A professional animal intuitive shares how to follow your intuition in 2024 part 2

I hope you enjoyed part 1 of our two-part kickoff to Season 5 of Let's Talk to Animals! 

I have been known to joke that animal communication is the hands-down best life coaching program I have ever found. But I'm really not joking. 

Learning this skill has been so profound that I now divide my life into two phases: BAC (before animal communication) and AAC (after animal communication). Intuition has been a major driver in my transformation and I want that for you too. 

In part 1 two weeks ago, I shared 5 tips to begin to find, trust and follow your intuition. For part 2, I share 5 more tools to turbocharge your intuitive abilities in 2024.

Key topics for part 2 include:

• The 4 pillars for deep intuitive transformation
• The difference between sensing and mental knowing
• A simple way to ground yourself before making any major decisions
• How to make nonverbal communication cool again
• Get unclogged intuitively and have FUN doing it!

✨Missed Part 1? Tune in now and grab my other 5 intuitive tips

Chapters

• 0:12 Tuning Into and Trusting Your Intuition
• 10:06 The Four Pillars of Intuitive Health
• 21:37 Intuitive Practices for Animal Care
• 29:05 Developing Intuition and Connecting With Nature
• 45:18 Tuning Into Trust and Following Intuition
• 57:06 Engaging With Listeners and Sharing Content

Transcript

Shannon Cutts: 0:12

Welcome to let's Talk to Animals. My name is Shannon Cutts. I'm an animal sensitive and intuitive for pets and their people, a Reiki master practitioner and an animal communication teacher here at AnimalLoveLanguages. com. And if you're watching the video version or if you're listening to the audio podcast and you hear this random kind of scratching noise, it's my avian Petal ,CUtts, Cutts who's just climbed up my hair clip and has climbed up the back of my head and is now sitting on top of my head, which is absolutely adorable. As you can tell if you're new here at Let's let's Talk to Animals, we are very interspecies family friendly around here. All species are welcome. It's the podcast all species can enjoy together. And for our kickoff for 2024, we're doing a two part series on how to tune in trust and follow your intuition.

Shannon Cutts: 1:08

As I introduced in our part one two weeks ago, 2024 really feels like a tipping point year. I don't know about you, but for me, looking back over the last few years since right before the pandemic started, man oh man, have we been through some stuff, some changes, some really deep losses, some transformations. We've gotten up close and personal with ourselves, face to face, whether we particularly wanted to or intended to or not. We have learned some things about life and what matters, and there's a lot more to learn, and it's really awakened our awareness of what's possible. There's a choice to be made. There's a choice to exist, to just kind of mark time, to hold space, take up space if you will. There's a choice to dabble, to try on a few new things for size and kind of keep to our comfort zone in the process. And there's a choice to emerge. And those of you who may have already joined my weekly love letter, my weekly eNews letter, if you haven't, head over to animallovelanguagescom and just fill in the little pop up and you will be in. You also get $25 off a session of your choice with me for your pet. But if you are already a member of our love letter community then you probably saw my post about a word of the year.

Shannon Cutts: 2:46

This is something I started doing thanks to a longtime mentor of mine, Christine Kane over at Uplevel You, and she has a tool called word of the year and I really love it and I've been doing it for the last nine years. And this year's word is emerge. And I chose that word for me because that definitely feels like what's unfolding in my life right now. But I also chose that word because that's what I feel like the energy is moving us towards collectively and it's a really important energy to tune into, to pay attention to. It's the difference between believing that life happens to us and life happens for us, and the for us approach really looks at life as an opportunity. Even the stuff, especially the stuff sometimes that's really really painful to us, is opportunity and all of its friends knocking on our front door loaded down with presents and gifts. It doesn't feel like that at the time but, to be honest, one of my very first visuals this was even in my pre animal communicator days, when I was just getting a stronger sensation that communication was happening between me and the non human animals that shared my world, shared by space.

Shannon Cutts: 4:03

One of the first visuals that downloaded for me was one of my favorite things to do in real life actually, which is to go to the shore and watch the seals or the sea lions basking on the warm sand, on the lovely little rocks out in the inlets. And one thing that I have noticed without fail is that as long as the big head honcho seal is warm and comfy on their rock. Life is good, but it doesn't last. Eventually there will be another seal or another sea lion that comes along and they want the prime spot in the warm sun on that rock, and what they do is they come up and they'll nip at the other sea lions, flippers, and all of a sudden that sea lion's not so comfortable anymore and they move. And so to me that feels like that's what the last few years have really given us Lots of uncomfortable opportunities prompting us to move. That is not at any level, to be little.

