How to cultivate your intuition to connect with your purpose
The darkness feels like I’m walking in a black tunnel in the underworld except I’m on a road next to the ocean in Pahoa, Hawaii, in 2017 near an off-the-beaten-path retreat center called Kalani, which means “the sky, or the heavens”.
When I go for my usual morning run, it’s so dark that I can hardly see my hands move side to side. I feel the emptiness all around me, and the prayer I’ve asked the island of Hawaii only 30 minutes ago seems to weigh on my mind. A few days earlier, a friendly 60-something lawyer going through a break-up named Rachel who I had befriended at the retreat, jokingly told me that if you pray to the Island God of Hawaii, Pele, she will grant you your wishes. I find out later that prayer or “setting intention”, is one of the key tools to manifest the life that you want.
It had been over a decade since I prayed and asked for guidance. I had never been on a retreat before, and I’m not sure if it was Stewart Blackburn, a Hawaiian shaman, who created such a comfortable container and lectured about the joy of hedonism, or if it was the beauty and grace of Hawaii itself, but in that moment, I felt ready to give up my disbelief and decided to pray.
“I need your help, please tell me what to do. What am I meant to do with my life?, I sobbed into the volcanic ash as the waves crashed against me. As I cried, I felt the wind pick up, and I stared at the dark sky, noticing the beginning of dawn, a new day. It almost felt like I was having a two-way conversation with nature. Pele, it seemed, was responding back to me.
In my earlier years, I felt religion was used to control me, and I took a hard left from the world of the spirit, and asserted myself as a devout Atheist. I realize now that I went from one polarity to another, and found myself lost in a world devoid of meaning or the sacred. My orthodoxy for religion was redistributed into orthodoxy for no religion. In that exchange, I had no choice but to view myself from the lens of a mechanistic zero-sum game world. In that exchange, there was no room left for the sacred.
I don’t know if it was the anonymity that I felt that day when I decided to pray. And honestly, it felt so good to pray and to offer up my problems to another. Carrying the burden of my problems weighed heavily on me, and it felt like an unnecessary burden as I laid them carefully in spoken word to Pele off the coast of The Big Island.
After I prayed near the ocean rocks and wiped my tears away, I walked back to the street and continued to run through the darkness. Suddenly, a flash of intuitive insight came to me, almost an ethereal presence that felt like myself. When people asked me later what this felt like, I can only describe it as myself but as a clean slate, wiped from my factory settings of human experiences and free of drama or history.
“Take two steps to the left” is what this clean slate of me said. I was listening to music on my earpods, so I felt confused by the message. Was this a thought? It seemed strange to move two steps to the left which placed me in the middle of the street by the yellow lines that separate the right and left side on an empty road. I felt an impulse to trust it, even though I thought nothing of it.
About 30 seconds later, a giant truck made an abrupt turn left from a road on the left, and the wind it generated from the turn was about a millimeter from my arm. The driver, an elderly woman, immediately stopped the truck, and screamed at me “Oh my goodness! I didn’t see you at all, I would have driven right into you!”. She too was overcome with the sacredness of this fortunate turn of events, and took a moment to cry, feeling the adrenaline of what could have been.
I stood there. Dumbfounded, bewildered and shook. Every part of my mind told me that this was pure luck or coincidence. Yet, deep down, in my heart, I knew that this insight did not come from the mind. It came from a place of the formless and the invisible world, the world of mystery and mysticism. It was so illogical that I could not go back to my ordinary life after that.
The great philosopher Aristotle said that there were only 5 senses - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell but there are in fact - far more than just these 5 senses. And these are important to understand intuition. According to Dr. Francesca McCartney who has a PhD in Intuitive Medicine — there are close to 21 extrasensory intuitive senses.
I later learned that what I experienced was called “clairaudience”.
This event would catalyze the most profound quest of studying with the masters of intuition and intention, prompting me to take workshops, and read over 300 books in this world. I would later devote 18 months to earning a master certificate in Intuition Medicine at one of the leading schools of intuition in the United States.
I started to experiment by using both logic and intuition and took a number of different modalities to build my own new creative life.
After I started to combine my knowledge of intuition with my practical and logical mind, I went from managing one career that was not fulfilling to operating as if I cloned five versions of myself, creating multiple careers that allowed me to express my full self, from film, to podcasting to becoming an author and more.
Through a series of synchronistic events, I started a podcast called Gateways to Awakening to build a bridge between the world of western ideals of form and business with the world of the east of intuition, inspiration, mysticism and intention. I’ve spoken with intuitive masters like Brenda Dunn, the former manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR), to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to Laura Day, Penney Pearce.
Let me rewind.
