Is it psychic? Or just experience?

Intuition/psychic ability and experience form a spectrum of knowledge, and it's not always possible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Here's what I mean:

There's an old story about a factory owner, whose very complicated, very expensive piece of machinery stopped working. This machine was essential to his manufacturing, so he couldn't let it stay idle for long. So he called a crusty, old repairman,  who arrived with his ancient tool kit. He looked at the machine for a few minutes, opened his kit, took out a wrench, and tapped a pipe 3 times. Then he presented the factory owner with a bill for $1000.

The factory owner was furious. He said to the repairman, "You've only been here 5 minutes. All you did is tap 3 times on a pipe. How can that cost $1000? I want an itemized bill."

The repairman wrote out a new bill, which looked like this:

• Tapping on pipe                       $  15
• Knowing where to tap              $985

 The joke obviously revolves around the value of experience.

At the extreme other end of the spectrum, there is knowledge that can only be gained psychically. For example, 25 years ago, when I was first starting to do psychic readings, I volunteered to do readings for a small women's group, to whom I'd been referred by a mutual acquaintance. I eventually became friends with a couple of the women. Last year, one of them told me that she knew right away that I was for real because I told her something she'd done that she had done by herself, and never told anyone. So clearly that was psychic info.

Sometimes it's not so clear. Last November, another acquaintance approached me about joining a network marketing group he had joined, saying that in 5 months, he was already making a ton of money on his tiny investment. The company was Zeek Rewards, in which he bought penny auction bids and gave them away via an automated process arranged by the company. He said he was making "1.4% average a day or 42% a month and it compounds" in just a few minutes a day. This man has proven himself trustworthy over the years, so I believed him.

But I'm not into network marketing (some of the products don't work, all are overpriced, and even if the products work, the commission set up has to be good enough to make money.) I have never made money on any network marketing. It's fine for other people, just not for me. I ignored his email.

I ran into him in early July, and he extolled the virtues of this particular network marketing company, telling me I was missing out on a good thing, taht he was still making money, exactly as he'd told me. Something in me said, "Ponzi scheme". Not only did I not go for it, I told him to take his money out ASAP, before he couldn't get it out at all. Honestly, I can't tell you if it was a feeling (clairsentience) or a voice in my head (clairaudience or telepathy).

Here's the funny thing: I was right.

So was it psychic knowledge? Or was it just that I've been around businesses for a long time, and I know a scam when I hear one? I honestly don't know -- and that's the point. Experience and psychic knowledge go hand in hand -- and maybe that combination is what people call 'intuition'.

What Do You Know? And How Do You Know it?

Friday night, my husband, Kosta, and I were in San Francisco. We were hungry, and stopped in to a funky little place with a diner-ish menu. As we sat down in our booth, there were 4 or 5 people in the booth next to us, who seemed to be finishing up their meal. I didn't pay much attention to them, but noticed they were of both genders, probably in their 20s.

After they left, the 50-ish waiter covering both our booths (actually, the whole restaurant, as business was slow), started kvetching (complaining, for you non-Yiddish speakers, but it also has the connotation of whining, and doing it persistently) about the people who'd just left, "Those are the worst customers I've ever had... probably raised by wolves. They just don't know how to act." And on.. and on...

When I asked what they'd done to earn that stream of bitching, he said that they'd asked him to justify the price of each menu item, asked for everything done in a slightly different way than on the menu, then complained about being charged for substitutions, and decided at the end of the meal that they wanted separate checks. Having been a waitress one summer in college, I completely sympathize with his estimation of these customers.

By this point, I'd detected a slight New York accent. I didn't want to 'lead the witness', but slipped into his phraseology, and asked, "Where ya from?" with a smile.

"Queens, and proud of it!", he answered. Then he began to kvetch about San Franciscans, in general, "No one will tell you like it is, everyone just tells you what you want to hear." And on... and on... He mentioned that all his friends still lived in Queens, that he was the only one who'd left.

"Why don't you just move back?", I asked, still smiling.

"I'm gonna be buried there!", he answered defiantly -- but he was smiling, too., as he left to put in our orders.