Shannon Cutts: 5:12

The amount of loss, the amount of grief, the amount of trauma that many of us have gone through Because of the pandemic. I'm really big proponent of honoring ourselves for what we've gone through and how it's affected us, as well as the opportunities it brings us, but it's, I'm, really kind of pointing us deeper, towards a mindset shift about what's going on in our lives right now, because this is the emergent, the emergence that, the opportunity that we have as we come through this. It's happened. It's happened whether we wanted it, whether we liked it, whether we ordered it, whether we dreaded it our whole lives. I, too, have had some really catastrophic losses during the past few years people that I loved more than anything and animals. And yet here I am and I can honestly tell you I have become humbler, more grateful, braver, more willing to show up for others and for myself, more willing to step out of my comfort zone.

Shannon Cutts: 6:23

Just recording this podcast is a huge act of courage for me. I don't even know if anyone's listening, that'll let I your listening, and my tort is malty in the next room. That's really great. I've got three listeners already, but I've just layers of peeled off. They had to for me to survive what happened. That's why I want to honor you for that and I also want to offer you an invitation, issue, an opportunity to explore deeper, explore that more. Keep going, keep going. Life is happening for us. We can shed another layer off our heart, our guarded, guarded heart, and be more open and be more present, be more aware Right here, right now, to the love that's available, to the opportunities that are, that are available to us, to the people and the animals around us who need us, who need to connect, to know that they're seen and they're heard and they matter. Let's use what has happened to us for us and for all. So that's really where my heart is as we launch into part two of how to tune in trust and follow your intuition in 2024.

Shannon Cutts: 7:47

And where I want to start us off for part two is what I call the four pillars of animal communication. And when I say animal communication, of course we're a podcast for all species, but I'm talking about communication with all species, with all animals, including as we talked about in part one of this podcast series ourselves as a human animal, with other human animals in our life, with non human animals in our life, animals we share space with and are increasingly urban and suburban living spaces, and with this planet and with the energy of all that is. And in order to do that to the very highest and best of our ability, we need to tend to home base in a particular kind of way. And when I say home base, I mean our multi dimensional systems, our physical body, our electrical and emotional energetic body, our relational, our soul level body and our connection to the energy of all the universal life force. And we do that in four ways. The first is to breathe. It's like, oh God, are we going back to kindergarten? Yes, we are.

Shannon Cutts: 10:07

When we're in intuitive training, we have not been trained this way our whole lives. Most of us, anyway. We have been trained to tap into our intellectual left brain, rational, logical and analytical abilities and so, in that, maybe we've got a master's degree or even a doctorate in intuitive training. If you're anything like me, especially when I started, we're in kindergarten, so play along with me here. This is not I'm not trying to dumb down what you need to do. I'm actually trying to amplify it. I'm actually trying to take it right to the college level, because this is the core stuff. If you don't do this, everything else you do won't really make much impact. We need to breathe.

Shannon Cutts: 10:49

Every morning, I start my day by doing 10 minutes of neuro feedback training for my mind, and it trains my mind to stay in a certain highly present moment focus state. This is not just something for people with ADHD or people with trouble focusing or people with PTSD or trauma patterns that can interrupt and keep them trapped in the past or locked in on a future they don't want. This is a very practical skill that keeps us in the moment, aware and noticing right now. So all of the tips we talked about in part one of this series we need to be in the present moment, focused, aware, right here, right now in order to use any of them, to develop and use them. And so I start my day every day with neuro feedback training for the brain and what I've noticed is it starts us off, it starts me off in my training every day. We do a minute, we do six deep in breast and out breast, and this oxygenates the brain and this oxygenates the brain. Our brain needs oxygen to help convert messages into electrical impulses, to move them around the body. And I noticed that while I'm doing my 10 minutes of training, when I'm breathing in, the more I breathe in deeply, the more my brain activity spikes. If I want the little ball to move up into the higher neural processing realms on my screen, I need to breathe. If I stop breathing, the ball stops moving and it looks like a flat line.

Shannon Cutts: 12:26

Breath is vitally important for intuition. Our physical organism at the most fundamental level is mostly water and air. We don't have enough air and the next four of the four pillows, the pillar two, is water. We are not going to be very intuitive because our system is offline. We're not available. So part two is we need to drink water and I've got a big old bat of coffee here that Petal keeps trying to get into.

