Women Gone Wild: Intuition: The Feminine Guide to Fearless Living

By Rhonda Swan and Penney Peirce

“The women in this book have taken the path of deep introspection, relying on trusting their inner voice, their essence, to guide them to their dreams.” —Diana von Welanetz Wentworth, New York Times–bestselling co-author of The Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook

Ever had a gut feeling you ignored—only to discover later it was spot on?

Have you ever felt called to one path in life, only to take a different direction?

Are you ready to embrace your intuition and discover the life of your dreams?

In this illuminating book from the Women Gone Wild series, fearless females share stories of how they transformed their lives by learning to tune in and trust their intuition. With trailblazers such as CEO of Unstoppable Branding Agency Rhonda Swan, intuitive and bestselling author Penney Peirce, and thought leaders spanning different industries, lifestyles, and backgrounds sharing their collective wisdom, you’ll learn how to spark the change you—and the world—needs most.

From the amazing stories in this book, you’ll learn:

• How to foster more intuition
• The price of avoiding your destiny
• How following the call of your intuition will change your life for the better

So get ready to grab hold of one of your greatest gifts by learning how to tap into the well of knowledge within you and make a positive impact on your career, your relationships—the world!—by truly living the life you were meant to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781612546391

Book preview

Introduction

I am beyond honored to offer you a sneak peek into the library of wisdom contained in Women Gone Wild: Intuition. This book is not merely a collection of pages; it’s a shared journey of rediscovery, illuminated by the experiences of twenty-five extraordinary authors, each delving into their deepest encounters with intuition.

It is a privilege to stand among such an amazing group of women who have courageously opened their hearts in these pages with the hope of guiding you to a deeper connection with your own intuition.

Within, you will uncover a wide array of personal stories, valuable lessons, and actionable strategies, all crafted to empower you to unlock and harness your intuitive powers.

Each author contributes a unique lens through which to view intuition, and together, we will navigate its multifaceted landscape, from cultivating trust in it to leveraging it as a catalyst for transformation.

Intuition is a formidable force, a superpower that resides within all of us as women. It is the whisper of an inner voice, the nudge of a gut feeling, often guiding us to what is best before our rational mind has a chance to catch up. Yet, in a world that frequently prioritizes logic over instinct, many of us have become disconnected from this innate gift.

In Women Gone Wild: Intuition, our collective mission is to help you rekindle your connection to this powerful inner wisdom.

Through a combination of introspection, practical exercises, and real-world examples, we will shepherd you toward a life lived more intuitively.

By the time you turn the last page, you will not only possess a deeper comprehension of your own intuition but also have the tools and confidence to listen to it, trust it, and allow it to guide you toward a more authentic, fulfilling existence.

Prepare to awaken your inner WILD woman and embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery.

Your intuition is calling; are you ready to respond?

With love and light,

Rhonda Swan

PART i

THE MAGIC IN METHOD

Chapter 1

The Most Magical Thing of Life

Penney Peirce

—Author of The Intuitive Way, Frequency, Leap of Perception, and Transparency

When I heard about the Women Gone Wild series, the first thing that came to mind was Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd, those wild and crazy guys, wiggling and shimmying around in drag. OK, thank you, Penney’s imagination . . . But honestly, I’ve learned that when opening intuition, it’s helpful to entertain first thoughts and be reverently irreverent—or irreverently reverent. Some of the best stuff comes when I cast off the kind of seriousness that’s heavy and let my imagination focus on self-entertainment. And that often comes clothed in silliness. I’ve come to see self-entertainment as a high-frequency state; it allows easy access to just-right insights, like allowing myself to mentally wiggle and shimmy a little more in life and have some fun!

When Steve and Dan finally moved out of the way, I remembered a talk I attended by poet Gary Snyder in which he spoke about wildness and the wild potential. He described it not as unruly disorder but as the naturalness of living things, each flourishing authentically amid diversity. He said, The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. A wild woman, in his way of thinking, would be unintimidated, self-reliant, independent, free, and fiercely resistant to oppression, confinement, or exploitation. She might be far-out, outrageous, spontaneous, empathic, expressive, and even ecstatic. That fits well with my own sense of feminine wildness. Like self-entertainment, it’s a very high-frequency state!

