Penney Peirce - The Intuitive Way

Birthing a first book can feel first like a dream, then like psychic surgery. I find that I am quite transformed internallyfor the betterby the process. My deep gratitude goes out to the talented psychic surgeons who assisted me so closely: to my editor, Lorraine Anderson, whose neutrality, keen mind, and compassionate communication style allowed me to see the good sense; to my agent, Sheryl Fullerton, who helped me achieve focus and become more visible; and to my publishers, Cindy Black and Richard Cohn and the staff at Beyond Words, who practice what they preach (Inspire to Integrity).

Various astute and literate friends provided me with invaluable feedback about the book. Thanks so much to Carol Adrienne, whose unflagging support and enthusiasm has often kept me afloat, and to those who mindfully read early manuscripts and nudged me forward: Joan OHannesson, Jabarra Athas, Rod McDaniel, Colleen Cayes, Peter Howard, Wendy Young, Allen Hicks, Donna Hale, Larry Leigon, Sarka Christova, Colleen Mauro, Richard Heinberg, and Mark Bryan. Thanks to my sister Paula Peirce and to Marcus True, who listened and helped me become clear.

I wouldnt be who I am without the inspiring contributions of my colleagues Dr. William Kautz, Joan Grigsby, Kevin Ryerson, Dr. Dale Ironson, David Finch, the good people at Anandas East-West Bookstore, and my many magical Japanese collaborators: Toshi and Yasuko Yamakawa, Lisa Yoshimi Vogt, Yoshie Usuba, Masako Watanabe, Naoyuki Sekino, and Takiko Koizumi, to name a few. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Mid and Skip Peirce, for believing in me and supporting me when I didnt do the traditional thing.

If youd like to have further experiences with your intuition, try the exercises below in any order that appeals to you.

Soul Activities

Spend time thinking about your soul activities. Write about what fascinates you to the point of total involvement. In what activities do you allow yourself to learn as you go, to be self-taught? Do you recall the effortless quality of your work at times like these? How work seems like play? How you magically proceed from one step to the next and everything seems just right? Describe in detail how it feels emotionally and physically to be involved in a soul activity.

Relaxing Your Masculine Mind

Pretend your brain-mind is a muscle. Tense it and contract it right now as if it were a fist. Tighten both fists as well and squinch your eyes closed. Make your brain-mind feel hard and tight. Hold it until you feel like shaking. Then suddenly let it go slack and loose, let your wrists go limp, and let your eyes drop open. Dont focus on anything in particular. Shake out your hands. Go blank, go blah. In fact, open your mouth and hang your jaw down, all the while moaning something like Duhhhh. Just hang for a minute without commenting to yourself. Let your attention be soft.

Your Parents Organizing Belief Systems

Write about the world views of your father and mother. For each parent, list the adages that epitomize his and her world view. You may have heard them repeat certain phrases, get upset by particular behaviors in other people, and say what they wished for. By looking at what your parents did and didnt let themselves have and what brought them satisfaction versus upset, determine the shoulds your parents lived by and what they were unconsciously afraid might happen if the shoulds failed to be maintained. Now compose a statement that accurately describes each parents basic assumptions about the nature of life. How have their beliefs affected yours?

Transforming Your Opinions

List five people you have negative opinions about. Bring each person into your awareness. Put your attention on that individual fully without making the person right or wrong. If your soul were explaining why the person is acting the way he or she is, what would the explanation be?

Do the same thing with five situations you have negative opinions about. Whats your souls explanation of why things are as they are?

Superconscious Insights

Write about a mystical experience that changed your view of yourself or of life. Perhaps it was a dream, perhaps a fleeting realization taking only a few seconds of real time but having a timeless feeling. These experiences often give you a feeling of profound love, a sense that there is a divine order to things, but they may simply be an ordinary experience of seeing to the heart of something.

Mining Your Subconscious

Save several pages in your journal to make an ongoing list pertaining to your subconscious blocks. Start by listing, as rapidly as you can, things you have a morbid curiosity about or cant stand seeing or thinking about. Then list things that make you blindly enraged or severely irritated.

Cut out images from magazines that trigger odd feelings of attraction and repulsion and paste them in this section of your journal. Let the words and images trigger associations from your past and present experiences. Write about the connections.

Who and What Youre Not

Think about your life and focus on areas where you are wasting your energy and time. List three answers for each of the following statements, and be sure you mean what you say: (a) I dont want to be _______ anymore. Instead I intend to be _______. (b) I dont want to feel _______ anymore. Instead I intend to feel_______. (c) I dont want to do _______ anymore. Instead I intend to do _______. (d) I dont want to create _______ anymore. Instead I intend to create _______.

Your Primal Emotions

Describe three times in your life when you touched the primal emotions at the bottom of the subconscious mind. Did you feel terror? Rage? Hatred? Grief? Write in detail about the experiences in your journal. What was the trigger experience? What conclusions did you draw? Describe the deepest beliefs you hold about the nature of life, the physical plane, good and evil, and suffering: I believe _______. Where might you be hung up in illusion concerning all this?

Cleaning the Energy in a Room

Have you ever had to spend time in a space that felt alien, dirty, unconscious, abused, or in some way negative? Have you ever walked into your own living room the morning after a party and still felt all the peoples energy residue there? Or moved into a house where the previous tenant had been sick or died? Heres what you can do:

Open a window or door, if possible, and burn some aromatic, purifying herb like sage, cedar, or frankincense. Or spray or vaporize aromatic essential oils, like rosemary, eucalyptus, lemon, or pine. As you do this, hold the intention in your mind that energies incompatible with your own highest good will disperse.

Sit down in the room. Close your eyes and get centered. Visualize a column of diamond light coming up from the center of the earth, directly below the room, and see it rise slowly through the floor. As it inches its way up through the room, let all the shadows and murky energy be absorbed and turned into sparkling light.

Wash the room with diamond lightevery corner, every molecule. Let the air become purified by imagining fresh breezes blowing through from the ocean or the mountains. Imagine the sound of a hundred wind chimes tinkling. The space is now conducive to your own highest good and highest creativity.