Shannon Cutts: 13:02

We both love it. Coffee is delicious, so we're all those energy drinks. I've got all kinds of stuff that I love. So is carbonated water. I love Topochico and all those wonderful aqua waters, but we need plain, purified water. Plain water is what our body runs on. Depending on what part of the body we're looking at, we're anywhere from 60 to 90% water. Our cells are mostly water, with just a tiny little bit of matter in the form of the nucleus and the DNA, and so we don't have water. If our cells are dried up and their walls are sticking to each other, they're not going to be interested in helping us deliver intuitive messages or transmitting electrical impulses, sending neural messengers to their little connection points. They're not going to be operating as a GPS for us. They're going to be struggling to survive. They can't breathe and they can't move. So when we drink water, we get everything flowing, and not only the stuff that just simply needs to be flowing to send and receive intuitive, subtle and sensory messages, but we also get the stuff that we don't need, that needs to get out of our body, the toxins. We get that stuff moving as well, and that relies on the third pillar, which is to move movement.

Shannon Cutts: 14:39

Now I learned something recently in one of the courses one of the many courses I'm taking which is that our circulatory system, the system of veins and arteries and vessels and capillaries and all that good stuff the circulatory system has its own in-belt pump in the form of our heart. Isn't that convenient? So it's working all the time. Even when we're asleep, even when we're not paying attention, even when we're not drinking water, even when we forget to breathe because we're stressed out and holding our breath, it's still pumping. Guess what system mirrors the circulatory system and does not have an in-belt pump? If you guess the lymphatic system, you already know where I'm headed.

Shannon Cutts: 15:24

The lymphatic system is the mirror system to the circulatory system. Its job is to move toxins out of the body, toxins like excess cortisol, which is the stress hormone, what the scientists call the silent killer. And this system does not have its own in-built pump, its motor. The only way we can get the lymphatic system moving is if we move, if we move our body. If you're watching the video version, you can see me moving crazy around on your screen right now. We've got to move.

Shannon Cutts: 16:01

If we don't move all that cortisol and all those other toxins just stay stuck, they marinate in there and they build up and then we get sick. We get sick physically, yes, but we also get sick in our heart. We get sick emotionally, we get sick relationally. We get stuck. Have you ever wondered why? You know that you need to do something different, or you know you need to make a change, or you know you need to keep going with X, y or Z, or you know you need to start A, b or C, but you don't do it and you just kind of feel stuck Like somebody's pressed pause in your life, in your motivation. You need to get up and move. This is also why, when students tell me I don't feel like I can hear the animals, I don't feel like I'm getting clearer messages, I see vague things. Or I hear vague things or I have vague sensations, but it's not clear.

Shannon Cutts: 17:01

We go back to the four pillars. How well is your sensory and intuitive system operating? Is every part of you online? Are you breathing? Are you drinking plain water, and enough of it? Are you moving, moving the toxins out of your body, moving the blood flow around your body, making sure that the oxygen you take in, that the water you take in is getting to every part of your system. Is every cell getting its fair share? Because if it's not, you're going to have limitations In terms of how your intuitive and sensory system, how well it can work for you. This is why I start every animal communication session that I do for pets and their people. It's why I start every animal communication course that I teach by breathing, by drinking water and by moving.

Shannon Cutts: 18:05

Usually, I like to do yoga. There's all kinds of movement that you can do. You can get up and walk around the block, you can walk around the house, you can do a few stretches. This doesn't have to be an Iron man or a triathlon, just move your body. Notice what's stuck. Right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm noticing that my lower back, which is a chronic kind of a pain point for me, has gotten kind of stuck in place and I'm moving it, getting some oxygen, getting some water, getting some lymphatic flow and getting some blood flow into this area to move the pain and to get things connected again. And so I do this before anything. That's important to me because I want to show up fully. I want to show up with all my systems online, which brings me to number four, and it's really hard for me to rank these. It's like, okay, without oxygen, we die. Without water, we die Without, with the buildup of toxins. If we don't move the toxins, we die. But here's the number one. It's probably first and that is rest.

