Feeling disconnected from your true self? I’ve been there too. This blog post shares my journey of reclaiming my intuitive gifts and how you can do the same.
Here’s what we’re covering in this post:
- Understanding the journey to reclaiming your intuitive gifts
- The High Achiever’s Trifecta and how it impacts us
- Steps to own your intuitive gifts
- My proven 3-Step Rediscovery Process
I invite you to continue reading to learn more and check out the associated video for this blog.
In August 2019, I found myself back in school at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, reconnecting with my intuition and Spirit Guide team. Let’s get started! Here’s how to reclaim your intuitive gifts.
Understanding the Journey to Reclaiming Your Intuitive Gifts
I sat on the ground in a slingback chair in a circle of women in the dimly lit room. I knew I was in the right place. I felt empowered and afraid. It was August 2019, and I was back in school, where I hadn’t been in over ten years. And this time around it was nothing like electrical engineering.
It was my first twenty-hour weekend in the Intuitive Guidance course, the first of five, at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts. An accredited healing arts college that teaches conscious holistic wellness, only fifteen minutes from my home. What I discovered in that class changed my life forever. In that classroom, I reconnected with my intuition and Spirit Guide team, and learned how to be an Intuitive Guide for others.
In 2019, Intuitive Guide was last on the list of the roles I carried, with more prominent ones like mom, wife, sister, daughter, friend, landlord, and high-achieving employee — that one seemed to top the list. It was hard to decipher what role I wanted to play because I felt caught up in what others wanted me to do, or the roles I had learned I needed to play.
The guilt, self-criticism, fear, and overwhelm were starting to quiet, and even though they would sometimes rise to the surface, I could still take the next step in faith as an investment in my education and personal development. Yet, even with the training, I didn’t step out and call myself an Intuitive Guide. It was too risky.
At that time, I had spent over a decade in corporate America, living the life society told me would make me happy, only to discover it disconnected me from myself and my joy. As I continued my spiritual awakening and healing journey, I had no doubt I was on the right path spending countless hours in dozens of healing modalities. Even so, there was still a part of me that was scared.
This part of me feared being an outcast; she didn’t want to be rejected or alone. So while my Soul patiently guided me along my path, parts of me knew: yes, this is it. Yet, another part of me was scared to be her true authentic ‘Self’ in the world.
Then I had the most liberating realization: There is no wrong path or timeline to reconnect, rediscover, or reclaim your Intuitive Gifts.
Reclaiming your Intuitive Gifts is reclaiming your Self. There is no wrong path or right path, there is only the path that is best for your Soul.
Our Intuitive Gifts are the gifts that come so effortlessly to us that we may miss them. They are typically discovered in our most trying times and help us get through the difficulties. We sense a flow, or time passes swiftly when we use our gifts. It’s what we love to do, what we dream to do every day. These gifts light us up, or rather brighten the light that we already are. Our Intuitive Gifts have been given to us to share in this world to bring more love, light, and healing.
The High Achiever’s Trifecta and How It Impacts Us
What Keeps Us From Owning Our Intuitive Gifts:
So what keeps us from stepping out and standing in our power by using our Intuitive Gifts?
Timing – We have a timeline, an agenda, of how we want things to go. Yet, we must remember that when we push based on what we think we’re supposed to be doing, we don’t fully experience what the Universe has in store for us in Divine Timing. Who’s to say we are not stepping out at this moment? Who’s to say we are not standing in our power? I believe all is divine. I followed the path I was called to, even though it was slower than my mind wanted. Was it possible to go faster? Yes. Yet, if I had started sooner, I would have completed only some of my healing work. And what I couldn’t see at the beginning of my healing journey was that Spirit called me to be an Intuitive Energy Healer; a role that never even crossed my mind before 2020. To authentically serve with my intuitive gifts, my healing journey was imperative.
The High Achiever’s Trifecta makes timing seem like it needs to be faster. The High Achiever’s Trifecta is the belief that who we are is what we achieve. It keeps us overwhelmed and overworked, with self-doubt, self-criticism, guilt, and shame. It consists of the 3Ps and the 3Bs.
The 3Ps are how the world sees us. You can view the 3Ps as the external world.
- People-Pleasing keeps us in accomplishment-mode for others so they will see our value, but the value we can’t yet see is the one within ourselves. Overgiving typically leads to irritation, resentment, and guilt.
- Perfectionism keeps us searching for the impossible, believing that we will finally be loved if we only look, act, talk, or perform a certain way. Never feeling enough leads to self-criticism, self-doubt, and anxiety.
- Productivity is the high achiever’s kryptonite. We learned that worth and value come from what we produce. This leads to a lack of rest, a racing mind, and non-stop go, go, go. When life is focused on what we do and how we do it, not who we are and what gifts we bring to the world, we concentrate on doing instead of being — missing ourselves in the process.
The 3Bs are what we do internally that perpetuate the cycle of the 3Ps. You can view the 3Bs as the inner world.
