Life Challenges

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The difference between intuition and mind interference Sandra Ingerman

Sandra Ingerman offers this exercise to help you experience the difference between intuition and mind interference.

Begin by sitting comfortably in a chair. Close your eyes, take four deep breaths, and try to relax as fully as you can. Now think about something you love, something very simple, like a color, a flower, a food. Tell yourself, "I love..." Repeat it. Just experience in your body what it feels like when you tell yourself a truth. Now get up and do something for a few minutes. If you're at home, do something around the house. If you're out, walk around for a few minutes. Then come back and sit down and close your eyes. Take four more deep breaths. And now tell yourself a lie. Say to yourself, "I hate.... "(the same thing you just said you loved). Repeat the phrase "I hate. . . "and try to experience what your body does when it hears a lie.

When I hear a lie, a red flag pops up in my solar plexus. When I'm listening to someone or reading, I can know if I'm hearing an essential truth by noticing whether or not the red flag comes up. If I'm trying to make a decision and my mind won't stop interfering in my process with its chatter, I say to myself what I'm getting ready to do and then I watch for the red flag. If it doesn't come up, I move forward, even if my mind is kicking and screaming all the way.

Other people report with this exercise that with a truth a warm sensation floods the body, or goose bumps or tingling sensations are felt throughout the body; a general peace may overcome them, or their heart may feel good. With a lie, a tightness occurs in the chest or solar plexus, or a particular color may come to mind, or there may be some feeling of distress in the body.

From Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self, by Sandra Ingerman, HarperSanFrancisco, a div. of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991, pp. 9-10. In reference to this exercise, Ingerman also sites the following, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, Mircea Eliade, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen series, vol. 76, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1972, p. 5.

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