At this point, I just knew that he'd moved to SF 30 years ago because he was gay, and and said as much to Kosta. He was surprised, and asked me me how I knew the waiter's story.

This was a complete shock -- I just assumed everyone would have known that -- that he knew that -- because it was so obvious to me. We agreed to ask the waiter how long he'd been in SF, his sexual orientation seeming a bit too personal to ask a complete stranger.

Sure enough -- he'd been in SF for 25 years. Okay, I was off by 5 years -- but then I could have been off by a few years in his age, too.

Kosta tried to pass it off as, "my wife, the psychic lady". But to me, being psychic is doing readings. And readings are something I do in an hypnotic state, where I'm really focused on the other person, with my guides around me, showing me pictures and talking to me, giving me information I couldn't possibly know any other way, especially since I rarely even meet, or see photos of, the people I read.

So I really had to think about how I knew that he'd been in SF for so long. When I backed into the logic of it, it went like this:

The waiter clearly loved NY and had friends and family there, clearly thought it was a great place. He'd been in SF long enough to complain about the differences between the two cities. 30 years ago, when he'd been around 20, NY was even bigger and more powerful in relation to SF than it is today; you could get pretty much anything there. The only reason you'd leave NY to come to SF was lifestyle -- and SF being the gay mecca of the world would probably explain it.

Absolutely none of these thoughts was conscious. It's just normal for me to infer things -- and they often turn out to be right. I don't think of this as psychic/intuitive; it's just what I've always done. It's what used to piss people off about me as a kid, because I did it, and knew stuff, and didn't know not to say it. I still don't know if they were angry because I knew things I wasn't supposed to know -- and was right, or because I said these things -- and lots of them were, I guess, embarrassing to the adults. Anyway, what I learned was to shut up, and only to use the information when I needed it for my own protection.

The dirty little secret here is that my Dad used to do this stuff, too. I spent a lot of time with him as a child, and he'd look at complete strangers and tell me about them. He did it with a medical eye, like seeing the telltale signs of alcoholism -- but I suspect he knew a lot more than he could have gotten just that way. Of course, he never admitted that he was in any way psychic.

I learned how to do it, at least the more everyday parts of being psychic, as a skill, by copying my parent, like all kids do. (Thanks, Dad!)

So this intuition is just a skill, like any other, that everyone can do -- they just maybe haven't been taught how. We all pick up little clues about each other, about the world, that we don't have the bandwidth to process with our conscious minds. (This is what Malcolm Gladwell was talking about in Blink.) We combine that with what we already know about the world to form an even more complete picture of the world.

So if you didn't have a parent who modeled intuition for you, how do you learn?  

• You wonder about things, or people, create a hypothesis -- and check it out (like we asked the waiter). 
• You let yourself imagine how something, or someone, might have gotten to be the way that it is -- and check it out.

And sooner or later, you'll find yourself just knowing that your waiter moved to San Francisco a couple of decades ago.

Does Believing Something Different Mean You're Crazy?

I book my own guests for my for my radio show, "Your Life, Your Relationships". Because I’m a hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner, I know a lot of very talented healers, so some of my guests are friends.

Last week, I called a friend to be a guest on my show. This is someone I consider a real friend, not an acquaintance, as we were fairly deeply involved in each other’s lives at one point, even though that period was over a decade ago. She is someone I respect deeply, for her intelligence, knowledge, competence, clarity and kindness.

She said she wouldn’t appear on my show, because she’d heard an earlier show, in which I’d talked about star visitors (aka ETs), and she was afraid to be publicly associated with me. Her market is a corporate market, and she’s afraid that if she is even heard on a show where such things are discussed, then she’ll lose business. (Personally, I think she’s being a bit paranoid, but it’s her business and her life, so she gets to decide.) 

She did offer that if I were willing to promise not to talk about star visitors on the show she was on, then she’d come on the show. But since I book my guests a month in advance, and I plan the rest of the show days in advance, there was no way I could promise that. And in any case, why would I give a guest veto power over the content of the rest of the show?