Intuition has long been seen as women’s territory. Men can be just as intuitive, but they go about it slightly differently. Men have fewer connecting fibers in the brain’s corpus callosum—the part that allows information and energy to flow easily between the left and right hemispheres. It means men operate more unilaterally in their perception, using one side at a time. This enables them to focus fully on what they’re doing. To be intuitive, they often must choose to shift from their logical, verbal left brain into the quiet sensing of the right brain. Or if they’re in direct-experience-intuition-mode, they need to shift into analysis and communication.

Since women have more connecting fibers in the corpus callosum, we experience the world bilaterally—both sides at once. It’s easy for women to focus on several things simultaneously. For example, we’re directly connected to the environment as though it’s part of our body; leaving for a trip with dirty dishes in the sink and beds unmade can cause a subtle anxiety that’s hard to suppress. It’s natural for us to receive a continual flow of intuitive input from the right brain, be able to describe it, understand the reason behind its occurrence, and communicate it to others.

Discovering My Intuition and Path

But what is intuition anyway? My mother’s precious, falling-apart dictionary from 1914 defines it as the immediate perception of truth without conscious reasoning. The word’s origin stems from Middle English: spiritual insight or direct spiritual communication. And earlier, from Latin: intueri, or to consider, which means: to fix the mind upon for careful examination, meditate upon, or view attentively. I call intuition direct knowing, and to me, it’s the most magical part of life.

Are we born intuitive? Yes! Early intuition is tied closely to the body and shows up as instinct and empathic connection to others. Can we develop this into a high-functioning skill? Yes again. Some people are born wide-open, others have sudden openings, and still others focus on refining intuition for years. I didn’t have a dramatic event that caused me to possess magical intuitive abilities. That would have been fun to weave into my résumé, but I didn’t even think about intuition until high school—and after that my development was a step-by-step process. Although, I must admit, I was fairly good at telepathically communicating with our dogs and horses, living on several farms during my youth. And I spent many hours alone, drawing, writing poems, or sitting on hills just looking out. But the point is that intuition is always there, waiting for a chance to be noticed.

I gradually became fascinated with mysteries, especially psychic phenomena and how some people could know past lives and future events or move objects with their mind. I devoured books on these subjects. I visited palm readers and trance mediums, healers and shamans, and many told me I was going to do work very similar to what they were doing. I laughed because I had become a corporate art director and designer, working with a team of engineers!

Before I could protest too much more, synchronicities began to fill my world, bringing colorful omens that pointed the way and more experts who taught me new skills and gave me guidance. I began to have visionary dreams, often prophetic, that inspired me and led me to increasingly trust my inner voice and sight. I repeatedly dreamed of teaching large groups at retreats on mountainsides, even though in reality I was quite shy. I met a variety of shamans in my dreams who taught me about the power of animals, rituals for increasing consciousness, and mathematical frequencies for various states of being. Later, I actually met many of them in my travels to South America, Japan, and Egypt.

My life in metaphysics unfurled rapidly and I was carried along on a wave of intuitive teachings. I remember going home to see my parents at Christmas and for several years, I’d tell them, I’m going to be an interior designer! Then, Now I’m going to be a graphic designer! Then, No, I’m getting a job as an art director. Finally, one year I said, I know what I’m going to do! I’m going to be a spiritual teacher! And my mother just sat there implacably, rolling her eyeballs back. But that was the last time I changed my mind.

I began to do intuitive readings from a light-altered state for people from all walks of life and many different countries—hundreds, then thousands of them. This caused my understanding of the inner energetic and spiritual workings of psychology, the soul, karma, reincarnation, perception, and finally, personal transformation, to skyrocket. My cosmology evolved; I’d describe how I saw the world working, live by it until the next revelation came, revise my description, and adapt to the new vision again and again. Nothing is fixed; there is always more. We must let ourselves evolve toward infinity.

This became more evident as I began to write books. After one was published, a year or two later I’d be possessed by a new topic that insisted on being fleshed out in another book. Life was accelerating and I saw how this increased the frequency of our perception; topics that had previously been invisible were suddenly recognizable and intelligible. And the processes of intuition development and transformation had many layers that required sequencing over time.

I realize my story is a little unusual; I think I-the-soul had a deep desire to participate in the exciting transformation process that would be occurring on earth—which would begin with masses of people becoming consciously intuitive. Your story may be somewhat similar, or quite different. You may be drawn to energy healing, innovation in technology, or protecting the environment. Perhaps you want to be an entrepreneur and develop a successful business, or perhaps you want to become a heart surgeon. No matter the focus, intuition eases the journey, makes it fun, and leads you to greater wisdom and perceptual skill.

