I was a practicing psychotherapist for many years, and from the very beginning of my practice I noticed an interesting phenomenon. I would be sitting with a client and listening to them deeply, focusing all of my attention on them and their inner process. But while I was listening to their words and sensing into their emotional landscape another part of my psyche would start to form images in my mind. It could be anything really… A nature based scenario, or a famous person, or the inside of a room, or an animal, or an object or a pop culture reference. And along with this image would come some kind of association. Like maybe an impression of an elephant would arise in my minds eye but then I would remember having read somewhere about how elephants are known to mourn their dead.

And then I would begin to talk with my client about what I was seeing as an allegory for what they were sharing. And the thing that always blew my mind was how totally right on these metaphors were for my clients. These word pictures and image stories never failed to elicit an ah-ha response of insight or bring them to tears of recognition or somehow take them deeper into their inner soul exploration.

At first I was reluctant to say what I was seeing because these image stories didn’t always make sense and often they were non-linear like poetry. But they were incredibly compelling and for some reason I knew to trust them.  And my trust was always rewarded by my clients response to what I was telling them.

They most often felt incredibly seen and deeply understood. And it fostered greater trust in me as their guide and also allowed them to connect more deeply with themselves.

It felt like I was seeing into my clients on a much more profound level and articulating things that they had a hard time putting into words. Through sharing my internal process I was allowing them to connect more authentically with the truth about their feelings and thoughts. I would often shake my head ( to myself) in wonderment, puzzled by how I could possibly know these things, much less name them. But I did continue to listen to and respect these missives from my deep psyche.

When I learned more about intuition and what it was and how it operated I realized that was what I was tapping into in these situations. When I was engaged with my clients in this way I was clearly exhibiting this process of knowing something without knowing how I knew it.

And I began to recognize that our intuition is also a direct conduit to our wisest self, which has a comprehensive access to all the subconscious levels of our being and knows things on a much more complex level than our thinking mind.

I still don’t know where this stuff comes from. It could be past lives, or ancestral memories or the dreamtime or something I’m picking up directly from my clients or something I heard or experienced when I was five years old and no longer remember. The why and the how is still a total mystery to me.

But I have learned to trust in it implicitly. And am grateful every day to be blessed with this seemingly endless vault of wise knowing and helpful information.

From my wild heart to yours,

Chris