Intuition and the Creation of a Better World
Discoveries of the Intuitive Heart
Henry Reed
Henry Reed, Ph. D. is Senior Fellow at the Edgar Cayce Institute for Intuitive Studies, and a former Professor of Transpersonal Studies at Atlantic University, Virginia Beach, VA, USA. He is author of Discover Your Intuitive Heart and trains Intuitive Heart Discovery Group guides worldwide. Further information on his website www.creativespirit.net.
When our "heart goes out to someone, my research has discovered, our caring naturally creates an intuitive bridge of understanding. I call this discovery, with its important implications for intuition, healing, and spirituality, the "intuitive heart."
While I was a psychology professor at Princeton University in the early 1970s, I was researching creative dreaming. I wanted something more than the typical laboratory approach and had a suggestive dream:
"A group of us have met for research into enlightenment. Lacking the right method, we are stumbling in the dark. Suddenly we begin dancing together in a circle. We recognize one another by the individual symbol each dancer displays. A fountain of sparks burst forth magically from the center of our dance and illuminates our space. We realize that our dance is our way to research."
At the time of this dream, I was receiving support for my work from the Edgar Cayce Foundation, The Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.). At their summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, I was exploring Edgar Cayce's idea that creative dreaming occurs more naturally when you are trying to dream with a purpose. Combining his suggestion with my dream, I created an experiment I later named the "Dream Helper Ceremony." It would prove to have importance beyond dreams. Here's the way it works: Among a group of people, a volunteer who is facing some personal challenge asks for help. This volunteer does not reveal the nature of the problem, but the group "sleeps on it" and tries to help out in dreams. The next morning, the group shares their dreams and examines them, still without knowing the volunteer person's concern.
As most always happens, no one individual dream has any obvious relevance for the volunteer. The dreams as a whole, however, show surprising commonalities. The collective dream themes form patterns that ultimately prove, when the volunteer does finally reveal the nature of the problem, to zero in on that focus and point to potentially helpful lines of resolution. There is yet another surprise waiting in these dreams.
When the individual dreamers interpret their dreams for what they reveal about themselves, they find their dreams are attempting to achieve resolution in their own lives to some aspect of the same dilemma that is confronting the volunteer. In one case, for example, the volunteer had just lost his job. One dream helper saw in her own dream how she needed to confront certain changes in her life situation that have made some of her comfortable patterns no longer advisable. The man with the job loss realized from this sharing that his own discomfort was the beginning of overdue growth.
It would seem that in our healing ceremony, each dreamer intuitively connects with the plight of the volunteer and seeks a gift of resolution. The gift, however, comes in the form of a personal expression of the dreamer. It is as if the volunteer's unrevealed dilemma acts like a silent irritant within the dreamers, stimulating the dream's natural healing ability to use past experiences to create a restorative experience. In the twenty five plus years that I, and the many others whom I've trained, have conducted this ceremony, the results are predictably the same.
The Dream Helper Ceremony demonstrates the principle of the "intuitive heart": Out of a compassionate connection, we intuitively find the other person within our own experience. Here is a natural expression of the spirituality of oneness. It is expressed in individual terms and it is healing. It's also an experience we can have without the necessity of going to sleep to dream.
My research discovered that we naturally have a way of sharing that can be quite intuitive. I've formalized it as a "ritual of discovery," although it is something some people do quite spontaneously when wanting to help another person. I call the ritual "in my experience." Suppose one person is facing a dilemma, but doesn't yet reveal what it is. A second person volunteers to be helpful to the first person. This "consultant" enters a relaxed frame of mind, and invites intuition by allowing a personal memory from a past experience to spontaneously come to mind, trusting that it will be a memory that will prove useful to the client's concern. It is somewhat akin to performing a "memory divination," allowing the apparently randomly retrieved memory to serve as the synchronistic pointer. The consultant describes aloud this memory to the client, as if telling a story, and finally ponders aloud what wisdom this experience has to offer, as if the memory were a metaphoric teaching allegory.
Here's an example, where I had the opportunity to give suport to a woman I didn't know. As I felt a heart connection with her, I recalled a time when I was mowing the lawn as a teenager. My mom was there, relaxing on the patio. I missed a patch of grass and as I went back to cut that missed patch I looked up to see if Mom had noticed my error. I described this memory to my partner, then explored aloud its meaning. I noted that I was concerned about my mother's approval and not arousing her criticism. As I sought for higher guidance concerning this memory, I realized I had often tried to make my mother happy to alleviate her depression, which created in me habits I'd have to unlearn in later life. The woman then revealed that her focus had been a concern whether therapy would help her with her relationship with her mother. She explained that her own son was showing some disquieting symptoms that reminded her of herself and her relationship with her own mother. She said my use of the word "approval" hit the nail on the head. She felt that my realization about the motivation for approval being to improve mother's disposition was a crucial insight for her to apply in her own situation.
My story is not unique. I have collected numerous stories from people who have experienced surprising insights and intuitive connections when sharing in this way. It proves we have an uncanny ability to come up with healing stories from our own experience that profoundly touch someone we care to help. We have much in common and our experiences are potentially helpful to each other. Our intuition naturally helps us find these connections. Here intuition and intimacy show their inherent relationship and how their union can be healing.
Experiencing from within ourselves our connection with others is an essential spiritual perspective. We can intellectually affirm our inherent unity, and create moral imperatives expressing that perspective, but it is only through intuition that we can directly experience this unity. Intuitive awareness can thus become a path to spiritual experience.