Intuition: Doorway to Genius and Compassion

I know many people think intuition is like being psychic and that it only works occasionally, when you least expect it, getting through to you when the message is dramatic and physical, like, Don’t get on that airplane! or, The winning lottery numbers are 16, 22, 4, 43, 39, and 10. So often, those dramatic declarations come from a place of subconscious fear and are generally wrong. Intuition is more subtle than that, and much broader in its range of insights.

For the most part, intuition sheds light on everyday life and on what you need to do to evolve. It might bring a specific sense of timing, a vision of your next project, or clarity about who is trustworthy. If you’re writing, it points toward what to talk about next. If you’re painting a landscape, it says, More purple in the shadows over here. In business, it helps you find shared motivation in your team, or gives you a sudden hunch about a coming trend.

One CEO I know says he has a sense about funny numbers when reviewing spreadsheets and it’s helped him uncover crucial mistakes. My sister, in her business, put certain calls aside, thinking she was procrastinating without knowing why. It usually turned out that the timing was off, or a key piece of information hadn’t come through yet; it would have wasted everyone’s time had she acted too soon.

Aside from providing practical help, intuition is a doorway into your inclusive, integrating right brain and the vast imaginal realm. We could call this astounding place the dreamworld, unified field, collective consciousness, hereafter, or even the wild blue yonder. All knowledge is available here and you understand the universal principles—and love—because you experience it all as inherent in your essence. Intuition is really the relay mechanism between all that and your personal reality. I experience intuition as revealing simple yet sophisticated truth that reminds me how elegantly and well pure-intelligence and compassion work.

Accessing Intuition

Intuition gives you the kind of first thoughts that feel deeply comfortable, not superficially relieving. The insights you receive sit well and are just right. They dissolve tension and catalyze enthusiasm. So often, once you receive a clear intuition, you feel it was obvious all along. If a new idea makes you hyperactive or anxious, it’s probably not true for you. Intuition flows easily when you:

Allow yourself to be quiet. Language puts you in your logical left brain and right-brained intuition shuts down. Try not talking in your external and internal reality for a while. It could be ten seconds, an hour, or longer. Create open space in your mind. It’s OK to pull out of social media habits for a bit, like answering texts instantly and looking things up online. Periods of boredom and lulls can be good times for deep knowledge and understanding to surface, or to clear out ideas you don’t need.

Notice similarities. When you see how things are alike and connected, you’re in the Flow and useful insights simply occur. I think of the Flow as the collective consciousness of all souls and living things evolving together; what I feel drawn to do is what both I and others need, and vice versa. It’s trust in provision. Seeing how things are different can block the Flow by creating gaps and barriers—unless you see how they’re different in the same way! Similarity creates bridges. Without similarities, it’s easy to be sucked into a quagmire of oppositions whose polarized positions never stop alternating.

Focus attention on the present and center yourself inside your skin. Projecting attention into other times and realities prevents access to what’s knowable and needed—unless you do it to gather information consciously, without leaving your body. It’s your body that registers truth.

Be honest, respectful, and allowing. Being biased, controlling, negative, or worried stops the Flow and distorts intuition.

What Intuition Taught Me

Perhaps intuition is another name for the Voice of Soul. It emanates from what I call my Inner Perceiver, a wise, observant me who notices what I-the-personality needs to notice, guides her to ask the right questions, and nudges her to choose solutions and actions that serve purposefulness and excellence. Here are a few things intuition showed me about being a better intuitive:

Commit to Radical Trust. Accurate insights come from being open-minded and open-hearted. This means choosing to trust your deep Soul-Self, your Inner Perceiver, 100 percent. It also means committing to using and applying what you receive.

Next, trust others. If they show you who they are, and if that seems squirrelly, you can trust them to be that way without judging them. The same applies if they seem grounded, honest, and competent.

Trust your body to give you accurate energy information. If a situation isn’t quite right, if it’s dangerous, or if there’s a lie, your body will contract or feel dense and heavy. If the situation is true, safe, appropriate, and win-win, your body may feel warm, expansive, or even effervescent. You might receive images or symbols denoting success or failure, like fireworks or a dried-up pond.

Finally, trust the Flow itself. The way thoughts, people, events, synchronicities, timing, and even problems occur is exactly what you need. You learn that the next thing is the guide, and that willpower is not required for progress—just clear choices.