Shannon Cutts: 19:10

There's this particular, very rare disorder some people get where they cannot sleep. They literally cannot sleep. I'm not talking about bipolar or anything like that. I'm talking about it's a disease where, like you, literally cannot sleep and people do not last long with this disease. We need it. We still don't fully understand why, but we need to sleep. We don't know if it's purely for physical repair and emotional repair, for it's to solidify neural connections. It's because there's other parts of us that want to travel to other dimensions where we're having different lives and different experiences and reconnecting. That's why I think sometimes I often see a lot of my departed loved ones when I'm dreaming, because I'm visiting them, you're visiting me. So we don't exactly know why. We don't need to know why. We have all the data we need to understand what happens when we don't rest, when we don't sleep. So that is certainly motivation enough If we're not rested, if you do not rest adequately for you, and only you know what that is for me.

Shannon Cutts: 20:09

I've always needed more sleep. It's frustrating, but that's just the way that I am wired. I need nine or 10 hours. I wish I was one of those people, like my mom, who can get by on six or seven, but I do not do well. So I have accepted, as best I can, that I need to stay in the bed longer and I use that time. I also do my meditations and I do my energy healing work on myself and on my animals when I am in the bed. If I need to be there might as well really rest, really rejuvenate, really rest, rejuvenate, really heal, really restore. So know what it is for you and then make a commitment to do it.

Shannon Cutts: 20:52

Maybe you don't have quite as many waking hours as you like, but the ones you have will be much more wildly productive than any of the ones that you had before. You can't get those hours back. If you're not sleeping as much as you need to, even if you think you can, you will have wasted waking hours. If you are not resting as much as you need to rest, you will not be able to hear the animals because your systems will be busy just keeping you awake. So we need air, oxygen, we need water, pure water we need movement movement that's right for you and your body, that is healthy for you and safe for you. And we need rest enough of it for you individually.

Shannon Cutts: 21:38

Those are the four pillars, so that's enough right there, like if I look at this whole series and the 10 tips that I'm offering to you from my own daily life practice and my intuitive, my professional intuitive practice the things that keep me online so I can be available when you need me, whether you want to learn animal communication, whether you need to talk to your pet here or in spirit, whether your animal needs healing or you need healing through Reiki and energy healing these are the things that I'm doing, that I'm busy with all day, every day behind the scenes, in addition to my courses and my continuing education and all that good in my personal life and all that good stuff. But honestly, I feel like if we just focused on this one, we'd have our hands full Just breathing drinking water, moving and resting. That's a full day's work right there. So that's why I want to start there and really want to anchor to that. It is so vitally important. My life has changed so profoundly by making these four things a priority.

Shannon Cutts: 22:37

The next tip I want to share with you is actually a really fun one for me. It's, and it's one that I really enjoy sharing with my animal communication students, because it almost always provokes a laugh, and that is to start sensing what's needed before it's needed. Start sensing into what you need, what another being needs, before there's any overt indication that that is correct, that what you're sensing is correct, that you are sensing correctly. Why does that provoke a laugh? It doesn't sound very funny. Well, because the way that I usually suggest it is to when you're approaching your houseplants, like if you're watching the video version, and you see this enormous houseplant right behind me and it's a very finicky monstera, fern, and it likes to be watered. When it likes to be watered, it doesn't like to be under watered, it doesn't like to be over watered, and if I don't do it correctly, it lets me know. And then here we are on the video with a bunch of raggedy leaves that are yellow and brown, and it's just.

Shannon Cutts: 23:51

It's really a great teacher for me, and so I just suggest to my students one of the great ways to practice your intuition every day is don't just water your houseplants on a schedule sense who needs watering before you go look in the pot and see what's going on. Or you go read the care instructions to see what the manufacturer or the distributor suggests the watering schedules should be before you power up your plant ID app and scan it to see how healthy it is. I have one of those ID apps and no matter what plant I scan, it tells me that my plants need care. So I know that there are things that that app doesn't know about even my healthiest plants. But I have so many different kinds, so many different species and varietals of houseplants and outdoor plants in our landscape, and each one needs something different, just like each human animal and each non-human animal in my family needs something a little different.

Shannon Cutts: 24:57

You may be keeping company with four dogs or five cats or 10 parrots or 15 turtles or seven humans. Each one is gonna need a different amount of water, a different amount of sunlight and air and movement and rest and all those good things. There are no cookie cutters in this world, and so this leaves intuition as the only reasonable path to take, the only logical path to pursue, and so just start experimenting with your houseplants. You can even ask them do you need water right now? Or I walk into your room sometimes and I've got three or four of them in there and I say, okay, who needs water? And I notice where my body moves, who do I spontaneous? Or I just find myself walking up to one and I'm like, wow, you're dry as a bone, sorry about that. And I go and I water it.

