All of us (I hope) agree on the five human senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. When we hear about the “sixth sense” though, what comes to mind? New Age theory? Feminine perception? The sixth sense is something we all have and is underappreciated: intuition. Whether we are aware of using it or not, intuition is hard-wired into our human nervous and hormonal systems. It is a key player in Somatic Intuitive Training™, where we get to rewrite our emotional history.
Wikipedia shows its limitations when it describes intuition solely as a function of the brain: a phenomenon of the mind;…the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. Merriam Webster gets closer to the truth: quick and ready insight, immediate apprehension or cognition.
Intuition finds its source in the heart and gut, where a lot more is going on than circulation of blood and digestion. These organs also produce hormones that send signals to the brain, which then sorts out our feelings and sensations into rational thought and decision-making. Thus “listening to our heart” or “having a gut feeling” are both very accurate and very true.
We all have the capacity for profound intuition. We humans used intuition extensively, before the 18th Century Enlightenment shifted Western civilization toward being hyper-rational, relying on empirical and scientifically provable knowledge. Since Freud’s psychoanalytic studies of the 20th Century, the absolutizing of science gained momentum, as intuition was increasingly relegated to religious enthusiasm or emotionalism. We in the West tend to mistrust intuition. We seem to rely more on technology to tell us what to think.
Somatic Intuitive Training restores the primacy of intuition in bringing about emotional healing from stress and trauma. As a practitioner I invite the client to use his/her intuition to sense which emotion is showing up or expressing itself in the body. The client also scans the body to determine the intensity of the emotional discomfort and the changes in the emotion as the process proceeds.
Lance Ware who developed the Somatic Intuitive Training protocol describes this intuitive discernment as: Finding and trusting inner resources of strength such as insight, wisdom, faith, guidance, and inspiration to assist in recovery. We thus call upon the client’s knowledge of self, that goes beyond mere intellectual cognition, to the deeper and more complex memories stored in the body, often for a lifetime.
Using his/her intuition a client investigates the recalled event, the principle persons involved, and the context of the memory. Often one memory will trigger another, deeper recall. This may be the one that “feels” right to the client, who intuits it as a root memory. The client recognizes how and where the memory and body hold the core emotion; it now can be changed once and for all.
I was amazed at how effective this process was for my own memories and events from the past. Instead of using my highly-attuned intuition to “read” others’ lives, I was able to use it to read my own past through the memories held tight in my body. Each of us can develop a healthy and practical use for this sixth sense. Somatic Intuitive Training has set my life on a new path toward personal wholeness and the power to help others transform their lives.
Pictures copyrighted by Andrew Ciccarelli