The
Power of Intuition
By
Judith Orloff, M.D.
I'm a psychiatrist and intuitive in Los Angeles. What
I do isn't my job. It's my life's passion. With
patients and in workshops, I listen with my intellect and
my intuition, a potent inner wisdom that goes beyond the literal.
I experience it as a flash of insight, a gut feeling, a hunch,
a dream. By blending intuition with orthodox medical knowledge
I can offer my patients and workshop participants the best
of both worlds. Now, listening to intuition is sacred to me,
but learning to trust it has taken years. 
I've described the details in my memoir, Second
Sight, which is meant to assure anyone who ever thought
they were weird or crazy for having intuitive experiences,
that they are not! This brief synopsis gives you a taste of
the book.
I grew up in Beverly Hills the only daughter of two-physician
parents with twenty-five physicians in my family. From age
nine, I had dreams and intuitions that would come true. I
could predict illness, earthquakes, even the suicide of one
of my parent's friends. This confused and alarmed me,
as it did my parents who were entrenched in the hard-core
rational world of science. At first they tried to write my
intuitions off as coincidence. Finally, though, after I dreamed
my mother's mentor would lose a political election –
which to my horror, came true – she took me aside and
told me, “Never mention another dream or intuition in
our house again!” I'll never forget the look in my
dear mother's exasperated, frightened eyes, nothing I
ever wanted to see again. So from that day on, I kept my intuitions
to myself. I grew up ashamed of my abilities, sure there was
something wrong with me.
Luckily, I've had many angels in human form who've
pointed me to my true calling as physician. In the sixties
I got heavily involved with drugs in an attempt to block my
intuitions out – obviously not something I'm recommending
to you! Following a nearly fatal car accident at age sixteen
when I tumbled over a treacherous 1500 foot cliff in Malibu
Canyon, my parents forced me to see a psychiatrist. This man
was the first person who ever “saw” me – not
who he wanted me to be, but who I was. He taught me to begin
to value the gift of intuition, and referred me to Dr. Thelma
Moss, an intuition researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute. She was to become my mentor and guide to developing
my intuitive side.
While
working in Thelma's lab I had an amazingly specific dream
which announced, “You're going to become an MD, a
psychiatrist, to help legitimize intuition in medicine.”
When I awoke, I felt like someone was playing a practical
joke on me. I'd never liked science, and I was bored around
all my parent's doctor-friends. I was a hippie living
in an old converted brick laundromat with my artist boyfriend
in Venice Beach, working in the May Company's towel department.
(I've had a great love of towels and sheets since!) The
last thing I envisioned doing was medicine. But because I
was beginning to trust my intuition, I enrolled in a junior
college just to see how it would go. So one course became
two, became fourteen years of medical training – USC
medical school and a UCLA psychiatric internship and residency.
The irony was, that during my medical training I strayed far
from the intuitive world again. Traditional psychiatry equates
visions with psychosis. Working in the UCLA emergency room,
I'd keep seeing psychotics who were wheeled in screaming,
strapped to gurneys, accompanied by cops with billy clubs.
These patients professed to hear God and to be able to predict
things. They also felt their food was poisoned, and that the
FBI was on their tail. No one tried to sort through this mishmash
of claims. Typically, patients would shoot up with Thorazine,
and were hospitalized on lock-down inpatient units until their
“symptoms” subsided. Seeing this so many times I
doubted whether it was safe or appropriate to integrate my
intuitions in medicine.
When I opened my Los Angeles psychiatric practice in 1983,
I had every intention of it being traditional; I'd use
medications, psychotherapy, but I didn't intend for intuition
to play a role. My practice was extremely successful. Since
I was a workaholic and also loved helping people, I had twelve
hour days, though very little personal life. But then I had
a heart-wrenching wake-up call that changed everything. It
was an intuition that a patient, on antidepressants, was going
to make a suicide attempt. Because she was doing so well –
nothing supported my hunch – I dismissed it. Within a
week she overdosed on the antidepressants I'd prescribed
and ended up in a coma for nearly a month. (Had she not survived
I would've been devastated.) The hardest part, though,
was that I thought I'd harmed her by not utilizing a vital
piece of intuitive information. This was intolerable for me.
From then on, I knew, as a responsible physician, I had to
integrate my intuitions into my work.
After this episode, my journey to bring intuition into my
medical practice began. I didn't know how I'd do it,
but I put out a silent prayer to the universe to help me.
Soon, I began meeting people, more angels, who showed me the
way. Gradually I grew comfortable with my intuition and set
out to write Second Sight. This took me seven
years to complete because I had so much fear about coming
out of the closet as an intuitive. I was afraid of what my
physician peers would think, that they'd mock me or blackball
me from the profession. My mother warned, “They'll
think you're weird. It'll jeopardize your medical
career.” Ah, Mother: I loved her, but thank God I didn't
listen. Finding my voice as a psychiatrist and intuitive has
been my path to freedom.
Sure, there's a risk when you stretch yourself, but the
rewards are enormous. Now, I'm blessed to travel around
the country giving workshops on intuition to auditoriums full
of extraordinary people – health care professionals and
general audiences alike – who long to embrace their inner
voices. I'm heartened to see that many physicians are
eager to deal with patients in the new way I offer. Recently
I gave an intuitive healing workshop at the American Psychiatric
Association convention, an annual gathering of the most conservative
psychiatrists in the world. I'm pleased to report the
response was wonderful.
I'm sad to report that my mother didn't live long
enough to see this. In 1993 she died of a lymphoma. But, on
her deathbed, she decided to tell me our “family secrets.”
She told me, “I want to pass the power on to you.”
I was astounded to learn that I came from a lineage of intuitive
healers on her side of the family – my Jewish grandmother
who did laying on of hands in a shed behind the pharmacy she
and Grandpop ran in Philadelphia. East coast aunts and cousins
I'd never met since I grew up in California. Also, my
mother, herself, had a strong inner voice which told her how
to treat patients for over forty years. She'd listened
to this voice and secretly used her innate healing powers
to keep her lymphoma in remission for many years. “Why
didn't you tell me?” I asked her. She said simply,
“I wanted you to lead a normal, happy life, not to be
thought of as weird like your grandmother was.” Oh Mother...
I'll always be grateful for what she shared, but, still...
she'd waited so long. Even so, I believe in the wisdom
of the paths we've been given. Mine has been to fight
for what I believed in despite what my parents or anyone said.
An invaluable but rugged lesson in empowerment.
These days, no matter what I'm going through, especially
when my heart is torn in a million pieces, my intuition has
sustained me. I hope that my journey in Second Sight
can help you. One thing I'm certain of: if you follow
your intuitive voice, you can't go wrong. Stay true to
it. Intuition is about empowerment, not having to conform
to someone else’s notion of who you should be. It's
about being true to yourself, and all the goodness that comes
from that.
Judith
Orloff, M.D., is a psychiatrist and practicing intuitive,
author of the bestsellers Second Sight, Guide to Intuitive
Healing and of Positive Energy, due out from Harmony
Books, April 2004.
Inner
Vision 