To be fair, she was very polite, and said that she respected my choice to believe what I believe, and that I do actually believe it. She just didn’t want to be publicly associated with it. Clearly, though, she doesn’t believe what I believe.This is fine -- and if you, like my friend, don't believe me, please watch this video. It's what convinced me. Since then, of course, I've had my own experiences.

Hmmmm… this feels really familiar. What does this remind me of?

Oh, right, I’ve been through this before! Back when I began to open up my psychic abilities, this same thing happened. 

As I acknowledged what was going on with me, my fiance, my parents, most of my extended family, and most of my friends from Harvard Business School (HBS) thought I was nuts. (A big shout out here to my Princeton friends, who never thought that.)

Some, who cared about me, said they were worried about the direction I was taking. Others, many others, just disappeared from my life. 

The joke was on them, though. Many of them eventually called me for help. They wanted my clairvoyant take on the future, for themselves, their businesses or their loved ones.

The culture changed, too. In 2001, I was asked to be on an alumni panel looking into the future at HBS. In a standing-room-only lecture hall of about 100 people, about 1/3 clearly believed that I what I was talking about was real. Another 1/3 were on the fence. Only 1/3 were completely dismissive.

Why am I talking about this?

Because as you grow and change and open up to new information, the people (at least, some of the people) closest to you are going to make you wrong for it. It’s much easier to make you wrong than to examine their own beliefs. This is true whether the new beliefs are about the psychic, the political or something else.

They may want you to stay the same to keep you close to them. Or perhaps they have another agenda – perhaps they want to control you. There is a lot of disinformation out there (Fox News, anyone?), and anyone who dares to step outside the mainstream story (Al Queda, and only Al Queda, was responsible for 9/11, for example) is shunned at best, attacked at worst.

What should you do?

·      Know what you know – Own your own experience. You saw it, heard it, felt it – just because someone else didn’t doesn’t mean you were wrong. It just means they weren’t in your shoes. Did you know that a rainbow looks different depending on where you are standing? Someone standing a few feet away from you might not see the rainbow at all. All of reality is like this.

·      Be open to new information – and check it out. Again, there’s a lot of disinformation out there.

·      Do not let someone else’s disbelief talk you out of knowing what you know. Hear their disbelief as fear, because for most people, that's what it is. Open your heart, and allow them to be afraid. Everyone grows and changes, but some do it more slowly than others. Allow each person his/her process.

·      Listen for openings in other people. Maybe some are open to hearing about political lies, or the 99% movement, but not to anything about their intuition, or about ETs. Others may be willing to open up to their intuition, especially if you language it properly, but not to political lies, or ETs. 

·      Meet people where they are. If they’re open to hearing about political malfeasance, talk to them about that. If they’re open to hearing about intuition or angels or guides, talk to them about that. If they’re interested in science fiction, maybe they’re open to hearing about ETs.

Remember, you are not going to convince everyone! You may only move one person out of ten, and that person one tiny bit. But this is how public opinion changes, one person at a time, perhaps shifting just a bit. Why make yourself crazy, beating yourself up if you never seem to affect anyone? Accept that you are trying, and you are doing the best you can.

Remember also that you affect people three levels out in your networks – your friends’ friends’ friends. So if you only have 20 friends, and each of them only has 20 friends, you are still affecting 8000 people. If each of you has 100 friends, then that’s 1 million people. If each of you has 150 friends, then that’s 3.375 million people you affect.

Let’s look at it another way. The transcendental meditation (TM) people did some experiments to see what the effect of TM was on crime. What they learned was that the square root of 1% of the population of an area meditating was enough to lower the crime rate significantly.

The square root of 1% of earth’s population of 7 billion people is 8,367 people. So if your network, and each of your friend’s networks, is 21 people, then you have enough of a network to change the world, simply by changing yourself.

What do you know? And how do you know it?

