ON INTUITION : Part II

The Conversation Beneath the Conversation

There is what people say. And then there is what is actually being transmitted. Learning to hear both distinctly changed everything about how I work, and how I relate.

Every conversation has two layers.

There is the surface. The words, the tone, the often careful architecture of what someone has decided to present. And then there is what is actually moving through the space between you. The vibration of it. The feeling that arrives in your body before your mind has had time to interpret anything. These two layers are often not the same. In my experience, they are frequently miles apart. The grief behind the cheerful report. The anger beneath the measured explanation. The longing inside the casual question. The silent judgment that pushes through a seemingly sweet acknowledgment. So often we are out of alignment with our own higher self, programmed by the culture we have tried to fit into, and by how we have survived our own wounding. We do this to conform, to be accepted. We developed this capacity when we needed it to survive. It now conceals our brightest truths and our deepest shame.

In relating, we take in the surface layer, the words, with our ears and make sense of it with our minds. The subtle layer, the energy, we read with the same faculty that delivers it, our bodies and our spirit, intuition. In the first post of this series, I wrote about intuition as our most natural resource, the inner knowing that reads the energy of the present moment rather than the story the mind is telling about it. Listening beneath the words is one of the ways we use our intuition in relationship.

I’ve always perceived both simultaneously: the spoken and the transmitted, the performed and the real. These two things can be of the same vibration. When someone is fully embodied, fully alive, present and beyond performance. I have found this to be more rare in my experience. And it was disorienting at times. The words spoken carried one meaning, and the feeling that washed through me said something else. Part of my difficulty in reading the difference initially came from a lack of training. And part of it was that I had long been taught to override my feelings. I was performing too. For a long time, until my late thirties, when I entered deep healing work. I didn’t truly know what to do with the gap between these two layers, because I couldn’t fully see the gap in myself. I had learned, like everyone else, to track the words and set aside what I felt. To be polite. To not make others uncomfortable. But the other layer was always there, arriving whether I acknowledged it or not. A heaviness in the chest when someone claimed to be fine. A brightness in the field around a person who had just made a decision that was right for them, even before they’d said what it was. A particular quality of the energy, a sense of completion, that told me something had just ended, or was about to.

The body receives transmissions the mind hasn’t learned to intercept yet. It knows what is true before the mind realizes there is something to know.

Most people are not aware of the gap between what they are saying and what they are transmitting. This is not dishonesty, at least not usually. It is conditioning, run so deep it has become invisible. We are trained from the very beginning to manage our presentation. To perform competence, composure, certainty. To keep the difficult feelings in the body, below the line of speech, where they can be controlled. Or so we believe. Because the body broadcasts everything. The energy field doesn’t edit. Whatever is actually present, whatever is being carried, suppressed, grieved, feared, desired, radiates, whether we intend it to or not.

The distinction between the way life is performed and the energy beneath it is the difference between the lower self, the ego or ego-mind, and the higher self, or spirit. By spirit, I mean that deeper, truer part of you. Your core essence, your aliveness. Your spirit is connected to the multidimensional reality that extends beyond the tangible third dimension. By ego or ego-mind, or lower self, I mean the part that organizes around protection. It executes your life, and it also compares, anticipates, controls, defends, strategizes. It is the constant thinking or running mind. It’s built on historic inputs and limited to that in its efforts. It’s not bad. It has a job.

When you are in spirit, you are in a higher vibration. And there is more openness, more presence, more ease, more flow, more clarity, more aliveness. So, you are aligned to your higher self and also available for intuition and the greater multidimensional reality we live in. When you are in ego-mind, you are in a lower vibration. It is more boxed into history, what has already been input into the mainframe of the computer. There may be restriction, tension, speed, fear, mental noise, or bracing. And this matters, because intuition can’t come through the defended mind. It comes through a more open field. As a result, intuition is not just about “getting an answer.” It’s also about recognizing the state you are in while you are listening. The ego tries to protect the known. Spirit is willing to meet the truth of the moment.

