Listening When Guidance Speaks: Understanding Intuition and the Four Clairs

A powerful true story and practical guide to intuition. Learn how inner guidance communicates through the four clairs and how to trust what you feel.

Want to understand how your intuition speaks to you?
I created a 90-minute course, Unlock Your Intuitive Language, which helps you recognize the ways your intuition may already be communicating—and gives you five exercises to actually practice it.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the different ways guidance has shown up throughout my life.

Maybe it's because I've been feeling a little stagnant lately. Physically tired. Energetically drained. Like forward motion requires pushing through something thick and resistant—like trying to walk through a pool of Jell-O.

And when I get into these seasons, I have a tendency to look backward. Not because I want to live in the past, but because sometimes I need to remind myself of the moments when I knew. The moments when something inside of me spoke before my thinking mind had the opportunity to question it, rationalize it, or come up with 47 reasons why it was probably wrong.

One particular memory came back to me recently. I hadn't thought about it in years, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized it might be one of the clearest examples I have of what intuition can actually feel like.

And it happened when I was nine years old.

The Day My Intuition Didn't Whisper

I grew up on a private gravel lane with only a few houses at the end of a road called Boxwood Point. On one side were acres of peach orchard; on the other, pine woods and thick brush. I remember bouncing around in the back seat as my dad turned off the paved neighborhood road and onto our pothole-ridden lane.

The day I’m recalling began with me walking home alone in the heavy summer heat. I had spent the morning playing with friends—running through backyards, digging in the dirt, skinning knees. All the carefree things that made up childhood.

I remember looking down, counting steps as my nine-year-old feet crushed gravel beneath worn white tennis shoes. A car approached from behind. I lifted my head, ready to wave at a passing neighbor.

But instead of passing, the car stopped beside me.

I recognized the man. He was connected to a family at the end of our lane—someone familiar, someone I’d seen before. As he rolled down the window, he leaned toward me and said firmly, “Hey. Come here,” motioning with his hand.

Conditioned to be polite when an adult spoke, I tried to step forward.

But my foot wouldn’t move.

I was frozen. Unable to lift my leg from the gravel.

He repeated himself, curling his finger in a “come here” motion.

And then—instantly—a voice I had never heard before entered my mind and screamed:

“RUN.”

It wasn’t a whisper.

It wasn’t gentle.

It was a command.

My body obeyed before my mind could argue. I vaulted across a drainage ditch, tore through grass and pine trees, and didn’t stop until I was inside my bedroom, safe.

The dominant emotion I remember wasn’t fear—it was embarrassment. I was terrified I’d been rude. Afraid I’d get in trouble for disobeying an adult. That fear kept me from telling anyone what happened.

Years later, I learned the truth.

That man—the one who stopped beside me—was later arrested for raping a girl in our neighborhood.

When I look back now, I understand what happened differently. I wasn’t dramatic. I wasn’t rude. I was protected.

Something greater than me intervened—loudly, unmistakably, unapologetically.

When Guidance Is Quiet (And When It Isn’t)

That day on the gravel road was one of the rare moments when guidance arrived as a roar.

But most days, it doesn’t.

Most days, guidance arrives quietly:

• A gut feeling you can’t explain

• A hesitation that slows you down

• A knowing that doesn’t come with logic

• A sense of peace—or unease—without a clear reason

• A door closing that hurts, but saves you later

Sometimes guidance whispers.

Sometimes it nudges.

Sometimes it unsettles.

And sometimes it is silent—not because it’s absent, but because it trusts you to lead.

The truth is this: guidance is always present. The question isn’t whether intuition is speaking—it’s whether we recognize the language it’s using.

That’s where understanding intuition becomes grounding instead of mysterious.

So, What Does the Language of Intuition Actually Look Like?

This is where intuition can start to feel unnecessarily complicated.

Spend five minutes reading about intuition online and you'll probably run into words like clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, and claircognizance. They sound mystical. Maybe even a little intimidating.

But underneath the terminology is something surprisingly ordinary.

Think about how you experience the world every day. You see things. You hear things. You feel things in your body. And sometimes, you simply know something without being able to explain exactly how you know it.

Intuition can work in many of the same ways.

The word clair simply means clear. So when people talk about "the clairs," they're really talking about different ways intuitive information may come through.

You may feel it.

You may see it.

You may hear it.

Or you may simply know.

And chances are, you've experienced at least one of these without ever realizing there was a name for it.

Clairsentience: When You Feel It

Have you ever walked into a room and immediately sensed that something was off?

Nobody told you anything. Maybe everyone was acting perfectly normal. But something in your body picked up on it before your mind had any idea what was going on.

That's a simple way to think about clairsentience, or clear feeling.

For some people, intuition seems to speak most naturally through the body. It might feel like a tightening in your chest, butterflies in your stomach, goosebumps, warmth, heaviness, lightness, or a sudden emotion that seems to come out of nowhere.

And this is where learning your own language becomes important, because obviously not every stomachache is intuition. Sometimes you just shouldn't have eaten the gas-station sushi.

Your body is communicating with you constantly. Stress, memories, emotions, your nervous system, hunger, exhaustion—all of these can create physical sensations too.

So you don't have to immediately decide what a sensation means.

Start by noticing it.

What happens in your body when something feels right? What happens when something doesn't? Are there sensations that seem to repeat themselves in certain situations?

