Intuition (Part 2)

**Re-release of Episode 3**

In Episode 3 of Chasing Starlight, we move beyond the theory of intuition and dive into the practical magic of daily practice. Your inner wisdom doesn't speak in ordinary, human language - it communicates through a custom dialect of sensations, numbers, dream landscapes, and limitless symbols. Join Isabel as she unpacks the anatomy of an "intuitive hit", shows how identifying patterns can help to connect the dots of your broader journey, and explores how divination tools can serve as tangible bridges to your own inner truth. (Also, does anyone remember Boardwalk Fries?)

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Chasing Starlight is brought to you by The Bell and Raven. If you’d like to explore more about who we are, including our workshops and educational offerings, our spiritual wellness retreats, and our one-on-one intuitive readings, be sure to follow us on social media: @thebellandraven or visit our website: thebellandraven.com.

Transcript

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If your intuition paid you a visit today, would you recognize it? I'm guessing maybe yes, maybe no. Because you see, it's an amazing but undeniable truth that your intuition speaks to you in a special language of signs and patterns that it picks out just for you. It's just a question of learning how to translate them into the messages of guidance that they really are. So if you're ready, we can learn how to crack the code together. I'm Isabelle, and this is Chasing Starlight. Including a moment where my own personal intuitive hit proved to be quite possibly life-altering for a tiny little animal in the road. And we also broke down how to tell the difference between a true inner nudge and the frantic-paced noise of stress and worry. If you haven't yet had a chance to check out that episode, I highly recommend pausing this one and jumping back to give it a listen because it helps to lay the groundwork for what we'll be diving into today. But if you're ready to take that theory and turn it into active daily practice, then you are in the perfect spot. Today's episode is all about moving from simply recognizing that inner voice to actively speaking its language on a regular, reliable basis. This entire conversation is dedicated to the practical application of your internal guidance system. We're going to explore what actually constitutes a quote unquote intuitive hit. We're going to look at why these moments occur, when they are most likely to surface, and precisely how they manifest within our daily environments. Because, as we are about to discover, your inner wisdom doesn't communicate using a standard dictionary. It operates through a beautifully complex, entirely subjective system of symbols, sensations, and recurring patterns. And just like any unfamiliar language, it requires consistent practice to interpret it with genuine confidence. Let's start by defining our terms. What exactly are we looking for when we talk about an intuitive hit? Culturally, we have come to tend to expect the highly dramatic. We have this idea that an intuitive breakthrough has to arrive like a flash of lightning, a booming external voice, or a sweeping, overwhelming premonition that completely stops us in our tracks. And there are certainly times when it can do that. But in the practical reality of daily life, an authentic hit is usually far more subtle. It comes by way of an unmistakable clarity that lands in your awareness in a complete and absolute way. Your analytical mind didn't do the heavy lifting to get there. It didn't track any data, it didn't weigh any pros and cons, and it didn't look at any historical examples to build a logical case. The information simply bubbles up to the surface of your consciousness seemingly out of nowhere. And it is that sudden, unprompted knowing that tells you to take a completely different street to an appointment or to reach out to a friend you haven't spoken to in years, or to pause and look closely at a specific book on a shelf. And the absolute defining feature of this type of breakthrough is its complete neutrality. And as a reminder, an authentic hit will never be delivered with a desperate sales pitch. It will never argue with you or admonish you. It won't try to validate itself, and it won't provide a list of reasons to justify why it's right. It simply states its truth, steps back, and then leaves the rest up to your own free will and hopefully meaningful follow-through. So why do these hits happen? What is the actual function of this internal guidance system? Well, at our most fundamental level of survival, intuition is an evolutionary necessity. Long before we relied on written logic and modern technology, our ancestors navigated the world by sensing the unseen shifts in their surroundings. They could read the subtle changes in the landscape and the unspoken behavior of the wildlife around them long before an actual threat became visible to the naked eye. And your physical vessel was explicitly designed to process these invisible currents of information. On a deeper spiritual level, these insights serve as your personal guide. They are designed to keep your choices aligned with your truest self, dropping small breadcrumbs of clarity so that you can navigate life from an authentic, self-reliant space rather than constantly relying on external trends, societal expectations, or the shifting opinions of the people around you. So then, when are these hits most likely to show up? The great irony of our internal guidance system is that it almost never speaks when we are frantically demanding answers. It doesn't function well when we are sitting at a desk hyper-focusing on a problem, spinning our wheels in frustration, and demanding that our inner guidance instantly fix the situation. When the conscious mind is running at that high velocity speed of stress, it creates so much internal feedback that the soft, neutral frequency of our intuition will often simply just get drowned out. Instead, these