I feel it. In myself and in others. I have always felt it. It was my intuition doing the reading, long before I had language for it. I have always been able to read core frequency. I just didn’t always know how to decipher it from the very strong messaging and programming of our culture and my own lived conditioning. And the longer I have done this work, the more I understand that this is not a party trick or an eccentricity. It is information. Critical, precise, extraordinarily useful information — if you know how to work with it.

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It is quite possible to work with this, to actually use what is being transmitted rather than simply receive it. But first, you have to clear your own energy field. You can’t see clearly through a dirty window. There is certainly quite a lot of noise these days too. I wrote about this in the first post of this series: the external noise of news, scrolling, and overfull days, and the internal noise of a running mind, fear, and old stories on repeat. Clearing it is an ongoing practice, and it matters just as much in relationship as it does in any decision. You can’t read energy in the field clearly if you yourself are not clear.

Once you clear all distortion from your mind and energy field and step into your higher self, you then need to learn to tune into the vibration with your intuition. To follow what is real rather than what is being presented. To feel into the sensation underneath the words: the constriction, the aliveness, the place where something goes quiet that was loud a moment ago, or loud where it was quiet. The body knows. It is always already reading the room. Then, the practice is learning to trust what it tells you.

This is the work. Not analyzing. Not diagnosing. Listening at a frequency most people have been taught to ignore. Everyone has access to this capacity.

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The second layer of this, the one that is harder to explain, though no less real, is what I think of as spirit-to-spirit communication. The capacity to speak not to the personality of another person, the defended, conditioned, masked self they present to the world, but to their higher self. The part of them that exists behind the fear and the armor and the learned smallness. The part that already knows what is true. This is where I work when I am working with clients. In my connection to my own spirit and then supporting them in connecting with theirs. They can begin to feel what is true for them in the aliveness of their body. With unlimited access to information beyond the mind, they suddenly can see and feel new possibilities arise for themselves.

Here is a little of how it works, so you can begin to feel it for yourself. When someone speaks, I am listening to both layers at once. There are the words, what they believe they are saying. And beneath them, there is what their spirit is asking for. Often it is something very simple. To slow down. To rest. To be seen. To begin again. To go this way instead of that. The ego-mind explains, defends, performs, and protects. The spirit reveals, softens, and opens. When I listen with intuition, I am listening for the spirit, and letting the rest of the conversation be what it is.

The body shows the difference long before the words catch up. The eyes brighten, or they dim a little. The jaw softens, or it sets. The breath drops lower, or it rises up into the chest and holds. The voice opens, or it narrows around something it doesn’t want to say. You feel the energy of aliveness or constraint. None of this is something to analyze or diagnose. I simply notice it, the way you might notice the weather changing. And when it feels right, I reflect it back as gently as I can. Your words are saying one thing, and the energy feels a little different. What’s underneath that? Then I let them be the authority on what resonates. Their own recognition is where the real shift happens. My job isn’t to tell a client what I perceive as their truth. It is, with their permission, to read the field and hold the space and ask the questions that help them open to the voice of spirit, to support them in following their aliveness. My teacher taught me, you can’t coach to story.

None of this is possible if I am tangled up in the other person’s energy. So before I listen to anyone else, I check in with myself. Where is my breath? Am I in my body or up in my head? Am I open, or am I bracing? Because I know what my own baseline feels like, I can sense when something arrives that wasn’t there a moment ago. A tightness in the throat. A heaviness that doesn’t belong to me. And then I can ask a very simple question. Is this mine? If it isn’t, I can let it be information rather than something I carry. I can feel into something without taking it into my body. That is what keeps the reading clear, and it is also what keeps me well. Transference and countertransference in intuitive and healing (and in every relationship) happens. Ethically it is my job to continue my own process and growth to be as clear as possible and constantly be in relationship with my own presence.

