Developing intuition can be a rewarding and frustrating process. Like building muscle, increasing your intuition requires regular effort to expand and to maintain your awareness of finer energies.

Small children usually have highly developed intuitive faculties, to compensate for their lack of language skills. They essentially read the energy of those around them until they can communicate in words. As children improve their language skills natural human intuition diminishes. Intuition is soon replaced with logic in the rush to achieve high grades at school and later at university.

Logic need not replace or even compete with intuition. They make an excellent pair, especially when making important life decisions. After researching your alternatives using logic, you can then utilise your intuition to help you to make a balanced decision. Not all aspects of a situation can be explored through logic, just as a life lived entirely intuitively can become aimless.

For too long we have assumed that logic and intuition are mutually exclusive but they can in fact be paired together very easily and profitably. Simple exercises to develop and maintain your intuition are listed below. There are several sets of exercises, so try them all out and use the exercises which best suit you. Intuition works differently for different people, and once you have determined which way your intuition best functions, the exercises below will serve to strengthen and maintain your intuition.

There are several basic types of intuition. These include:

• Hunches or gut feelings
  This type of intuition is linked with survival and usually surfaces in times of crisis.
  
• Dreams at night
  Dreams can be useful, but require interpretation. It can be difficult determining if something in a dream depicts an actual event or is merely symbolic. With practice you can set dream tasks at night to answer specific questions about yourself or your life. (See exercises below)
  
• Psychometry
  This involves the reading or sensing of energies left in objects. When you regularly handle your car keys you leave tiny traces of your energy behind. This energy can be ‘read’ through psychometry. With practice you can form a psychic link between the object and its owner, in order to gain more information about that person. Please be sure that you have their permission first, or you’ll be energetically trespassing. Psychometry is sometimes called clairsentience; or clear feeling.
  
• Clairaudience
  This simply means clear hearing. It refers to the ability to hear voices internally. This can be the act of listening to your own inner voice or guidance, or listening to spirit guides. Sometimes mediums (those who contact spirits of the deceased) hear their voices internally. It can be difficult at first differentiating between your imagination and your inner voice or the voices of guides. This comes with practice.
  
• Clairvoyance
  This simply means clear seeing. This refers to the ability to see clear images of past or future events. These images are seen in the same way you remember past events. If you take a moment to remember your living room or a favourite place, you see images internally. Clairvoyance offers images in the same way, except that these are images of places you have not yet seen physically.
  
• Telepathy
  Telepathy involves the sending and receiving of information (often in the form of images) from one person to another. Telepathy requires that both people are on the same ‘wavelength’ so it better results are achieved when you know one another very well. It works well with lovers, close friends and family members and is difficult to do with complete strangers. In our psychic development courses we have a series of telepathy exercises which involve the drawing and visualising the five basic shapes; a circle, square, triangle, star and a pair of parallel wavy lines. One partner stares at a shape and the other draws what they sense is the correct shape. This is repeated 20 times. Then the partners talk for five minutes in order to find at least five things they have in common. They repeat the exercise and the results are usually improved, due to both people being better attuned to one another.

You’ll find with experimentation that you have an aptitude for one method, and a small percentage of people have abilities in more than one area. These types of intuition are grouped together under the heading of psychic abilities. To develop your innate abilities in these areas you’ll need to practice the exercises below. I’ve made these exercises fun so that you don’t give up on day two.

Psychic development exercises:

• Hunches or gut feelings
  When you visit a house to rent or to buy, you ‘get a sense’ of what it is like. This sense relies on gut feelings. When visiting the home of a friend, take a moment to tune in to what you feel about the home.
  
• Dreams at night
  Keep a pen and pad beside the bed and upon awakening spend five to ten minutes writing our what you recall of your dreams from the previous night. You may not recall much for a week or two. When your subconscious mind is aware that you are listening to your dreams, you’ll find more and more information is revealed to you through your dreams. For some people this information comes within days and for others it can take up to a month. Be patient.
  