Shannon Cutts: 25:54

Same thing with fertilizer. You buy one of those little indoor plant fertilizer bottles and it tells you you need this much. You one squirt, two pumps, whatever, or every week, or only in the summer. I like to ask, I like to see where I go If I find myself just going over to that bottle and picking it up and giving somebody a pump. I know that that plant asked me for fertilizer.

Shannon Cutts: 26:18

So this is a great way to start practicing, especially since our plants tend to be a little more resilient than our animals or our people. If we don't get it perfectly right, they have to be. I mean, you watch plants thriving and cracks in the concrete on the sidewalk and you realize they've got a whole host of survival skills that we haven't even tapped into, we don't even know about. So plants are a great place to practice. They tend to be a little more forgiving and of course, you've always got the schedule to go back to, but so err on the side of caution. But I have found them to be very willing and eager teachers over the years and I have lots of houseplants that are doing really well.

Shannon Cutts: 26:59

So I haven't and I used to be like the plant killer. It was awful. I never remember to water them, I never. I didn't understand. I would read the feed instructions and I didn't compute. I didn't know what they meant by feed your plants. I thought they got everything. I guess I slept through biology and I thought they got everything from the environment. So now it's quite different. Now I have a whole. I have a heavy responsibility of taking care of plants, but they're all doing pretty well. So this is a really good place to just stretch your intuitive wings, so to speak.

Shannon Cutts: 27:36

You can also, once you start feeling confident with your houseplants, you can start with your animals as well. You know our docs and the vet said okay, feed this kibble and feed it twice a day and feed this amount. When I moved in here with my mom after my dad passed and my mom had a fall and I moved in here to kind of help with the house and help help, you know, care for her when she needs it intermittently. I found that that wasn't working for Flash at all and we have completely and utterly changed his diet. He now gets completely different diet. He gets fed more frequently. He gets lots of different kinds of things that the vet doesn't agree with.

Shannon Cutts: 28:16

To be quite honest, our traditional vet hasn't necessarily been on board with some of the things that we've tried. I'm using my intuition and Flash is losing weight that he needed to lose. He's more active. He's not having as much trouble with his code and allergies. We've even changed his shampoo. We've changed how we do bath time. He didn't like the tile on the floor in the shower the big shower where we bathe him and he asked for something that grassy. So I bought him a big thing of Astroturf and we hauled him there into the shower every time when it's bath day, and so there are so many things that your intuition can teach you and the professionals in your life, even the trainers and veterinarians.

Shannon Cutts: 29:06

They may not be on board with that, because not everyone who cares about animals and has something to offer is also training, an intuition. So just recognize that you know your animal best. You're the one who's interested in developing your intuition, and if you're interested in developing your intuition, then you must be interested in trusting it. And the only way to start trusting your intuition is to give it a try. And if that means saying no to something that a professional in your life has said yes to, within all safe boundaries, I encourage you to give it a try and trust that your animal may need something more or something different than what's been presented by the professionals who've gone through a certain type of training and have a certain protocol that they use that's more cookie cutter oriented. I have never wanted to say don't do what your vet tells you to do. I have never wanted to say that animal communication or anything that I do is a substitute or replacement for veterinary care. So don't get me wrong. But I'm just saying, if we're gonna develop our intuition, let's take it out for a test drive and let's start using it with the teachers and the willing co-conspirators that are right here in our lives, who love us and trust us, and see if we can't just make a positive difference in their life.

Shannon Cutts: 30:25

Now my next tip. It's also one of those tips where it was like I was really having trouble ordering these so I decided not to and I was just gonna like intuitively download them and see what I was gonna talk about first and next. So this next tip, this third tip for part two of our two part intuition series, is really about grounding yourself back to the energy of the planet that we live on and depend on for everything. It's so easy for us to kind of get in our own little self-contained world, in our artificial environments, with these fabricated four walls and this inset, these electrically generated lighting and all this. The artificiality of our environments are really not in tune with the seasons, we're really not in tune with the circadian rhythm, we're really not in tune with what's going on with all the other species that also live on this planet and depend on it for all things. And so one of the things that can help you the most when you're feeling like your intuition is not flowing or not there, maybe not even present at all, is to go back and reconnect.