Many years ago, I was a part owner of a business that sold equipment to fire departments, so I got to know lots of firefighters, mostly fire captains and fire chiefs. One of those chiefs, who'd been a volunteer for over 20 years in a fire department that protected part of Hwy. 80, told me he'd never seen a fatal car wreck where the driver was wearing a seat belt. He didn't know why, but suspected it was because it kept the driver better oriented to what was happening.

Times are about to get very weird. (See this and listen to this and this to learn about what I mean. They are long, and well worth the time and effort. The written one is well-researched, and the audio is convincing.) Imagine that you're alone, flying down the highway at top speed, when the road suddenly disappears. Maybe you're just on grass, or worse, mud. Or you're suddenly in a forest, having to drive around trees that you never noticed before. And all kinds of people are suddenly clamoring for your attention, some from the back seat and some from the forest.

It's definitely time to fasten your metaphorical seat belt. How do you do that?

Ask yourself how you know what is true. The natural world is a great place to start. Plants can't really lie, and animals find that pretty hard, too (the Oscar-worthy performances of our cat to scam us out of more food notwithstanding). What do you feel in your physical body (or your electromagnetic body) when you're in nature? Maybe you'd describe it as peaceful, or grounded, or one of a thousand other words, but go deeper. Use kinesthetic words to describe the feeling -- are you feeling light or heavy? warm or cool? tense or relaxed? tingly? These are just suggestions -- it doesn't matter how you feel, but rather that you identify it.

Once you have that down, how do you know when someone is telling the truth? Again, use what you feel.

Or here, maybe you have an inner voice, the still small voice within, that says, "nope", or some variant of that. It's important to pay attention to the quality of that voice. Is it male? female? neither? How fast does it speak? Does it's inflection go up and down, or stay fairly flat? Where does the voice seem to come from? Is it inside your head, or somewhere outside that you can point to?

Or maybe it's not a voice, exactly. Maybe it's a sound. Maybe it beeps when you're getting a lie, or the truth for that matter. Again, it doesn't matter how you know the truth, but that you identify how you know it. 

It's important to keep that truth meter on all the time. The best lies include some elements of truth, and you have to be discerning to tell which is which.

Remember, as things get strange, you can't drive looking in the rear view mirror. If things change significantly, then habitual ways of acting must shift. You wouldn't drive the same way in snow as you would on a sunny warm day, would you? Look at the conditions ahead.

As you watch significant changes happening all around you, it might be easy to be seduced by the spectacle into just watching. This is equivalent to trying to drive while watching out your side window. You're likely to crash, because you're not watching where you're going.

Similarly, it will be important to stay focused on your responsibilities as things change. This will be different for each person, and only you will know your particular path through the new landscape. How will you know? By knowing your own truth.

How Your Intution Can Keep You Out of Prison

 I just heard this story, and it was too good  not to pass on!

"Shari" is an acquaintance of a few years. I like her and I respect her immensely -- she's got an Ivy League PhD in economics, and does strategic planning for one of the Fortune 1000. She's also spiritual, very perceptive about people -- and a lot of fun. She's got a huge network of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, whom she organizes for picnics and dinner parties.

Apparently it wasn't always this way. When she was much younger, just finishing grad school, she was married to a guy who was several years older than she, had an Ivy MBA, and was quite the wheeler dealer. They even had some business interests in common.

Their relationship deteriorated for a number of reasons, including her discomfort with how he operated in business. She saw him operating "just this side of the law" and her gut became more and more knotted up. One day she realized that she was worried a US Marshall was going to show up and arrest someone. She listened to her gut, and her worry -- and she left, divorcing him soon after.

It's 15 years later -- and she just learned that he's been found guilty of money laundering/RICO, and is awaiting sentencing.

She listened to her intuition -- and it saved her untold amounts of trouble. It just took 15 years for validation. Sometimes you have to wait for that.

How do you know what to do?

How do you know what to do? What the right course of action is?

Sometimes your body gives you clues. Here's what I mean:

My friend, Jenni, like so many people, is unemployed, and has been for over a year. She's managing by moving in with her elderly parents, and helping to take care of them while she looks for work.