• Psychometry
  Psychometry is easily practised, every time you touch something which belongs to someone else. You can practice this with friends and blind tests are easily arranged. Two friends Alice and Karin regularly post small items to one another for intuitive practice. They ask for unwanted items from friends and then post them to one another. When Alice receives an item she phones Karin to tell her what she sense from the object. Because Karin knows the object’s original owner, she is able to confirm the details revealed. If not, she takes notes and later asks the owner if the information received is accurate. They have been doing this together for almost two years and their accuracy is astounding.
  
• Clairaudience
  This takes more time to develop as it is difficult to determine when you are being intuitive, imaginative or simply crazy. Take ten minutes alone in a quiet place and centre yourself. Ask yourself one simple question. Wait. Listen within for an answer. With practice you’ll learn to quieten your mind and allow your higher self to speak to you from within.
  
  In the 1980's I was consulting a natural therapist who specialised in vitamin therapy. Before each consultation I was asked to complete a psychological test using a set of cards which were to be placed into two boxes marked true or false. The cards included statements like "A cow is like a radio because they both make noise". There was a card stating "I hear voices in my head," which I always placed into the true box, realising that I get paid to hear voices in my head. On seeing this the therapist increased my dosage of the B group vitamins without ever asking me about the voices. The vitamins helped. I felt fantastic and the voices are still there.
  
• Clairvoyance
  When developing clairvoyance many people expect to immediately see crystal clear images as they do when watching television. This rarely occurs at first. Instead, many people find that they are confused between imagination, memory and intuition.
  
  To improve your visualisation skills, spend ten minutes remembering your present living room. Then spend ten minutes recalling to mind a previous living room or the living room of a friend. Go through the room slowly, carefully and in great detail. If there is a television examine it in your mind. Scrutinise every ledge, bookcase, table and object in the room, noting the colours, textures, designs and brand names.
  
  Guided meditation tapes and CDs are useful for developing clairvoyance and visualisation skills. When you are ready, simply ask a question and close your eyes; allowing an image to come to mind. You can also hold an object belonging to someone else and allow images to come to mind. Be patient. Aside from a blow to the head, developing clairvoyance requires the most patience of any of the methods.
  
• Telepathy
  You’ll need a regular partner (or several partners) for telepathic practice. It can be done in the same room, face to face or at a distance, even interstate. It is more difficult to do when your partner is overseas.
  
  The partner sending the image is to concentrate for several minutes on a single, simple image. You might use the five basic shapes mentioned previously. Complex images increase the likelihood for confusion. The receiving partner is to still his or her mind and allow an image to enter. Then draw this image.
  
  Telepathy can also be used for sounds, songs, and feelings. Images are the usual content, and even these can be misinterpreted. Many years ago I was out shopping and my partner discovered that we had run out of milk for her tea. She considered sending me an image of a carton of milk, before realising that I don’t drink milk and was likely to dismiss the image. Instead she sent me an image of a cup of tea and I arrived home with 100 tea bags. "And you call yourself a psychic!" she said coldly.

Everyday techniques:

Try guessing the number of letters or email you’ll receive at the beginning of each day.

Guess the number of messages you’ll find on your answering machine each time you enter the house.

When the phone rings, take a second to guess the identity or the gender of the caller. You might state "It’s a man, a stranger and he’s over forty years of age."

We all have intuitive abilities, and it is up to each individual to ignore or to develop these qualities. A strong intuition can mean the difference between buying the right house or a money pit, securing the perfect job or entering another nightmare workplace. Learning from experience is useful but it can take too long. For those who think that intuition is too difficult to develop, think of your mother. It’s rare that you can successfully lie to your mother, because innate ‘mother’s intuition’ usually rears its head. Suddenly she’s asking you pointed questions and you feel like you’re in the dock, answering the judge. You struggle for the right answer, knowing that a wrong turn might lead to 8 to 10 with a non-parole period of five years.