Without intuition, magick can be a lot of guesswork. You have to guess what ritual to use, guess whether it’s working, and guess what the magick’s trying to tell you. If you learn to hone your intuition, everything becomes clear.
If you don’t know how to trust your intuition, how to read signs and sense omens, you can feel left in the dark. You are not alone. Intuition can be elusive, but it doesn’t have to be.
Where is the feeling?
A few years after I started out in magick, I was guided by somebody older and wiser, and I was led through a fairly complex ritual. After that, I was told to trust my intuition. Cool, no problem. Except I didn’t really know what that meant. I had a lot of fear that it was going to go wrong. Was that my intuition or was that just fear? I didn’t really feel anything else, so how could I trust my guts? After a few puzzled hours, I realised I didn’t have a clue how to trust my intuition. I wasn’t even sure what intuition was.
Was intuition the same as a guess, a hunch, a gut feeling, or something else? If I was looking for signs and omens, what was I actually looking for? I’d asked for angelic guidance for my next big career move, and the idea was that I’d be given the answer through intuition, or a sign or omen. It might even come to me in a dream.
If you’ve read any of our books, this probably sounds familiar to you. All the time we say answers might come in dreams, through a feeling that occurs to you out of nowhere, or through signs and omens that reveal an answer to you.
What should you feel?
What exactly are you meant to feel when you’re intuitive? What counts as an omen or a sign, and how can you tell what’s worth noting?
There are several easy ways to solve this mini-mystery, and mostly it’s about being open to seeing what’s there, and trusting that messages can be delivered in the most unusual ways.
You might already use your intuition all the time without realising it. When you’re thinking about buying a house, you get a feeling it’s not right. On paper it looks great, but something tells you no, move on. It can happen with jobs, partners or any area of life. This is intuition and if you already find you live this way, you can keep going.
The only thing to watch out for is too much fear. If you get a hunch or intuition about danger, you should trust it, but if you find that your intuition is always telling you not to do something, to take fewer risks, or to back away from opportunities, then it may not be intuition at all. That might be fear parading as intuition.
How can you tell the difference? If you trust those hunches, and they lead to things working out in a better way, that’s intuition. If the feelings always feel like they make you avoid something, then that’s plain old fear. Intuition opens you up to possibility, and sometimes warns you of real dangers, but overall it leads you to a bigger life.
When there’s no vibe
I’ve said if you’re already cool with intuition, all’s well, but the point of this post is to offer guidance if you never have those feelings, if you never get a hunch or a vibe or a sense of how something is going to work out. What do you do if this all seems too weird and mysterious?
All you need to do is be aware when a thought or idea has a feeling of significance. The key is that feeling of shivering strangeness or a slight recognition. When you get that feeling, or your own version of that, you know that the thought or sign is genuine intuition, or an omen being revealed to you. Without that feeling, it might be a coincidence. Look for the feeling of recognition, strangeness or a slight unreality in the moment.
Intuition can be as simple as a gut feeling, but more often when it comes to magick, it’s a feeling that comes with a hint of the strange or significant, something that urges you not to ignore it.
The more open you are to the world, looking at what is around you, the more likely you are to get these feelings. (Get your head out of your phone and see the world. There’s nothing more powerful than experience of your actual reality, rather than the virtual reality that fights for your attention!)
Signs and Omens
Signs and omens don’t appear to everybody, but you should be open to possibility. Imagine you’re about to take a new position at a glass factory, and on the drive home from your final interview you see three buildings with their windows smashed out, and glass all across the road. Is this a sign? If you dream about being cut by shards of glass, is it normal or something magickal? What matters is how you feel about it. A sign or omen can work both ways. Smashed glass might be an indication that you belong in the glass industry, and you’re there to make sure things go well to avoid everything falling apart. Or if you feel that every shattered window you see is a warning, then it’s a sign to back off. Notice how you feel, and trust that feeling.
There are so many moments that can give you a jolt of intuition or a sign. The expression on a stranger’s face might give you a feeling about your own problem. Or it may be that a pattern of small events alerts you to a message. The more you see of the ordinary world, the more likely you are to see a magickal sign that’s been laid out for you. The more you trust these signs, the more accurate and useful they become.
When I was driving to work on a contracted project that I felt unsure about, I drove past one of those roadside memorials (where there had been a fatal road accident), and there were flowers and a cross with my name, and the words Rest In Peace. It could have been a coincidence, but my reaction was deep. I knew it was a sign telling me that this project would pretty much kill me. But I laughed it off because right then, I wanted the money. I pretended it was a silly coincidence. But you know what, that job was truly terrible, and I was overworked and manipulated to the point where it almost killed me. I wish I’d trusted that sign and turned around.