flashes of clarity almost always catch us when our analytical mind is slightly distracted, relaxed, or operating on a simple autopilot loop. Think about your own life for a moment. Your biggest epiphanies and aha moments likely never hit you in the middle of a stressful meeting. They find you when you're standing at the kitchen counter peeling vegetables or when you're out walking the dog or when you're washing your hair. When your hands and mind are occupied by a basic repetitive task, the conscious supervisor tends to soften its grip and lower the blinders a little bit. And it is in those spaces between our deliberate thoughts where our deeper wisdom can find an open channel to come to the surface. It requires a relaxed, soft focus to let the data translate into something that we can consciously perceive. Some of you may remember a thing in the 80s and 90s that we liked to call going to the mall. And it was one of my favorite pastimes. And during this bygone era of Record Town and Benetton and Walden Books and Boardwalk Fries, does anyone remember boardwalk fries? Oh my goodness. We would take our babysitting money and set ourselves free in the vast retail jungle. And there was always at least one store that would have this phenomenon called the magic eye poster. And if you remember, you know what I'm talking about. These posters had multicolored, two-dimensional patterns that repeated over and over and over again over the entire thing. And the trick was that if you looked at them in a certain way, you might be able to see a hidden 3D image within the poster. Keyword here being might. Might be able to see. I struggled with this every time. I remember getting so frustrated that I could not, for the life of me, see the hidden horse or car or dolphin that everyone else seemed to be pointing at. Anyway, I bring this up because when I'm trying to explain the state of mind that's best suited for receiving messages of an intuitive nature, it's in a lot of ways the same method used to see the 3D image within the magic eye poster. In order for you to see the image, you needed to relax and soften your focus without staring directly at the pattern on the poster. And if the poster was behind glass, that could actually help, as people would find that if they focused on their own reflection in the glass rather than on the pattern on the poster itself, the 3D image would appear almost instantly. The same thing happens when we want to receive clarity or answers from our internal guidance system. If we are asking it directly, loudly, with a very sharp focus on it, demanding that the answer come to the surface, it will almost always elude us. But if we soften the gaze of our mind's eye and give our conscious mind something else active to occupy it, like weeding in the garden or a hands-on craft like knitting or crochet, we have a much better chance of connecting with those deep-seated messages from our subconscious, from our intuition. So now for the fun part. To become adept at using our intuition, we have to understand the unique way that it communicates. And here is something crucial that so many approaches overlook. Your intuition does not speak the same everyday language as humans. But typical ego-driven humans that we are, because we speak English, for example, we just naturally expect our inner wisdom to speak English right back to us. You know, well, I speak English, so why won't my inner guidance just hand me answers in plain direct sentences? Why do I have to spend time deciphering these abstract feelings and physical sensations? And that would be nice. It would be great to have an 800 number that connects us to our spirit guides and to our inner wisdom. Hey, make it a toll call. I think most people would be willing to pay to have this type of clarity presented to them in their native language on a silver platter, free from any complex interpretations. But it doesn't work that way. Our intuition speaks in the language of energy, and it will use whatever it has available to it energetically in the moment. And that may be through a physical feeling or an animal that crosses our path or a pattern that we see in our travels. It speaks through the language of signs and symbols, and it's up to us to learn its language in order to benefit from its important messages. Think about traveling to a completely foreign country. If you stepped off a plane into a culture you've never experienced, you wouldn't automatically expect the local residents to adapt to your native tongue, at least I hope not. You would understand that you have to meet the environment somewhere in the middle. The exact same relationship applies to your inner world, and there is no generic mass-produced dictionary that can accurately decode your personal landscape. Your intuitive vocabulary is completely unique to your own biology, history, and emotional makeup. It is a highly custom tailored dialect that blends the physical responses of your body with the symbolic imagery of your mind. For one person, an authentic internal yes might manifest as a sudden physical sensation of warmth spreading through their chest. But for someone else, the exact same validation might land as a quiet visual that drops into their mind seemingly out of nowhere. A warning might show up for you as sudden goosebumps. Meanwhile, for the person sitting right next to you, a warning might manifest for them as a symbol in their dreams. This is why you have to dedicate time to studying your own internal signals. If you spend your life waiting for a loud, obvious sign to appear in your mind while your physical form is trying to communicate through a subtle shift in your physical comfort, you're going to miss the guidance entirely. You have to learn your own unique shorthand before you can comfortably read the messages. So let's examine some of the specific daily channels through which this personalized shorthand likes to operate. And one of the first common avenues is the channel of numerical patterns. Most people have experienced the act of