Abstract: We are all intuitive. The trick is learning how each of our unique intuitive abilities work. In this 4-part series, I’ll discuss the four main intuitive skills—seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing—and include tips and stories about how to recognize and use these skills every day.

LIVING INTUITIVELY: Making Sense of Intuitive Knowing

As we explore our intuitive abilities, we eventually realize that we’ve been using our intuition all along, but often misinterpreting the information we’re getting. It makes sense, then, to learn how our intuition works, so we can make it second nature. This is particularly important in working with the intuitive ability of clair-cognizance, or clair-knowing. In this third article in a four-part series, I’ll focus on the in’s and out’s of intuitive knowing.

Claircognizance: The Intuitive Art of Knowing

Clair-knowing is a tough ability to master—unless you’re thinking too hard about it. That is, we are taught to think in a restrictive scientific way that focuses our thinking on an empirical, linear model. Clair-knowing doesn’t work that way. Instead, you literally know things without any evidence and without following a strictly A to B to C process. Thus, of all the intuitive abilities, clair-knowing is the one that will alert you to an emergency before it’s on top of you. However, the knowing could confuse you because it’s so different from how you learned to think that you could assume you’re making it up. The solution, then, is to learn to identify an instinctive knowing and react to it without stopping to question yourself.

Here’s a dramatic example. One day I was driving up a narrow, winding hillside road in Seattle that had little to no shoulder for an emergency pullout. I was behind a small pickup with had tools in the back. As I looked at the pickup I had no reason to be concerned: it looked well-maintained and the driver was clearly paying attention. Nevertheless, I suddenly knew I had to back up and leave extra room between us. Reacting to that instinctive knowing, I lightly tapped my brakes so the driver behind me knew something was up and I added an extra two car lengths between me and the pickup.

In the next moment a ladder flew off the back of the pickup and landed in the road. If I had not backed up—for no good reason!—my car might have been hit by the ladder or I might have slammed into it.

While I have developed all of my intuitive skills, clair-knowing is my dominant ability, and I’ve learned to trust that instinctive warning that alerts me to something I need to know when there’s no clear evidence that it’s necessary. In this case, I avoided a potentially bad accident by reacting. Was it a bit of precognition, a knowing of what was going to happen? In many cases, I think clair-knowing does involve precognition, which itself is the most common intuitive sense we all share. In a sense, nature abhors a vacuum, and fills it with clair-knowing. 

Mastering Clair-Knowing

Clair-knowing is particularly common in natural leaders, people who were born taking charge and often stepped into careers that required quick thinking in tough circumstances, like the military, police, fire, and emergency medical services. These are the people who can look at a fire, for example, and all the people gathered to help, and immediately focus on who does what and where and efficiently manage the situation—while staying a step ahead of developments.

If you’re someone with clair-knowing, learn to distinguish between actual knowing and storytelling: it’s literally a visceral reaction to a coming event, not fiction. Consider telling yourself to feel a pain in your shoulder or a twinge in your gut when it’s an actual clair-knowing situation. Over time, you won’t need the added detail because you’ll have learned to tell the difference between your intuition and everything else.

More typical examples of clair-knowing involve simply knowing that something is about to occur. For example, do you suddenly have an uneasy feeling about a family member or friend? Call them, something might be up. Do you suddenly notice someone at work and know that something happened at home to distract them?

Again, practice this skill. Keep a record of your hits and misses; follow the pattern that helps you learn how to tap it. Think of clair-knowing as the skill that gave our ancestors “eyes in the back of the head” that saved them from the sabre-toothed tiger. Whatever those are in our complex world, clair-knowing can save you, too.

Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt hosts the OM Times radio show, “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World.” An intuitive and spiritual consultant and certified past life regression specialist, she is an award-winning author whose next book is “The Afterlife Is a Party: What People and Animals Teach Us About Love, Reincarnation, and the Other Side.” Find her at RobynFritz.com.