Is everything magickal?
You can’t think that every sign you see means something. You might see a hundred road signs a day saying Stop, Turn Back, Wrong Way and if you interpret them all as magickal signs, you’re never going to make much progress in life. So how do you tell it’s an actual sign that you should take seriously? Your feelings are the guide. If it stirs something in you, like it did with me, it’s that feeling that counts.
And the word ‘omen’ is really another word for a ‘sign’, but some people would say an omen is something more visual or strange. After a ritual, you might find that you always see a flock of crows, for example, and for some reason it feels quite eerie and magickal. This is a common one. Omens like this are usually an omen of magick itself; the magick is showing that you’re being heard. But it might have a more personal meaning to you. A personal interpretation is always more important and valid than one you’ll find in a book (or blog post). Again, trust your feelings.
Omens and signs can be really weird at times, with you hearing a voice whispered in your ear, or having somebody say out loud the answer you were expecting. Imagine you’re planning a trip to Canada for work, and you’re at a party, and suddenly you get this shivery feeling and somebody next to you who’s not even talking to you says, ‘Don’t go to Canada. It will not work out.’ You’d get a feeling about that! That story’s not made up. It happened to me, and I took it seriously and changed my plans because of the creepy feeling I got immediately before she said those words. If I hadn’t had that feeling, I’d have laughed and carried on. As it turned out, cancelling that trip was a hugely significant and positive career choice for me at that time.
Opening up
It’s all about being open to the world, seeing it as a canvas where messages can be painted, sculpted, and sung in the most unlikely ways.
You can look actively. I sometimes go for a walk, asking the angels to give me a sign while I’m on my walk. That’s Damon Brand’s technique, and sometimes it’s brilliant. I see what I need to see. It doesn’t have to be a walk. You can sit looking at a busy street, and decide this is when you will see a sign that is meaningful. It can work. But the most foolproof method I’ve found is to avoid pushing for a result when you choose, and allow it to come whenever. Then you remain aware, open to the world but not actually looking for signs, not forcing them, not demanding something before sundown. When you stay alert like that, you see the signs, you get the feeling and intuition flows into your life.
If you’re prone to fear though, and if you worry that magick is dangerously supernatural, be wary of reading too much into the unusual. If you find things in your house have moved, or there are a few creaks and groans at night, don’t freak out and assume all the forces of magick have turned on you. Usually this is a good sign that reality has been softened up, made loose and changeable, so that the changes you desire are more than possible. Not every strange thing is a sign or omen.
Magick doesn’t always rely on intuition, but after performing a ritual, the spirits you’ve worked with often want to give you knowledge and insight into the situation. As well as helping you obtain what you want, they offer a wider knowledge that can guide your future choices. You might notice novel or intriguing thoughts and feelings, and if they feel like magick you can trust them. This is a good way to encourage this sort of contact. If you close down to it, and assume it’s a stray thought, the contact is less likely. What you use in magick becomes more useful.
Finding the right magick
One time when intuition is most important is when choosing your magick, when knowing what it is you really want, and what kind of magick to use. If you’re stuck, and can’t decide what you want, give yourself some space. You can use Contemplation Magick, as found in Zanna’s book The 72 Sigils of Power, to help you know what you want. Or you could just go for a walk, not looking for any answers, but knowing that answers may come.
In time, as you practice and trust, you get better at knowing what you want, what magick to use, and reading the signs that guide you in the days following a ritual. All it takes is being open, and when you get that slight tingle of the strange, knowing that this is a message you should take note of. It might take practice, but in time, it becomes easy and enjoyable. When you get used to this, it can be an exhilarating part of magick. And everything becomes easier.
– Adam Blackthorne
Damon Brand’s Archangel book will be available in January, so keep your eyes out for that. Before then, if you haven’t read it yet, check out our most successful book, Words of Power. It’s been used by thousands of people for many years to get fast results.
Three recent reviews from Amazon, posted here under Fair Use provisions.
‘Everything I have tried from this book has had measurable results.’
‘Simple yet not shallow, a great read. I did several rituals, most of them brought the results I needed.’
‘Incredible results. I used the Obtain Any Desire and End Bad Luck chapters and the next day obtained two tangible results. I passed a test which I was very nervous about and also found a missing pet! I was so happy that day!’