One thing that buoys her spirits is the spiritual course/community she joined for the year. It meets weekly, is reasonably priced, and has helped her maintain a positive attitude. As part of the course, she was required to attend a retreat weekend, to which she readily agreed, though she didn't know how much it would cost. It turned out to cost $275, which, she said, was more than she'd spent on anything in over a year. She was committed, as it was part of the curriculum, and because she'd given her word, which she takes very seriously. She had an immediate visceral reaction, literally feeling sick to her stomach -- and that reaction recurred every time she thought about the retreat. She also found it hard to eat.

Finally, she couldn't stand the feeling any more, and got up the courage to explain her situation to the group leader. Of course the leader was sympathetic, and asked her what she could afford. She told him $125, to which he readily agreed. While that was still more than she'd spent on anything in the last year, she felt the money was well worth spending. And her digestive distress went away completely!

Here's another example:

I ask people I talk to casually to call my radio show if they have any relationship questions, because I do need callers, ideally about 5 per show -- hint, hint. (Oddly, though, the people who have called in are not the people I've asked.) So I asked Ben, whom I met at a party a few weeks ago to call in. He agreed to call that same week, and I was thrilled.

A few hours before the show began, he called to ask if it was okay if he didn't call in to the show, saying he was under pressure at work.His call surprised me --  I'd forgotten that he'd agreed, and anyway, if I had a dime for each time someone said they'd call and didn't, well, let's just say I wouldn't still be doing client sessions. Of course, I said it was fine if he didn't call.

Here's what he told me later: "I felt so much better after you let me off the hook, it was amazing! I had
walked down to my PO Box, and my head was pounding. My blood pressure has been going up and I'm sure this was a new record. The world looked dark. 

"When I make a commitment to someone, it's cast in stone, but I decided I should at least find out what my commitment meant to you, so I called. When you said it was fine if i didn't call the show, the day literally got brighter -- it was a beautiful day and I had not known that.

"Oh, and my head stopped pounding."

So here's the take-away: At a deep level, you know what you need. And since mind/body are one system, your body knows what's best. If you don't yet have a well-developed intuition, you can begin by listening to your body -- it will guide you to do what you need to generate positive results. 

The Future of Privacy

Are you upset about the lack of privacy on the web? About how current or potential employers can see those photos of you from college, or worse, high school, of you doing the stupid things you still can't believe you did back then? Perhaps a little historical perspective is in order.

Back when humans lived in small clans, and even when we lived mostly in villages, everyone knew everyone else's business, all the time. You couldn't have an adulterous affair, and expect not to be branded with the letter A. If your acts were too outrageous, you had to leave the tribe or clan, which in some cases meant certain death. Consequently, people moderated their behavior to suit the norms of their society.  Yes, it was stultifying, and you can read about that in countless Victorian novels. (There are still places like this, places where entire extended families sleep in the same room, and so nothing is private, not even sex between a husband and wife.)

Towns and cities grew. More people moved away from their farms and small towns to live in these cities. Living alone in a city, you began to feel that what you did was private, and largely anonymous. (Please note that anonymity is often conflated with privacy here.) The result of this privacy/anonymity is the feeling that you could indulge in all sorts of debauched or nefarious behavior without anyone knowing, which is to say, without consequences. And you feel the strongest privacy/anonymity within your own home, your refuge from the outside world. (In the US, this is partly because of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, which states, in part, that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated".) 

Along comes the Internet, and especially Facebook, which has made it ridiculously easy for you to document your own life if you have access to a computer and/or a smartphone. Unfortunately, all your friends can do this, too. So now, any unguarded, embarrassing behavior, even done in your own home, can now be opened up to the scrutiny of the entire world. Global village, indeed! We are, in fact, coming full circle. Or as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Now imagine that the internet is a precursor for humanity's development. Envision a world where the internet is unnecessary because everyone can tap into the same knowledge base, where everyone has internal access to all knowledge all the time. Envision a world where everyone has fully developed intuitive abilities -- especially external clairvoyance (the ability to see everyone's energy fields), clairsentience (the ability to feel other's emotions) and telepathy (the ability to know what others are thinking). This is where I think we're headed.

