When I worked with Doreen Virtue, she talked a lot about the four ‘clairs’ – clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance. Even then, ten years ago when I edited her column in Woman’s World, these labels struck me as … off, slightly sideways of what intuition actually felt like to me.

For me, intuition wasn’t four things. It was a deep flow which I dipped into in different ways. Sometimes, I sensed things with my body. Sometimes, I received a flow of images in my mind’s eye. Other times, I heard a message in a song or (often as I woke from sleep) a gentle whisper in my right ear.

When Doreen (and others) broke intuition into parts and explained each part back to me, it was not intuition – it was something else: a commodity, to be studied, purchased, pursued.

Also, naming it into four parts tended to make me feel separate from it – taking me (and perhaps you) out of the natural blended flow of intuitive experience into my head, wondering, which of my ‘four clairs’ is more powerful? Which do I need to develop?

This didn’t make sense because I knew that intuition was a part of me like my right hand, my left ear, my face. It was… mine.

Years earlier, when I was studying psychology, I had the same instinctive objection when professors talked about ego, id, superego. Anything that breaks the mind into pieces and labels the parts creates opposition. Now there is an ‘other’ to fight with, repress or kill. This becomes a problem when the opponent is a part of our own consciousness, like the ego which, we are often told, needs to be trained, subordinated, dissolved.

There was another way that those ‘four clairs’ made me uncomfortable. When people used them to claim special powers, as in, “Oh, I’m claircognizant so I just know things… about a situation, about the world, about you.”

Ick! Ewww… Get out of my energy, please! (Same is true of anyone claiming to have transcended the ego.)

This isn’t spiritual mastery and it isn’t intuition – it’s a grab for power, for a spiritual ‘brand’ to elevate one person over another (so that she or he can sell you things).

Genuine intuition, native to all of us, has nothing to sell. It offers everything. It welcomes everything.

Genuine intuition encircles, it embraces. It doesn’t make me (or you) special – it nestles me (and you) into the world and holds us there, safely and gently.

Intuition blesses everything.

This is why I do all I can to coax those ‘four clairs’ together.

This is why we want to bring all the fragmented pieces of you (and me) into a wholenes, ONE braided flow. A flow that can hold you as you dip into your own intuitive gifts. A flow that loves you (all the parts and pieces of you) just as you are.

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