your third eye. When your clairvoyance is one of your main channels, it takes a certain amount of practice to learn how to differentiate between your imagination and your soul’s intuitive guidance. That’s because when you imagine things, these made-up images tend to come in through your third eye, too – just as intuitive images do. However, the images you receive from your soul are alive. In other words, at some point you will notice that these intuitive images start to behave in ways you wouldn’t have imagined, sending you signs and symbols to clearly let you know that they are talking to you. Allowing those intuitive images to play out their messages without interrupting them – nor moving back into your imagination – is how you can learn how to discern your intuitive guidance from fantasy.
Some more subtle ways of perceiving
There are many more, even subtler ways of perceiving, which sometimes use senses we tend to not be very familiar with:
For example, there is a way of understanding dreams as messages, and some of us even have the ability to communicate with their soul through dream consciousness, as if they were talking to a good friend.
Or, there is this thing where a certain spaciousness opens up around you, which seems to be untied to this Earth and its physicality – and this spaciousness can send you clear messages through perceptions that are not feelings, per se, but something even more subtle. As a child, I would often drift into this space just before I went to sleep, and it took me a long time to understand all the ways in which this space was sending my soul’s messages to me.
And then, there is an inner sense which can pick up on messages through your connection with the elements of this planet, which means that you can receive guidance through fire, water, earth or air.
And so on.
The list of intuitive senses through which we can perceive soul-guidance is probably endless. Clairaudience, clairvoyance, claircognizance and clairsentience are just the most common ones.
Try this:
Next time you are picking up on an intuitive hit, become curious: Which channel did that piece of guidance use to get to you? Which of your clair senses were involved? Was it just one of your inner senses, or a combination of two or more?
Did you hear a voice?
Did you see an image?
Did you feel a sensation?
Did your mind download a piece of knowledge?
Did you receive guidance in some other way?
Which of your clair senses feels like the one your soul is using most often to send you messages?
Could you allow that clair sense to open up just a tiny bit more?
Also, which permission would you need to give yourself so you could take your intuitive hits (more) seriously?
Stay curious. Ask your soul to help you recognise your channels clearly. And then ask your soul to show you what you need to know, today, to get to where you want to be.
If you need any help with understanding your clair senses, contact me. It’s a big part of my work to help you sense-see-feel which of your intuitive channels have been waiting to open up more for you.