You'll have to modify not only your behavior, but also your thoughts, which cause your feelings, or everyone will know. The good news is that you'll know everything about everyone else, too, so they'll have to modify their behavior and thoughts, as well. This will result in more fair trade, because everyone will be aware of the consequences of their purchases. It will also result in a lot less crime, as it will be intuitively obvious to everyone that a crime is about to be committed, and people will choose to intervene gently. People will eventually be easier on themselves, too, because they'll have example of how to change their thoughts, so they don't have to beat themselves up.

Ever made a bad decision, even though part of you knew better?

You know how it is -- you take a job, even though you have a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. Or you get into a relationship, even though that still, small voice inside says, "No!" Or you say 'yes' to a project, even though a red light flashes internally.

It doesn't have to be that way! You can learn how to access your own intuition, your own psychic abilities, and test them in a low stress atmosphere, so that you learn to trust that feeling, that voice, that vision. It's easy, it's fun, and it's coming to a telephone near you.

I've been doing psychic readings as an expert intuitive for over 25 years. In that time, I've teased apart the building blocks of intuition. After you know what these building blocks are, you'll begin to identify what your special gifts are, and how they manifest for you. You'll also learn an undetectable method of using your hands to get information anywhere, any time, under any circumstance.

Once you know these things, you can practice -- the class provides safe opportunities to practice. You'll also learn how to practice on your own, so you can build the self confidence to trust your intuition when it really counts -- for the job offer, the relationship, the project.

The class meets twice a month for 5 months -- and the first month costs only $1!

To learn more, click here. Space is limited, so if you already know this is for you, call me now at 888-4-hollis to sign up.

Meaningful Work

In his book, "Outliers, The Story of Success", Malcolm Gladwell defines meaningful work as work that has

• complexity
• autonomy
• a connection between effort and reward

I agree, and I think I'd take it further. More than just complexity, it needs a degree of difficulty that is a 'stretch' for the worker (if I remember correctly, this comes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow"). This 'stretch' will, of course, be constantly changing, because what begins as a 'stretch' eventually, through practice, becomes quite easy. When you rode a bicycle for the first time, it was really hard! And pretty soon, it became so second nature that you almost didn't notice you were doing it. Of course, if the stretch is too great, you get frustrated, because there is no reward for all that effort.

Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'autonomy' as being self-governing or functioning independently of other parts. Obviously, the level of autonomy varies from the relatively low level of the assembly line worker to the relatively high ones of the solopreneur or research scientist. Those with the lowest level of autonomy, that is, the lowest amount of control over their work, tend to have adverse health outcomes because of it. I suspect that above some minimum level, however, different people prefer different levels of autonomy.

The connection between effort and reward is a bit murkier, however. What sorts of rewards? Monetary? Benefits? Appreciation? Status? And what happens when the relationship between effort and reward changes for the worse, i.e. more work, less reward? I know I've had several small business owners remark to me that "I'm working harder for less" in the last few months -- and it's true for me, as well.

So what do you do if that connection between effort and reward isn't what it used to be? Here are a few ideas about where to look for that improved connection between work and reward (in no particular order):

• Realize that things have shifted -- permanently. You can call it the economy, but it's really larger than that. The industrial model (more or bigger is always better, regimentation) has broken down. The earth can't support it, for one thing. Factory farming (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) is poisoning the earth, from toxic fertilizers to seeds that are controlled by one company to poisonous vats of excrement. Fossil fuel, which is what allowed our industrial culture to flourish, is causing global warming -- and is running out. (That may be a good thing, in the long run, but it's destabilizing in the short run.) Treating people like numbers for health care doesn't work, either. We are moving to appreciating each person's unique make up.
• Looking backwards isn't likely to help. The earth supported many fewer people before the industrial revolution than it does now. The speed of the internet, and the connections it makes, are genuinely new, and not likely to go away.
  