noticing repetitive numbers at some point in their lives, whether it's looking at a digital clock at exactly 1111 or constantly seeing sequences like 444 on receipts and road signs. Now, it would be very easy for the rational mind to dismiss these patterns as mere coincidence, but we have to remember that patterns are the fundamental language of the natural world. Personally, I love to look at license plates when I'm out on my daily travels. When I find myself waiting at a red light or paused in a line of traffic, I naturally look at the plate of the car in front of me, and if it displays a prominent number sequence, I like to tally up those numbers to see what the overarching theme might be from a numerology standpoint. And when a specific sequence catches my attention, I don't overanalyze it, I don't force myself to sit there and dissect it with rigid logic. That wouldn't help me. Instead, I just acknowledge it. I treat the underlying energy of that pattern as a gentle validation from my internal guidance system, and I receive it with a quiet understanding and appreciation. Sometimes the theme of that number directly answers a question that I was just mulling over in my head in my car. And sometimes the connection doesn't become clear until days or weeks down the road. And then sometimes I just know that it's simply a reassuring confirmation that my awareness is fully present. But the magic is in the act of noticing. The moment you actively flag these patterns and acknowledge them, you are effectively tuning the receiver of your inner radio. You are demonstrating to your deeper awareness that you are paying attention and that open loop allows the communication to flow more clearly moving forward. The more you acknowledge the numbers, the more clearly they begin to show a kind of map along your path. Another major channel for this work and one that provides an incredibly rich source of data is the landscape of our dreams. In a future episode, we'll be diving into the power of dreams when it comes to intuitive work and spiritual connection. But for today, just know that dreams are arguably one of the most efficient delivery systems for intuitive downloads. When you are deep asleep, the analytical and self-critical parts of your mind are completely offline. The conscious mind filters are switched off, and so your subconscious mind finally has total freedom to communicate. It takes all of the millions, yes, millions, of subtle environmental data points that your body absorbed during the waking hours, the brief expressions, the shifts in atmosphere, the details that your conscious mind bypassed to avoid complete overwhelm. And it translates them into rich symbolic imagery, which is wonderful. It is. I have journals upon journals documenting my dreams since my teenage years, and I love going back and revisiting them. But how do we take a dream and translate it into a message that we can understand and use to guide us? Well, we can certainly start with the universal language of symbols and archetypes. Across human history, mythology, and collective psychology, there are classic dream tropes that carry universally recognized themes. And dream dictionaries, for example, will help to shed light on what they mean. But while there are broad collective symbols that share meaning universally, your personal dream vocabulary is always intricately wired to your individual memories and personal associations. If a horse appears in a dream, for example, it will carry a completely different meaning for someone who spent their childhood happily riding on a farm versus someone who experienced a frightening accident involving riding a horse. One association represents freedom and strength and playfulness, and the other represents unpredictability and fear. Your internal guidance system explicitly uses your personal history and the significance that you have attached to different settings and objects and themes over the course of your life to construct its nighttime messages. It borrows the imagery of your life to illustrate your current internal state. So when you wake up from a particularly vivid or memorable dream, try to lie still for a few moments before moving into your morning routine. Feel the emotional texture of the dream. Notice how the memory of those symbols registers in your physical body. And ask yourself, what does this specific visual mean to me? What is my personal relationship with this symbol? And most importantly, how do I feel emotionally when I think about what transpired in my dream? Know that it is your emotions that serve as the connector to the true message of that dreamscape. Another beautiful way this intuitive communication surfaces is through the natural world, specifically through the animals that intersect our paths. Animal symbolism operates deeply on the law of repetition. If you happen to see a specific bird or animal once, it's a lovely encounter. But if you find yourself experiencing a sudden unusual frequency of encounters with a specific animal, the dynamic changes. Imagine that three days in a row a hawk flies directly across your path while you are driving, which actually happened to me a few weeks ago. A hawk swooped down just above my car and flew in front of me for an almost comical amount of time. And then it flew off for a few moments and then it swooped back into the same position as if it were leading me on my drive. When we see an animal in repetition in relatively quick succession, this is an established pattern. Your deeper awareness is utilizing the environment and our nature allies to break through your mundane mindset. It is saying one encounter wasn't enough to break her train of thought. Twice she might call it a fluke. Three times, well now she has to stop and think about it. And think about that for a second. Why three? Why the number three? Well there is a real undeniable magic to the number three, isn't there? If anyone here remembers Schoolhouse Rock, you remember it taught us that three is a magic number. And it is, we see it