Shannon Cutts: 31:36

Go outside as much as you possibly can, even take off your shoes, find a safe spot, even if it's on a patch of concrete or on some gravel or a sand bed or some dirt or a patch of grass. Take off your shoes, take off your socks or wear cotton socks because that's still naturally conductive and stand on the earth. Just stand on the earth. The earth emits a powerful electromagnetic frequency. You've ever watched flocks of birds flying overhead and they're headed to their destination, where they go every year, and you're thinking how on earth do you know how to get there, like some of them have never been there before? They're tuned in, they're tapped into the electricity, the energy, the magnetism, the frequency of the planet. They are using our earth like a giant GPS. We have it here on our phones courtesy of satellites. They don't need any of that fancy technology, they've got it inside them. This is how elephant matriarchs if you've ever watched those geographic specials where the senior elephant matriarch is the only one in the tribe in the herd who knows where the secret watering holes are that they absolutely must find or they will die they pass it on to the next senior matriarch and then the next senior matriarch to come. It's handed down, this information is handed down. They can find these watering holes that even us, with our most sophisticated instruments, would struggle. They can go, they can walk for miles on terrain that looks exactly uniform and totally the same. They can't see any differential, no landmarks, no maps, no, nothing. And they can find these watering holes. Their energy GPS is up and running, they're tuned in, they can sense subtle, subtle energetic and vibrational magnetic changes and they can find their way.

Shannon Cutts: 34:06

If we're feeling out of tune, out of touch, out of sync, just discombobulated or just out of whack, or like all of our car with four tires all pointing in different directions, one of the easiest fixes is just to go outside and stand on the earth with bare feet or with organic material. I have these sandals called grounders that I ordered from the same company that I ordered my grounding mat from. You can go out with them as well and you can stand on the earth. You can stand on the grass and you'll still be. It doesn't block the most of the shoes that we wear, even the synthetic material socks that we wear, blocks or dolls the magnetic connection. If we're not connected with all of the rest of life and the flow of life around us, we're missing a lot of messages, even if this sounds super woo to you and, of course, if you're still here and you're still hanging in with me. I'm going to assume that woo doesn't bother you. Maybe it even intrigues or inspires you. But don't take my word for it. Give it a try. Go out and do it someday.

Shannon Cutts: 35:18

When you're feeling really stressed or really distressed, go out and just stand on the ground. Or, if you can just lay down, let the crown of your head touch the earth, put your palms on the earth. If you can't stand on the earth with bare feet, then reach down and put your bare palms on the earth. Or if you live in an area where it's really hard to do that, or you live in a high rise where it takes 30 minutes to get downstairs, then buy yourself a grounding mat. They're not expensive. I put my bare feet on my grounding mat when I'm doing my sessions. If I'm not able to go outside because of noise or weather or whatever, then I just I put my bare feet on my grounding mat indoors. I'm connected. If I want to get really clear communication from your pet when you really need me to, I need to get grounded.

Shannon Cutts: 36:12

This is one of the fastest ways to realign yourself with the flow of life as it is right now. With the energy. It's like plugging your personal electrical cord back into the universal socket so that you are drawing from an energy source that is greater than you personally. It's going to support you, it's going to sustain you. It will even magnetically draw you through the tough challenges and the hard times and the indecision that we talked about in the last episode. It will draw you forward. It will activate your intuition for your highest and best good. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Tip number four we talked a little bit about this in the last episode, but one of the really cool ways I have started to develop my sensory awareness of intuition and how it flows in me and through me in my life and really just my tactile intuitive abilities.

Shannon Cutts: 37:24

When we're learning animal communication, we learn that information can flow through and through many different pathways. We've got our normal everyday outward facing senses our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth, our skin actually the biggest organ in our body and our gut brain, which is really where most of the messages originate. If you look at the vagus nerve which connects the brain, brain and the gut brain, most of the messages are flowing up. We know who's really in charge If we look at these organisms, we really are mostly focused on our outward facing senses. What do I see, what do I hear, what do I smell, what do I taste, what do I sense Sometimes? What are my vibes telling me? Even Then, there's this whole inward facing sensory capacity that we have that really doesn't get talked about unless you're actively studying intuition. This is what some people call the four clairs. Actually, there's many clairs.

Shannon Cutts: 38:17

Some people call it telepathy, some people call it the six sense or the spidey sense, or our vibes, or our gut instincts or our aha moments, whatever you want to call it. This is an inward facing aspect. It's part of, it's actually wired into our fight, fight freeze, tender, befriend system. Believe it or not, we tend to think of that system as the emergency response system that shuts us down. Yes, it absolutely has that function to keep us alive, to keep us lean, mean, lightweight, ready to stay alive. There's also this other aspect of it that allows us to receive urgent messages, timely messages, important messages.