• The speed of processing has outstripped human rational thinking. We all need to process faster -- and the fastest human processing is intuition. So begin working with yours so that you learn to trust it. (And call me if you'd like some help there -- either in private sessions or in classes.)
• People do still have needs -- food, clothing, shelter, health, safety, connection/belonging, and self-actualization -- but you may want to consider how your talents, skills and resources can be useful lower down on Maslow's hierarchy. Anything that helps with health (human or the earth's) or efficiency, i.e. doing more with less, is probably a good idea.
  
• At some level, you agreed to be here, on Earth, at this interesting/critical time. So part of you knows that, and knows what you came here to do -- and it may well not be what you think. Listen to your own heart -- it knows.
• Count your blessings regularly. That will both point you in the right direction and keep your spirits up.
• Group effort and sharing are key to this. There's an old problem, referred to as the commons problem. If a community has a finite amount of grazing area available to it, what's best for an individual herd owner is to have as many cows as possible. But if everyone does this, there are too many cows, they're all sickly, the land gets overgrazed and in the long run, won't support very many cows at all. What's best for the community is for them to agree on the number of cows that's best for the community and how they're going to apportion that number. (Apparently, they actually did this with the fish in the waters off Iceland -- mentioned incidentally in Michael Lewis' wonderful article about Iceland's financial meltdown.)
  

It's an incomplete list, and I'm working the murkiness like everyone else. Co-housing, anyone? Want to to add to the list?

On Psychic Etiquette

The human senses register millions of pieces of information every second, so many that we can't possibly process them all consciously -- and many of then we can't even process at an unconscious level. These bits of information, processed beneath the level of conscious awareness, constitute intuition or the psychic senses. (See Malcom Gladwell's "Blink" for a great discussion of this.)

You can choose where to focus your attention, however. And as you begin to open up psychically, you have to have guidelines for the responsible use of your abilities. Here are my rules for what is fair game (you can choose your own):

1. Things that concern me.
2. Things that other people ask me to look at that concern them.
   

For me, all else is off limits -- it is not clairvoyance, but clairvoyeurism, rather like being a psychic peeping Tom. If no one asks me to look, I don't look.

I do know some people have a lot of natural psychic or intuitive ability, and don't know how to manage it, and 'see' or feel stuff for other people all the time. These people (usually women) are so overwhelmed by the information that they get, that they either can't function, or shut the abilities down entirely. And often, before they shut down the abilities, they have the experience of telling someone something they saw, and being made wrong for having seen it.

Shutting down seems a shame to me, because we are given these gifts as a natural part of our existence, and not using what you have is like tying your dominant arm behind your back. Then you don't have your arm available for your own betterment or protection, and you don't have it available to help others who want to be helped. (If you are one of these people, I can help. Call me at 888-4-hollis.)

Develop Your Intuition -- it's fun AND convenient!

Everyone has intuitive abilities. No matter what level you’re starting from, you can develop your innate abilities and learn new skills. You'll learn easy-to-use techniques to access deeper level information and you'll get answers for yourself and others. You'll

* practice getting answers to everyday issues in your life and others' lives,
* learn to read people quickly and easily, and
* understand the deeper dynamics of interpersonal and business situations. .

This is a safe environment to explore your issues. You'll even make new friends, as you'll be trading readings.

This method is completely different from any other way of teaching the development of intuition; all other training teaches standard techniques, which may or may not work for you. Here, you'll identify your natural talents; then turn these talents into skills, using my unique method. This intuitive method does not use any sorts of external divination tools, like tarot or runes. This has several advantages:

· Your tools are always available, since there are none outside yourself.
· Your skill is subtle and can be used in any setting, with anyone, skeptic or not.
· Your skill enhances the use of any divination tools.

Here's what you can expect:

- A clear understanding of what psychic ability is
- Useful beliefs to enhance your intuition/psychic ability/clairvoyance
- An understanding of your own psychic/intuitive skills
- Practice with others in a safe space to get feedback about what works for you
- Knowledge of how to practice using your skills on your own

Who should attend:

Everyone!

It's for you if you're ready to see yourself, others and the world more clearly.

It’s for you if you have ever said something like, “I know there’s a message here, but I’m not quite getting it” or “I know I’m intuitive, but I can’t rely on it, because it isn’t always on.”