- Boundaries. We struggle with boundaries because we desire to be loved and believe that if we do for others, we will receive that same love. We often struggle to prioritize our wants or needs, which leads to a lack of self-care, or neglecting our tasks or other important things. The world of boundaries is littered with feelings of guilt, shame, resentment, and fear of abandonment which keeps us in the cycle.
- Betrayal. With this B, I’m not talking about betraying others, I’m talking about betraying ourselves. When we believe that who we are is what we do, then we will inherently choose what we do daily, not why. As we continuously deny ourselves, we develop a deep form of self-criticism and a lack of self-trust. Betrayal is when we believe we need to neglect ourselves for others to love us.
- Burnout is the result of our belief that our worth is based on what we accomplish. Burnout happens when we push ourselves to conform to what the world needs from us and do not understand our true value and worth. Burnout is experienced with overwhelming thoughts, emotions, and exhaustion. It is a deep rooted fear that who we are is unworthy.
Unconsciously, we live in this cycle because we focus on the 3Ps (how the world sees us) and neglect the 3Bs (how it impacts us internally).
This is how the cycle shows up in life:
The Cycle – Our Soul is always calling us to remember the true essence of who we are and to remember our Intuitive Gifts. Yet, we can get stuck in the cycle, which looks like this…
- Soul’s Calling: We hear the call of our Soul to show up differently in the world, yet we…
- Get Stuck In The Demands Of The World: We typically struggle with the High Achievers Trifecta when we feel the call of our Soul for something more significant. As the pressure and demands of the world are so great, inner turmoil can become the norm. Consistently we have listened to the world’s demands and ignored our true heart’s desires which makes us…
- Feel Out of Alignment: Feelings of anger, anxiousness, irritation, frustration, and resentment rise to the surface in our relationships, in our work, and our relationship with ourselves. To avoid experiencing “bad” feelings, we typically…
- Avoid and Push to Achieve: We push ourselves to achieve more and fall back into old self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-sabotage cycles. We do what we know — the work, the achievement, the accomplishments. To get the praises, the raises, and the love we so genuinely desire.
This cycle causes inner conflict and turmoil because we genuinely desire to follow the call of our Soul. It’s time for a shift.
How to Own Your Intuitive Gifts
The key to owning your gifts is to heal the cycle of abandoning your Soul. To heal the cycle we must see what’s under it. When we can heal from the inside out, we more confidently step out of the cycle and into our Intuitive Gifts.
Under all the work you keep pushing yourself to do, are buried emotions just waiting to burst out. The parts of you that want love. As a result of ignoring your Soul’s call for so long, overwhelming thoughts and feelings let you know when you’re out of alignment. This is the sign of coming back into alignment: into a home right within you.
In the world of Spirit things are simple.
Coming into alignment and shifting your life is simple, it’s choosing yourself. However, choosing yourself can be difficult because we have been conditioned to choose the world over ourselves and have spent a lifetime or more doing just that.
And when we choose ourselves old stories of unworthiness, value, guilt, and fear come up.
Here I will gently guide you through my proven 3-Step Rediscovery Process to own your Intuitive Gifts. The 3-Step Rediscovery Process opens space inside you for more love, and allows you to reconnect to who you truly are – which naturally exposes your gifts. It helps remove the barriers and blocks around your heart, so you can finally feel more love, acceptance, and peace in stepping out with your Intuitive Gifts.
3-Step Rediscovery Process
We must become aware of the cycles that prevent us from owning our Intuitive Gifts. So let’s talk about what’s underneath the cycle.
Step 1: Realize – Become Aware
The first step is to realize that you are on a different path; you wouldn’t be reading this blog otherwise. Next is to become aware of when you choose the world’s demands rather than your heart’s. In Step 1, we look at why we desire to answer the call of our Soul and why we choose not to.
Soul’s Calling: When we were young, we could feel the freedom, aliveness, and unconditional love that our Soul filled us with. This feeling was incredible, and it’s all we desired, to be free. Yet, most of us didn’t learn how to listen to the innate wisdom within. Instead, we were taught to be whom others wanted us to be. And in doing so, we would…
Get Stuck In The Demands Of The World: Many learned that who we are is based on what we achieve, and our worth and value depend on what we produce. We continue to push to succeed because that is when we received love as a child, which is all we ever wanted.
As a result of continuously following the world’s demands, many women become:
- High Achievers
- Controlling
- A-Type
- Hyper-vigilant
- Perfectionists
- People-Pleasers
- The “good girl.”
When we live by the demands of the world — by the roles listed above, or roles others have created for us — we feel stuck. Living by the world’s demands disconnects us from our intuitive gifts. To live in alignment with our Soul and flourish in our Intuitive Gifts, we must understand what’s driving these roles and keeping us stuck in the cycle.
It’s imperative to bring awareness to when we stopped choosing ourselves and started picking the world, and identify the repercussions this has had on our lives. This process will help us identify what keeps us from stepping into the world and using our Intuitive Gifts.
To Start Owning Your Intuitive Gifts, you need to understand if these roles serve you.
- What roles do you play today?