Over time, you begin learning your own patterns.

And that's really what we're doing here.

We're paying attention.

Clairvoyance: When You See It

Clairvoyance means clear seeing, and no, this does not necessarily mean closing your eyes and watching a crystal-clear movie of the future unfold in your mind.

Sometimes it's much less dramatic than that.

An image might suddenly pop into your head while you're talking to someone. You might see a color, a person, an object, a place, a symbol, or even a quick flash of something that makes absolutely no sense in the moment.

And because it happens inside your mind, it's incredibly easy to dismiss.

I just made that up.

Maybe.

But here's something worth getting curious about: Did you intentionally create the image, or did it simply appear?

That's a very different question from Was it real?

We're not trying to prove anything here. We're learning what our own internal experience feels like.

The more familiar you become with the way your mind normally creates images, the easier it becomes to notice when something seems to arrive unexpectedly.

Clairaudience: When You Hear It

My experience on the gravel road is a powerful example of clairaudience, or clear hearing.

RUN.

There wasn't a lengthy explanation attached to it. No debate. No list of reasons.

Just information.

Clairaudience doesn't always mean hearing a voice as though another person is physically standing beside you. For many people, it may be experienced internally—as a word, phrase, name, thought, or sentence that seems to arrive fully formed.

Which presents a pretty obvious problem:

We have thoughts all day long. So how the heck do you know what's intuition and what's just... you thinking?

Welcome to one of the biggest questions in developing intuition.

One thing you can begin noticing is the quality of the information.

The thinking mind tends to have a LOT to say. It analyzes. Explains. Questions. Replays. Predicts. Changes its mind. Comes back five minutes later with additional evidence.

Intuitive information can sometimes feel much simpler.

Call her.

Wait.

Go.

Not this.

That doesn't mean every short thought is intuition. It simply gives you something to begin observing.

What does your regular mental chatter sound like?

And what feels different?

Claircognizance: When You Just Know

Then there's claircognizance, or clear knowing.

This one can be particularly frustrating for anyone who likes evidence because sometimes there isn't any.

You just know.

You know what someone is about to say. You know which direction you want to go. You know something isn't right. You suddenly understand something you haven't consciously worked through.

And then your analytical mind arrives right on schedule:

Okay... but WHY do you think that?

And you don't have an answer.

That's the experience we're talking about.

Claircognizance can be easy to overlook precisely because there isn't always a sensation, image, or voice attached to it. The information simply seems to be there.

One way to become more familiar with it is to notice what comes before you begin reasoning.

When you're making a small decision, pause before creating the pros-and-cons list.

What was your first knowing?

You don't have to act on it. You don't even have to trust it yet.

Just notice it.

You Probably Don't Have Just One

This is where I want to take some pressure off the whole conversation.

You don't need to figure out which clair you "are."

Most people experience intuition in more than one way, and the way information comes through may change depending on the situation.

You might feel something first and then suddenly know what it means. An image might appear followed by a word. You may notice that one form seems particularly natural to you while another is much quieter.

There's no hierarchy here.

And you don't need to become more intuitive to get this "right."

The more useful question is:

How does intuition seem to communicate with me?

Because once you begin recognizing your own patterns, you can do something much more useful than memorizing definitions.

You can start paying attention to what happens next.

Did that feeling mean anything?

Was the random image connected to something?

Did that quiet thought turn out to be useful?

Was the thing you somehow knew accurate?

That's how you begin building something much more valuable than a label:

self-trust.

Knowing the Clairs Is Only the Beginning

And this is where reading another article about intuition can only take you so far.

You can understand what clairsentience means. You can memorize the difference between clairvoyance and claircognizance. You can even start recognizing yourself in some of the examples above.

But eventually, there's only one way to learn the language of your intuition:

You have to experience it.

That's exactly why I created Unlock Your Intuitive Language.

It's a beginner-friendly, self-paced course designed to help you explore how intuition actually communicates with you—without needing to be psychic, spiritual, "gifted," or anything else.

In about 90 minutes, we'll move beyond the definitions and into practice. You'll explore the different ways intuitive information can show up, begin recognizing which forms come most naturally to you, and work through five exercises that give you a chance to actually experience it for yourself.

Because the goal isn't to walk away saying:

I'm claircognizant.

The goal is to start saying:

Oh. THAT'S what I've been noticing.

And maybe, little by little, to stop second-guessing it quite so much.

The Language Was There All Along

Maybe developing intuition isn't really about gaining something you don't already have.

Maybe it's about learning to recognize what's been happening all along.

The feeling you couldn't explain.

The image that appeared out of nowhere.

The quiet sentence.

The thing you somehow knew.

Sometimes guidance screams RUN.

But most of the time, it doesn't need to.

It may have been speaking your language all along.

The practice is learning to recognize it—and eventually, trusting yourself enough to listen.

Want Somewhere to Keep Exploring?

If you're curious about intuition, energy, consciousness, and our connection to something bigger than ourselves, we'd love to have you inside the Immerse Institute of Connection.

Our private Skool community is completely free and was created as a place to explore these ideas with other curious humans—without needing to have all the answers or believe exactly the same things.

Inside, you'll find free resources, conversations, live gatherings, and The Lab, where you can actually put some of this into practice through self-guided experiments.