I'm a medical intuitive. I do intuitive consultations over the telephone. A person calls and tells me his or her name and age -- nothing more. Then, having never met or even seen the individual in question, I perform a long-distance "reading." I discern both the person's physical condition and the emotional state of his or her life, and explain how the two are linked together. Invariably, after I finish, the clients respond in one of two ways. Some gasp in surprise and say, "How do you do that? I could never do that. I don't have intuition." Others, unimpressed, state flatly, "I already knew that." While they did know it, intuitively, they didn't believe admit or express it until I, a total stranger, expressed it to them in impersonal terms.

This is how it usually is. People either don't believe they have intuition, or they don't believe in intuition at all. They therefore don't trust or won't recognize the intuition that's through their bodies, throughout lives. I'm frequently asked whether I "really believe there's such a thing as intuition." Asking me that question is like asking me if I believe in Vitamin C, or whether I trust that there's a Hawaii. I've never been to Hawaii. Nor do I know specifically how Vitamin C works. But I trust that they exist. As for intuition, I don't just believe it exists. I know it does. And contrary to the prevailing myth, it doesn't exist exclusively among a small band of individuals who possess some sort of extraordinary, God-given powers. Intuition is just another sense, like seeing or feeling or hearing. Moreover, it's a sense we all share. We are all intuitive.

I admit that accepting and acting on the presence and working of intuition in your life can involve a leap of faith, the way we all have to take it on faith that Neil Armstrong and other astronauts truly walked on the moon. It requires a suspension of your natural disbelief. Many people, perhaps most, have to go through the act of intuiting and experience the amazing sensation involved before they can begin to implement intuition in their lives. Yet learning to decipher your own unique language of intuition can help you immeasurably in creating a happier, healthier life and a healthier body. For intuition is precisely that: another, unique language created by the brain, and the body, to help us gain insight into and understanding of our pasts and to provide solutions for the future and help us create stronger, more pleasurable lives.

This is what this book will reveal to you: If you have a brain and a body, if you have memories, if you sleep at night (or any other time), then, by definition, you have to be, you are, intuitive. And, most importantly, you can use your intuition to make your body healthier and your life more pleasurable.

When something significant happens to us in our lives, the emotionally charged experience gets encoded in the brain. We may not even know the true significance of this experience, yet it, and other emotionally charged memories, will affect everything we do in the future, from whom we choose for companionship to what we do for a living. By reclaiming the memories stored in our brains, we can understand rationally how the past continually influences our conscious minds and our everyday actions and realities.

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We have other memories besides those in our brains. Memories and experiences and the emotions associated with them are also encoded systematically in all the tissues and organs of our bodies. These memories and emotions speak to us not via the rational processes of the brain, but by means of symptoms and disease in our bodily organs. A substantial number of scientific studies have indicated that certain emotional and psychological patterns are associated with diseases in specific organs; other studies support the link between specific memories and emotions and certain organ-specific diseases, such as breast cancer, coronary heart disease and Parkinson's disease.

Our rational minds find it difficult to understand how painful memories and experiences can create distress and disease in our lives. Traditional or even alternative medical approaches and psychotherapy can't always help people who are ill or in pain. The key to healing lies in the unconscious. If we can become aware of the memories stored in our bodies and bring them to mind, we can gain a different, non-rational understanding of how the past influences the present and our conscious minds and actions.

We can do it if we learn to tap into what I call the intuition network, to help us envision and create healthier lives, instead of allowing old memories and patterns of behavior to continue recreating painful experiences.

I wish I could say that I learned the connection between memories, dreams, intuition and healing in a college course, or, better yet, through divine inspiration. As fate would have it, however, I had to reach an understanding of this connection the way I believe many, if not most, people do -- through illness.

I've always been intuitive, but I haven't always wanted to be. My first recollection of possessing any intuitive skill reaches back to my early childhood. Each evening after dinner, my father would go over the arithmetic tables with my older sister, who was having a lot of difficulty with them. As my father drilled her in addition, subtraction and multiplication, she repeatedly came up with the wrong answers. I was only five at the time, but listening in, I would intuitively blurt out the correct answers right behind my sister's incorrect ones. My father would look at me in shock (my sister would mostly look peeved) and ask me how I knew what the right answers were. I was just "guessing," I would reply. The expression of disbelief on his face unsettled me; soon enough, I began to equate "guessing" with disapproval. My parents were more inclined to chalk my remarkable ability up to brains, which, I quickly realized, they considered far preferable.

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So from my earliest days, the message I received -- and I believe it's the message most of us receive -- is that intuition was bad, while intelligence was good. Intuition is suspected; intelligence is accepted.