Written by: Mike Mantic, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I was 18, heartbroken, and in Paris, a city I'd never been to before.
I'd gone there with the idea of clearing my head and getting some space from a recent breakup.
I'd spent the previous few weeks interrailing around Europe, sleeping on night trains and waking up in new towns every week.
When you see the sights of Europe, it wouldn't be complete without visiting Paris. That's what I told myself consciously. Subconsciously, and not admitting it to myself at the time, I had a fantasy of an impromptu meeting, a grand romantic gesture, and her coming to her senses and coming back to the relationship.
It sounds like a joke-writing it out. After all, Paris is a big city. I knew that she was working in a department store for the summer. Of course, Paris being one of the world's fashion capitals, there are many department stores. It's impossible to expect I would find her in a city of millions, especially having never been there before.
Surely this was the textbook definition of a fool's errand, and to be honest, I didn't expect to.
The fact I had a notion of which department store she worked in was little consolation. First of all, it was a chain store with many locations. Second, this was long before the days of mobile phones and GPS-powered maps. Thirdly, I couldn't speak the language, and I was too shy to ask for directions or make my objective clear.
"Excuse me, Mr. French man have you seen a smiley girl about this high with strawberry blonde hair and a round face?". It was laughable.
It was a gut instinct that led me out of the cheap hotel door in the Montmartre district. Walking into the heart of Paris, I listened to that gut feeling, not really knowing where I was headed.
I didn't actually go out that day to find her. Far from it, my daily routine was to go out, get food, see sights and return to the hotel with a few photos taken.
Yet here I was with this intense feeling to follow my inner voice. Turn left. Keep walking. Turn right. Walk further, Cross the road, turn right. Turn into this door.
That inner guidance took me on a more or less direct route to the very store, the very entrance, and the very counter where she was working. Boy, were we shocked to see each other!
It turned out to be one of the most revelatory moments of my life, even to this day. That instinct! That intuition could be so accurate, so precise as to locate a single person in a city of millions, in the space of fewer than 90 minutes.
It was many years before I learned how to use that skill more consciously. Before, I learned to use intuition in ways that could be directed and focused on revealing information about specific topics.
Online there is a video of the spiritual teacher David Hawkins (author of Power Vs. Force) using intuition through the mechanism of kinesiology, finding the exact location of a gun hidden in a room that he'd never been to before and had no previous knowledge of.
Through a series of yes or no questions, he was able to determine the truth of whether there was a gun in the room and where exactly it was hidden—kind of like finding a single girl in a city of millions.
Intuition is so much more than a simple gut instinct. Despite having used it to locate a person in a city of millions, those impressions were still somewhat vague and hard to read. Getting an intuitive feeling about something is an excellent source of information. Still, if we don't know how to direct it or differentiate it from "other" sources of information, it remains unreliable.
That's where intuition training becomes critical if you want to get the benefit of its ability to guide you.
That guidance can change your life.
In training people not only to use this skill but also to use it in a business context to design, build and grow transformational businesses, it never ceases to amaze me the clarity of guidance people can get.
From the specific details of the business they should build to the exact personal drivers, hangups, and secret desires of their avatar or ideal customer, the level of detail, specificity, and accuracy are unmatched. When it comes to building a business that you truly love, that comes directly from what your heart wants to create, following your intuition is the single most powerful tool in any creator's arsenal.
There is a level to which intuition cannot be controlled but should just be listened to. The one thing you can rely on with intuition is this: What you get intuitively will not necessarily be what you want, but it will always be what you need.
In the case of my extraordinary, odds-defying meeting in Paris, we met, said a few awkward words, shared an uncomfortable silence, and then I left. That might seem like somewhat of an anticlimax, but there was something positive that came from it. About a week after the encounter, after months of feeling down and heartbroken, I awoke one sunny summer morning, and she was entirely gone from my heart. I never thought of her again. I was, in a sense, reborn into a new world of adventure and possibility.
Intuition gave me what I needed to move on. Sometimes letting go of what you know and listening to your own inner guidance is the thing you needed all along.
Mike Mantic, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
After a near-death experience at 13, Mike began a 36-year journey of exploration in meditation, shamanism & altered states of consciousness, culminating in a curriculum of training to bridge each of us to our own highest self and deepest wisdom. Mike supports healers, consciousness coaches, and personal and spiritual development trainers to intuitively build successful and rewarding businesses sharing their gifts. He also guides people to explore and overcome the archaic, hardwired fear of death; To divine the truth of what their heart wants to create in the world, and finally to live the life they incarnated here to experience.