For as long as I can remember after I moved to NYC from college, I asserted myself as a devout Atheist, and scoffed at any types of spiritual ideas, gods, demigods, or religions. I grew up in the midwest as a child of immigrants, attended both Islamic and Catholic school, and at the age of 18 took a hard left from any indoctrination and later spent over 10 years in New York, where I chased fun, excitement, and the material things in life, thinking that perhaps my status would ensure I would be safe, and perhaps enough.
In 2016, I finally had a reckoning. On the outside, my life looked great. Yet, I was privately suffering from many months of sleepless nights. I often had this recurring nightmare for years but it started when I was a kid.
I’m swimming in a dark and vast ocean during the middle of the night. Not even a single star shines in the sky. The eerie full moon glistens its reflection on the water, and the sharks and humpback whales are circling all around me, speaking the language of the creatures that live under the water. I hear the noises they make and feel their magnitude. I shake with fear at the thought of swimming so far into the infinite unknown ahead of me, but I force myself to keep moving one arm after another, while I accidentally gulp in the salty ocean water as I gasp for air.
My insomnia got so bad that after almost three weeks of little to no sleep, I woke up sweating profusely, and the sweat would follow me as I walked into my corporate office in San Francisco. Some of my coworkers started to ask me if my health was okay.
I didn’t want to try pharmaceutical drugs, so my friend Shruti recommended that I try the Japanese healing modality, Reiki. At that point, even though I detested these “woo-woo” modalities, I knew I was in trouble and needed help, and was willing to try anything.
I’m not sure what happened after my first Reiki experience, but it was a gateway into a world of synchronicities, and experiences that I was never open to before. On the journey, I wondered privately if I had lost my mind, and if I was making up my intuitive messages, but the synchronicities and messages became so prolific, that I knew I had not lost my mind. Many people started to ask me how it was possible to create and produce so many new artistic endeavors, especially since it all happened in such a short period of time?
I realized soon on the journey that I had been asleep for most of my waking life, and that my experience of being human was far greater and more expansive than I could ever imagine.
Looking back on my journey, I realized that it wasn’t just my experience in Hawaii but it was a series of many experiences that catalyzed my desire to investigate and understand the intuitive and invisible world.
For most of my life, I walked around barely awake to the magnificence of my own existence. I often thought that everything I needed to be happy was outside of me, and I would look to the outside world to guide my inner world. It took me decades to realize that everything I did, from getting into relationships to seeking validation at work, and traveling the world were all just bids to find a way to connect to myself more deeply.
I often wondered at what point in my life did I lose my connection with my inner world, the world of my inner voice, and inner knowing. With all the noise coming from the media, our cultural upbringing and friends and family, it felt difficult and near impossible to discern which voice was truly my own versus a borrowed narrative. I wondered where my ideas came from, and whether they felt true for me, or if it was something fed to me by the cultural hypnosis.
Religion formed a large construct of my world when I was younger, and while I thought some of the underlying messages were poetic and beautiful, I often felt like the dogmatic voices would continue to condemn me later in life, even for the most basic and natural human impulses. Instead of creating a strong relationship of trust with myself, and discerning the polarities of my life through my inner wisdom and experience, I was often followed by the noise of the collective thoughts that told me that I was not “enough”. I was not good enough, I was not smart enough, thin enough, white enough.
Even more frustrating, when I was growing up in the 80’s, I never saw women of color in positions of power, and as a first generation Iraqi-American, an inferiority complex would follow me. And while I used my minority status to catalyze my determination for external success, I paid a huge price when it came to my emotional world and the world of the shadow. It completely obstructed my contact with my inner-knowing.
One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned about intuition is about the meaning of time. Before, I would often spend most of my days in the past, or in the future, and found it near impossible to sit in the present moment, unless I was stimulated by something or someone. I remember carrying my calendar around with me during my formative years because I was obsessed with “finishing” things, and “getting to the end of things”. I felt constricted by time, and I had a desire to accomplish a lot, and frankly, be someplace else.
What I know about time now is that it is a distortion, and we can “hack time”. There are some days that I am guided entirely by my intuitive world through inspired action, and I can accomplish in 1 day what used to take me 5–6 weeks.
The most important principle to master is getting present. In the present moment is where the juiciness of life exists. In the present moment, we have full control and power over the steering wheel of our journey, and can direct our awareness and energy like a magician with his/her wand.
As my guest Thornton Streeter says, all the great sages and mystics know about tapping into the world of presence and “wave” over the world of “form” in order to access our deepest and most authentic selves. This is how we create and manage our energy and not our time — and create our own layer of reality.
If you’d like to learn more about how to develop your intuition and shift your life, I offer a specific 5-week program 2 times a year. You can sign up for the waiting list here.
You can listen to my podcast, Gateways to Awakening, now in the top 2% of all podcasts listened to globally, where I interview some of the leading experts on intuition, consciousness, emotional intelligence and more.
