highly sensitive power

“One of the first steps in developing intuition is to learn your own symbolic language. With practice you’ll learn that certain symbols or impressions are, for you, highly reliable signs of certain things.”

~ Laura Day, Practical Intuition

In Hawaii, when I was seven, I found a dollar bill on the sidewalk not far from a statue of King Kamehameha. I felt as though he’d given it to me personally. That got my attention, and I still pay attention when I discover money in my path. I ask myself what I was thinking about in the moments just before the discovery, and consider that the money may be a sign of positivity related to those thoughts. Finding money is sign of positivity for many people. But that’s only the tip of the personal symbology iceberg.

My lexicon of personal symbology, after years of collecting, includes a wide range of whacky things that consistently provide me with useful feedback. Playing cards are about love. Feathers indicate that I’m thinking or moving in the right direction. Bells are about journeys. Worded messages tend to lend me support when I need it. For instance, when I walked past a busy schoolyard a couple of hours after being unexpectedly laid off from a job I loved, a boy yelled into a sudden silence, “You just have to believe in yourself!” I took the message to heart, calmed down, and moved on. In fact, being laid off from that job has only resulted in better things coming into my life.

A simple way to develop personal symbology is to think about an issue you’d like help with, then look around and see what you notice. You can’t notice everything, right? The input from our senses (including our sixth sense) that gets our attention is personal. What comes to your attention again and again? And in what circumstances? Over time, your intuition, revealed in a language that makes sense to you, becomes a powerful tool. You learn to notice what you already know.

“The greater awareness of the subtle tends to make you more intuitive, which simply means picking up and working through information in a semiconscious or unconscious way. The result is that you often ‘just know’ without realizing how.”

~ Elaine Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

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[17 April 2009 update: The second edition of this e-book is now available, under a new title: Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat.] Announcing the release of The Healthy Boundaries Handbook, just in time for the holiday season, when we can find our boundaries challenged by time pressure, visits home, family members we love even though they bug us, and our own longings. Written by Grace Kerina, this e-book is available for immediate download upon purchase. For more information, go to www.healthyboundarieshandbook.com, which will direct you to the book’s page on the Highly Sensitive Power Website.