woven all throughout mythology, divinity, art, literature, from the three fates and the three graces to sacred trinities across many world religions and traditions, down to the classic rule of three in storytelling. Geometrically, three is the absolute minimum number of points required to form a stable shape, a triangle. And in perception, three is the precise mathematical threshold where an event transforms into a pattern. One occurrence might be an anomaly, two might be a coincidence, but three is a rhythm. Three is a system. And that threshold resonates with us so deeply because we, at our very core, are creatures of patterns, as is the universe itself. Sacred geometry, planetary orbits, biological rhythms, everything in existence operates through harmonic cycles. When a symbol or encounter hits that magic number three, your inner radar naturally recognizes the universal language of alignment. Now, right here is usually where our conscious mind loves to step in and try to derail the momentum. The moment a subtle pattern or encounter full of synchronicity appears, our logical brain starts scrambling to rationalize it, convincing us to chalk the whole thing up to some coincidence. So let me give you a little golden rule, a helpful hint to keep in your back pocket when this happens. If you find yourself asking, was that a sign? It's a sign. Period. Don't second guess it, and please do not dismiss a quiet, subtle nudge because you are holding out for some grand theatrical, signer sign to drop in out of the world. The sky. It just doesn't work that way. Your intuition doesn't do Hollywood special effects. It speaks in quiet, simple truths. And if you sit around waiting for a signier sign, you're going to miss the message that's standing right in front of you. There is an analogy that I love to share in my intuition workshops and classes that really helps to bring this entire process into perspective. Think of each individual intuitive hit that you receive, whether it's a sudden physical knowing, a repeated number sequence on a license plate, or a vivid dream symbol as a single dot, one single glimmer of clarity. And yes, we can and absolutely should accept that single hit, that single dot, as an individual sign in the moment. These unique standalone messages tell us what we need for that specific point in time. But here is where the true magic lies. Over time, as you begin recording, tracking, and honoring these moments, you'll start to see that the wide spectrum of hits that you've been receiving aren't just isolated disconnected dots. They're a larger connect the dots puzzle. When you take a step back and look at the overarching message of all of these seemingly unique and separate dots, you realize that they are actually drawing a complete picture. They are telling you something bigger as part of your broader journey. The individual dot gives you clarity for right now, but when you step back to connect them, you get to see the bird's eye view of where your soul is actually guiding you. So if you are listening to this and thinking, well, this sounds incredible, but my daily life is still so full of mental static that I really struggle to connect those dots or to decode those environmental patterns without second guessing myself. Please know that this is completely normal. When you are first learning to tune this instrument, it can be incredibly helpful to use a physical focus, and that is exactly where the practice of divination comes into play. Now, before we even talk about how to use these tools, we have to clear away some heavy cultural baggage, unfortunately. Pop culture, Hollywood cinema, and centuries of institutional religion have heavily stigmatized the word divination. Some people have been taught or otherwise conditioned to associate it with something dangerous or forbidden or taboo. I actually began really exploring divination because once upon a time I had a terrible reading done for me. I was in my early twenties and I was visiting a friend in New York, and there was a summer festival going on, and I saw in a window a neon sign that said Palmistry readings. And so that was it. No one had to twist my arm. Of course I was gonna go in and check that out. And the woman performing the reading was she was nice enough, though I noticed that most of what she said in the reading was based on obvious physical indicators that anyone could observe about me. But when she got to the end of the reading, her final words to me while she was looking at my hand were, oh yeah, and one last thing I see here, whatever you do, stay away from bridges. Okay, I that was not a fun moment. I was maybe 22 and a naive 22 at that, and I panicked. I was in New York. The amount of bridges that I had to take just to get back to Connecticut, well, you can see where my mind started spinning. I was scared, but in short order, that fear turned to a kind of curiosity. And so I gripped my steering wheel with white knuckles in order to get back home. And once I was back home safely, I started researching how to read palms. And what was first a feeling of dread and fear after that so-called reading soon turned to anger because the lines and the textures of your hands will never, ever tell you to stay away from bridges. That woman used shock value to make the reading more interesting and more compelling. It was so wrong, and it was totally irresponsible, and it made me so angry after the fact. And so from that point on I started learning the ancient craft of pomistry, and since then, one of my aims is to educate people not only on pomistry, but on all forms of divination, what it is and what it most definitely is not, no matter what Hollywood or any unethical imposter might try to tell you. If you look at the etymology of the word divination, it stems directly from the Latin root meaning of the divine, to be inspired by or in direct communion with the divine nature within and around us. It was never meant to be about foretelling doom or a rigid, unchangeable future. Real divination is not quote