- Which roles keep you from being the most authentic version of yourself?
- Whom did you have to be as a child to receive love, and what role did this create?
- What roles are no longer serving you?
- What roles do you want to shift/change?
Step 2: Reconnect – Honor and Accept
We must honor the cycle. My gifts were not harnessed in my home as feelings were seen as a weakness. “Cry and I’ll give you something to cry about” was a common rhetoric. As a result, I often felt misunderstood and didn’t feel safe being my true self.
This led me to become a logical, analytical, and critical thinker. The A-Type, hardworking, perfectionist, people-pleaser created by living according to the world’s demands helped me excel in corporate and make multiple six figures a year. However, the high achiever in me drove me to workaholism. These roles kept me out of my body and negatively impacted my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. I was no longer me. I was a shell of me with a void within. I felt out of alignment.
Feeling Out of Alignment: As children forced to choose the demands of the world repeatedly, we learned that our wants and needs didn’t matter. Desiring freedom but being repressed by the demands caused overwhelming feelings. When we expressed our emotions, we were typically shamed and reverted to what we knew would get us love. So we would…
Push to Achieve: Focusing on achievements and doing what others want us to do, ignoring the call of our Soul.
To start owning your Intuitive Gifts, you need to understand how the roles have served you.
- How did being a high-achiever (or another role) serve you?
- What have you been able to accomplish because of the roles you have played?
- How does each of the roles you play want to serve and help others?
- If you didn’t have to play these roles, what would be possible for your life?
Step 3: Release: Listen to What You Need, Forgive, and Bring in Unconditional Love
To own our Intuitive Gifts, we need to feel safe being ourselves.
I needed to feel safe being me. I wanted to know that I was loved no matter what. Since I didn’t feel that way as a child, I left my body until I could do the healing work to establish safety.
Our body is the subconscious mind, the intuition. The place I spent most of my life ignoring. My body is where everything I was looking for was hidden.
What’s hidden and what’s whole was within me the whole time. It was the world’s demands that kept me distracted. The patriarchy that kept me looking outside of myself for answers.
My body is where my gifts were hidden. My body waited for me, never wavering. It was the loyal servant to my overwhelmed mind and distant Soul — longing to reconnect. Finally, the divine connection of mind and BODY gave me clearer access to my Soul and my life’s path. My journey reconnected the Divine Feminine (body) and Masculine (mind) within me to the Divinity (Soul) that is me.
To initiate the process of opening to your Intuitive Gifts, you need to reconnect to your intuition: your body. The key here is to develop a relationship with your intuition.
- Find a quiet place to sit and relax. Inhale for the count of four and exhale for the count of four until you can feel your body start to relax. Notice that your eyes, eyebrows, jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, legs, and feet start to relax. Continue breathing.
- To go deeper in this process, ask yourself from this still place, “what does my body need?” It is that simple. You may get a vision (clairvoyance), a knowing (claircognizance), a feeling (clairsentience), or hear a loving, patient, compassionate voice within (clairaudience).
- From this space of compassion, identify who needs to be forgiven for living in these cycles? I often find that the one I need to forgive most is myself. Let the tears flow if they come, and allow yourself the space to be vulnerable.
- In this place of stillness, you can also gain insights into your intuitive gifts. Ask yourself: What makes me the most joyful? What fills up my heart and Soul? What would I love to do every single day of my life? What’s the next step I can take to align with my heart’s desires?
When you complete this process, journal, and write about everything you learned, saw, felt, and experienced. I invite you to do this daily for 2-5 minutes. If you want to own your Intuitive Gifts, you must own the relationship with yourself.
Answering the call of our Soul is freeing and takes courage.
To know who I am, I had to learn and experience who I was not. I had to heal who others told me to be. I had to remember that I am lovable and worthy, just as I am. Knowing this allowed me to forgive intensely and deeply both myself and others.
Realizing that the whole point, the entire experience, was to remember me and the gifts I have brought to this world, I saw it as a process and a journey, not a destination. If I hadn’t gone through the hard times, I wouldn’t have needed healing, or studied healing. The work I now share with others.
Know this: you’re on your life’s path. Sometimes it’s hard, in those times ask yourself: what am I meant to learn? What part of me is showing up for love? How can I use what I am experiencing to help others?
It’s been five years since I sat on the ground in my first Intuitive Guidance course. In a full circle moment, I was asked to teach the Intuitive Guidance and Spiritual Studies program at the college that helped me reveal my Intuitive Gifts. However, my Soul had other plans.
I have chosen to empower conscious, unconventional women to awaken to their Soul’s calling, and create an unapologetically aligned life. I have finally embodied my role as an Intuitive Guide and Energy Healing Practitioner and my role is ever evolving. Now I am studying Spirituality from around the world in a master’s program.
It took a lot to get here and I’m stepping out with an entire group of women to support me. In a community — a space where we can freely be ourselves — we heal, and we feel empowered to stand in our power and serve and share our Intuitive Gifts. I found my tribe and I invite you to find yours. Enjoy owning your Intuitive Gifts!
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