When:

* 1st & 3rd Mondays of the month, for 5 months (10 classes), beginning February 16
* 5:30PM - 6:30 PM
* All calls will be recorded, so you can listen in if you miss a class, or replay a class you feel you can get more out of by listening again (each class will have a meditation, so this is highly recommended!)

For fees and other info, please click here.

Why do you need intuition?

Are psychic and intuition different?

It used to really bug me that people used the word, 'intuition' or 'intuitive', instead of 'psychic' -- but no longer. Here's why:

What is Intuition?

What you know you know -- are facts.
What you know you don't know -- is research you need to do.
What you don't know you know -- is your intution.
What you don't know you don't know -- is grace, which you get to partly through intution.

Fear and Loathing on Wall Street

Are you watching the markets lately? I mean, who isn't, even if you don't have money in them?

Here's another opportunity to practice using your intuition/psychic senses on a real world matter, with immediate feedback. There are 2 ways to do this, and I'll discuss the easy way first:

1. Pick an index to which you have no attachment, like the Hang Seng. Asian indexes are great because they open at hours when no sane American is watching the markets, unless it's his or her business to do so, and they close before we get up in the morning.
   
2. Before you get up in the morning, check in with yourself, asking, did the index close higher or lower than it closed yesterday (extra credit if you want to guess percentage).
3. Notice how you get your information: did you see a chart in your mind's eye? an arrow? another sort of picture? Did someone whisper in your ear? Did you feel something, and if so, where? Did you 'just know'?
   
4. Look online (perhaps here) to see how you did.
   
5. Keep track -- a little journal is best.
   

Now for the more difficult way, because you are emotionally invested.

1. Pick an index (or stock, or ETF, or whatever) in which you are invested.
   
2. Since it is most likely in the US, during the trading day, ask yourself at least once, is it higher than the last time I looked?
   
3. Notice how you get your information: did you see a chart in your mind's eye? an arrow? another sort of picture? Did someone whisper in your ear? Did you feel something, and if so, where? Did you 'just know'?
4. Look online (perhaps here) to see how you did.
5. Keep track -- a little journal is best. Does your emotional involvement screw up your perception?
   

The whole point of this is to develop your own internal date base on how you get information, what information tends to be right, and what tends to be wrong, so you know when to pay attention to it. It was only by doing this that I learned that my 'pictures' and 'voices' tended to be right, but my feelings were only projections of my own fear.

Improve your Intuition -- & Donate to Charity by Doing It!

Quick -- What does pondokkie mean? (Answer is at bottom.)

My latest obsession is www.freerice.com. It's actually a vocabulary builder, with a charitable twist. If you correctly define a word, someone donates 20 grains of rice through the UN world food program to end hunger.

There are 60 different vocabulary levels. You start at level 36, and when you answer a few questions correctly, you move up to the next higher level. Answer a few wrong, and you move down. Pretty simple. And surprisingly addicting!

I read a lot, so I have a pretty good vocabulary, and so far, my highest level is 52. At that level, I have neither seen nor heard many of these words. In fact, I suspect that a lot of them are not English words, because I know a few of them are French. And here's where the intuition comes in.

When you've never heard of a word before, sometimes you can figure it out by context, but here, there is no context. Sometimes, you can make an educated guess, because you've heard of a cognate, or at least one of its root syllables before. But when none of that works, as sometimes in life, all that is left is your intuition. So guess! The good news here is that there is very little downside, which makes it an ideal situation for practicing your intuition.

What I love about this is that it is like real life. You are asked to make a snap decision on a real world matter, for which you can sometimes use your intellect -- & sometimes not.

Notice how you guess: Does a little voice say something to you, like it does to me? Do you feel something when you look at the correct answer? Is the correct answer somehow brighter on the screen when you look at it? Then notice which guesses are right, and correlate the correct answer with how you got the answer.

How often is your intuition right? Are you going with your intuition? Or ignoring it? And if you're ignoring it, what stops you from going with it?

Answer: A pondokkie is a makeshift shelter.