unquote fortune telling. It is simply the sacred practical art of making the unseen visible. It's the intentional use of a physical tool that can create a bridge directly to your own subconscious mind, safely bypassing your logical skepticism and pulling your hidden inner truth to the surface. And the beauty of this approach is that the options are limitless. Dreams, tarot cards, oracle decks, a pendulum, a mirror, even tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. There is no single superior tool. It's all about finding a physical medium that resonates with you and that you feel comfortable with. Take tarot card decks as an example. Tarot cards are essentially a structured system that depicts universal archetypes and natural cycles and patterns. If you were to draw a single card from a tarot deck in response to a question you might have, you aren't asking a piece of cardboard to tell you what to do or to predict your fate. And this is very important. No matter what any film tries to tell you, by practicing divination, you are never handing your personal power over to an object. What you are actually doing is providing your deeper wisdom, your knowing with a capital K, as I like to call it, with a visual tangible outlet. When you see the card, your eyes and your analytical mind will likely connect with the artwork, the colors, and the characters on the card. And while it does this, your intuition connects to the underlying energetic pattern. So you see, the card did not make up an answer to your question. It just gave your subconscious a mirror to show you what you likely already knew on a soul level. Divination tools are simply a vehicle through which you can connect to your inner radar, transforming your own internal knowing into something tangible. Now, before you go diving headfirst into working with any of these physical tools, let me provide a disclaimer about a crucial boundary that we need to address. We have to enter into any form of divination, any form of intuitive work or energy work for that matter, with respect for the unknown and for universal energy. Personally, I have always felt that it was deeply irresponsible for toy manufacturers to take something as spiritually potent as a spirit board or a talking board and package it as some cheap parlor game in a cardboard box. Working with spiritual energy is not a game. And it's careless and unfair to paint sacred tools as mundane novelties. If you treat methods of divination like a party trick or something to laugh about, do not expect to receive any genuine truth, depth, or clarity from your tool. It doesn't work that way. It is one thing to be healthily skeptical. Healthy skepticism is grounded and welcome. It keeps us discerning. But it is something else entirely to mock universal energy. And that brings me to a rule that I share constantly. To mock is to block. When you approach spiritual tools with sarcasm or mockery, you create an immediate dense energetic block within yourself. You will never be in the aligned state necessary to receive and accurately translate messages from your intuition if you approach the process with cynicism. Respect the space, respect the energy, and respect the tool. In our upcoming episodes, we are going to be expanding on all of these fascinating doorways, and we'll dive much deeper into specific methods of divination. And we'll talk about why you might select one tool over another depending on your circumstances. We're also going to dedicate full conversations to the secret language of dreams, as well as meeting and collaborating with our spirit guides, what I like to call our spiritual support team. And yes, we all have them. Every single one of these topics ties directly into this greater ecosystem of receiving signs, interpreting messages, and stepping into your innate intuitive wisdom. But for now, as we close out this chapter of our journey today, know that whatever practice or symbol catches your attention, I encourage you to approach it with wonder and awe and an empowering sense of discovery. In the days and weeks ahead, don't pressure yourself to see signs or receive intuitive hits right out of the gate. You can't expect to build strong communication overnight with a part of yourself that has likely been quieted by years of hyper rational conditioning. It requires consistent daily practice to be open to these signals without trying to force them. As you move through your typical day, just play with the vocabulary. Look at the patterns around you without needing to overanalyze them. Keep a notebook or a journal nearby and jot down even just a single fragment or a color from your dream the moment you open your eyes, letting the meaning settle naturally. If an animal crosses your path in a repetitive way, stop, reflect, and look for the pattern and ask yourself, what is this pattern trying to show me? What does it want me to know in this moment? What does it want me to learn? Tapping into your intuition is all about establishing a relationship of self-reliant trust with the deepest layers of your own being. It's about becoming a fluent speaker of your soul's native tongue. So you can treat it as though you are learning a new language because, in essence, that's precisely what you are doing. And you are using that language to build a bridge back to your own inner clarity, your own inner knowing. Thank you so much for exploring these deeper spaces with me today on Chasing Starlight. As you explore the world around you, remember to let the patterns catch your eye, let the dreams unfold, and let your body, mind, and spirit resonate in alignment with your own inner wisdom. Stay open, stay curious, and watch for the signs. Chasing Starlight is a podcast brought to you by The Bell and Raven. If you'd like to explore more about who we are, including our workshops and educational offerings, our spiritual wellness retreats, and our one on one intuitive readings, be sure to follow us on social media at the Bell and Raven. Or visit our website, thebell and raven.com.