Within this container intuition can begin to reset a relationship. So many of the painful loops we find ourselves in with the people we love are really two protective selves talking to each other. The same argument, the same hurt, touching the same tender places again and again. The frequency drops, and both people begin speaking from their history rather than from what is true right now. When I pause, clear my own field, and listen beneath the words, I can often feel what is actually being asked for underneath it all. For myself, first and foremost. So that I don’t abandon myself. Then for the other. Do you see me? Am I safe with you? Do I matter to you? When I respond to that, rather than to the words on the surface, something in the space between us rearranges. In my experience, spirit always moves toward connection, and the ego-mind moves toward separation, toward being right, toward winning. When even one person steps back into their spirit, the whole field has somewhere new to go.

And you cannot force this. Some people are not available to shift in a given moment, and that is theirs to choose. I have learned that I cannot want someone’s peace more than they want it for themselves. What I can do is stay steady, keep my breath slow, and let my presence carry what my words cannot. Sometimes a little humor opens a door that effort never could. Sometimes the kindest thing is to sense that a conversation wants to wait, and to return to it when there is more room for what is true. Our nervous systems are always listening to one another. A steady, open heart is felt, even when nothing is said.

Spirit to spirit communication becomes necessary in particular circumstances. When the ordinary channel is closed. When someone is so deep in their wounding, their reactivity, their ego’s grip that no real conversation can happen at the surface level. When the defenses are too high and the hurt is too raw and whatever you say will be filtered through a layer of pain that will distort it before it reaches them. In those moments, talking harder, or louder, or more carefully, doesn’t help. The ordinary conversation isn’t the one that needs to happen.

And sometimes the person you need to reach has died. The ordinary channel is gone entirely. But the energetic one, the spirit-to-spirit one, remains open. I know this not as a belief but as a direct experience, one I have returned to again and again in my own life and witnessed in the lives of people I work with.

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There is something I have had to learn to do with people I love, when the ordinary conversation has become impossible. I can only describe it as speaking from a different plane of consciousness. Getting out of my own wound first. That part is not optional, and it is not easy. You cannot make contact with your higher self or the higher self of another person while you are fully identified with your own hurt, your own fear, your own need for a particular outcome. The anger has to be metabolized, not bypassed. Actually moved through, not skipped. The judgment has to be set down, often through self-love first and then love for the other. The agenda of what you want them to do, to say, to become has to go entirely. What remains, when all of that has been released, is something quieter and more honest. Something closer to love than to need.

When your higher self becomes embodied, grounded, present, clear, you have access to more than your mind can imagine. You speak with intention and open-heartedness, directed toward the highest self of the other. You hold the space for what is true and the best and highest good for all. You offer it without grasping for it to be received. You trust not only in your own spirit but in that of the other. What is meant to reach them will reach them, in whatever time and form it will. And always with love.

I cannot always measure what happens. I cannot prove it in the way the rational mind would like. What I can tell you is that something shifts. Not always in the way I expected. But something moves. The field between two people changes, even when no ordinary words have been exchanged.

A client came to me stuck in the aftermath of her mother’s death. There were things she had never said. A whole conversation that had lived inside her for years, waiting for a moment that never came. She did not need my permission to have it. She needed to understand that the channel was still open. She needed to know that the person she needed to reach was still, in some real and accessible way, reachable. We worked together to create the space and make the connection from her spirit to the one she lost. As the tender words were spoken, something shifted in the brightness of the room, the heaviness in her shoulders diminished, she sat a little more at ease. That night, she slept through for the first time since the loss.

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I am telling you this because I think many of you already know, in some part of your experience, that this is true. That you have felt the conversation beneath the conversation. That you have sensed something in a room before anyone spoke. That there has been a relationship in your life, living or lost, where the ordinary words were never quite enough, where what needed to be said lived below the surface of what could be said.

You are not imagining it. You are perceiving it.

The question is not whether this layer exists. It does. The question is whether you are willing to learn to work with it. To trust what your body receives, to speak from your higher ground when the ordinary ground is impassable, to understand that some of the most important conversations of your life may never be spoken aloud.

They happen anyway. In the field. In the silence. In the space between what is said and what is true.

If you are holding a conversation that cannot happen at the surface, or if you have spent your life feeling the room in ways you haven’t known what to do with, I’d be glad to sit with you. A Clarity Session is a place to begin.