Balance Your Two Brain Hemispheres. Don’t get stuck in your left brain, being too logical, analytical, defined, futurized, and motivated by speed and willpower. If you identify with your left brain, you may become egotistical, feel isolated, need to control life, and lose spontaneous creativity. Balance healthy left-brain skills with right-brain intuition and creativity. To access direct knowing, focus your attention rather than setting intentions.

How do you enter the right brain? I previously mentioned the power of silence to activate the right brain and intuition. When you just be, without commentary, you’re there! Momentarily, you will know directly instead of translating. You’ll learn that language emerges spontaneously from the state of being you occupy.

You need both kinds of perception to know what you know, receive just-right visions, and materialize them. Terrence McKenna, famed ethnobotanist, once said that the function of the left brain is to interrupt the right brain—otherwise we’d never know anything specific, or be able to focus and make decisions, since the right brain is about immersion and knows everything all at once.

Develop Deep Thinking and Feeling Into. Don’t stop at the superficial answer, the societally-safe insight. Ask, What’s under that? Why would that be? What causes this? Then ask those questions again, and again, until you reach a core cause, a substantial truth. Pay close and loving attention to anything you focus on, then keep your attention there a moment longer, and another moment longer. Penetrate the essence of a flower or even a difficult client. Use your heightened sensitivity and empathy to feel into what you see. Closer, closer. Keep going until you feel yourself as the object or person. Conscious communion lets you know life from another point of view. Even a coffee cup has consciousness and inner truth. Find understanding and compassion, then return to your own point of view and make sense of what you learned.

Intuition, like a nighttime dream, puts you in touch with freedom and entitlement within the realm of anything’s possible. It shows you that the higher realms always support you.

I’m truly pleased to share these intuitive tips with you. With attention, you can hone your ability to become a skillful intuitive and go wild into your expanded self!

I’m picturing you, right now, not with lightning bolts striking your head (Aaach!) but with soft golden light steadily emerging from every cell, radiating through and from you, creating a highly hospitable environment. Tiny translucent birds flutter from your heart and forehead, and teeny, joyful dolphins swim and leap about in your field of light—all carrying your best ideas and wishes into the world to become real. The vision changes, and now I see you wiggling and shimmying, dressed in some wild outfit, having a hoot being and playing on planet Earth! Come along and dive with me into the richness of the nonphysical worlds using intuition as your guide—and discover how truly gifted and full of love you are.

—Penney

Chapter 2

Unleashing Your Inner Magick: Intuitive Pathways in Nature’s Embrace

Patti Negri

—Good Witch, Bestselling Author of Old World Magick for the Modern World, and Vice President of Paraflixx.com

In my work as a celebrity psychic medium and good witch in Hollywood, I see how people can easily reconnect with this perfect, beautiful inner knowledge that reignites their creative right brain with just a few simple exercises. My artist, actor, and musician celebrity clients and friends are often the most intuitively connected simply because they allow their creativity to blossom and shine. I saw this impact when my local elementary school (a beautiful one-hundred-year-old school with a terrible scholastic rating) cut all the art and creative classes due to budget restrictions. The students suffered. But when we brought in extracurricular art, dance, improv, and photography classes, the kids’ reading and writing skills went through the roof. We need creativity in our life to bring us balance because it helps us tune into our intuition that’s buried inside us or lost in the chatter.

You don’t have to be a celebrity or elementary school student to bring life-enhancing intuition and magic into your life. We’re born with it. It gives us life-enriching insight and understanding that no class or book can teach us. Unfortunately, in our modern, Western, non-mystical society and world, so much of our intuition has been lost! We focus primarily on logical and left-brain thinking, often at the expense of right-brain intuition, and this has numbed us from the beautiful knowledge within.

I am an elemental witch, and I work with nature and her elements. Nature truly does balance us, and when we are in balance, our intuition can truly shine. Many of us don’t get enough time communing with our beautiful earth. Even so, her elements are still powerful and balancing. Here are some fun, empowering, and easy techniques that will open that intuition door for anyone who tries them!

Drawing Down Lunar Magick

Let’s start with the moon. The Moon has always been associated with feminine energy, creativity, and intuition. It governs the unconscious realm, and intuition is primarily described as coming from a source outside of consciousness.

It’s not just the full moon that makes everybody crazy. We are subtly affected by all the moon cycles. The Moon’s position and phases affect the tides, and our bodies are about 60 percent water, so it makes sense that the moon also influences our intuition at these different phases. If we tap into these natural cycles, which balance and shift what