Shannon Cutts: 39:04

I saw it activated when my father was in hospice and he was in a coma and he had a really severe medication reaction one night and he couldn't tell us what was going on. There was a whole team gathered around him care workers, nurses, doctors, my mom, me I was able to receive intuitive messages from him. I was very new at the time to this ability. I was going through rakey attunement and training at the time. I was pretty new to it. I was getting reattuned. I had been attuned in my 20s and just kind of forgotten about it. It was really just like sort of reactivating a system that had been dormant for many, many, many moons. It really shocked me at first when I realized I was getting intuitive sensory messages from my dad. Over the course of a few hours, something overtook me and it spoke through me in a very robotic voice. It took three and a half hours I thought it was about 15 minutes. I was able to tell all the care workers exactly what to do to help my dad get through this medication reaction and get him back to a calm, comfortable state. It was really amazing.

Shannon Cutts: 40:22

It started with reactions in my physical body. The first thing that happened is I got very physically nauseated. I dropped to the floor and I said I think I'm going to throw up Right as my mom was running to get a bucket. I realized it's not me, it's dad. Over the course of the three and a half hours my body started to unkink and uncurl. By the time we were on the track to him, getting him comfortable and calm again, my body had relaxed enough to where I was laying flat on the floor. It was an amazing thing to witness. It's something that hasn't happened to me too often in life where I have had this incredible physical response in an extreme emergency state.

Shannon Cutts: 41:15

I'm not sharing that to suggest that that is the only way that this can work for you. Far from it. Again we get to the point where we're open enough that, instead of what I shared with you in the last episode, where I used to get these big booming voice in the sky messages because those were the only messages that I was available to hear you had to really yell at me to get my attention Now it's much more subtle. Since that experience, my dad, from the spirit side, has become one of my most powerful intuitive teachers. I've learned that I could pay attention to my own body to notice what my intuition is trying to tell me. This again, it can be, if you're at all familiar with applied kinesiology, or what some people call energy testing or muscle testing, if you're familiar with nonverbal communication, which if you've taken any speech classes, like me.

Shannon Cutts: 42:05

I was a marketing major in college and I had to go through public speaking training and all that they talk about nonverbalists. Well, just use more gestures or just make eye contact, or pick one person in the back of the room or imagine nobody's wearing any clothes or whatever it is. There's a lot more there. Nonverbal communication is 90% of the communication. For a reason, I always wondered why our teachers would tell us that, oh yeah, verbal communication is 10% and nonverbal is 90%. Then they'd spend all the rest of their time on the 10%. I'm like I want to learn more about the 90%. So that's what we're doing here.

Shannon Cutts: 42:40

We're starting to notice our own body, because our own body is giving us cues all the time about what's going on in our intuitive universe. That includes how we're feeling, how we're reacting, what we should be doing next, and then next, the next step. Then they talk about the next, take the next step and then the one beyond that will appear. Well, which way should I step? Should I step forward? Should I step to the side? Should I step back? Should I step on this surface or that surface, or should I take a big step or a small step?

Shannon Cutts: 43:18

We can start to notice our body, notice your body language, notice whether you're making eye contact, notice whether others are making eye contact, notice how you're feeling. Have you ever been in conversation with someone? Even though everything seems the conversation is interesting and everything seems to be above board, you're just getting icky vibes. You're just like I'm not liking this. You cannot put your finger on why, and nobody else around you validates what you're feeling either. Because they're not tuned into their intuitive system, they're not tuned into the nonverbal, they're not tuned into their vibes, to their gut instincts, to their intuition. Everybody is like what's wrong with you, you're not comfortable with that person, but he's so nice, she's so nice, it's like I don't know, I'm just not. You have a choice whether you're going to trust that or not. So you can even notice that just something as simple as if you're talking to someone and your body just starts to lean back this is something that the energy applied kinesiology practitioners also look at is like the body leaning back is kind of the equivalent of an energetic no, or at the very least a yellow light vibe, a weight for more information, whereas the leaning forward is the equivalent of a green light vibe, where we're looking at go, move forward and move closer. So start to notice how your body moves. Even I'm not necessarily just talking about in conversation, but even have there been times where something's happened or something's not happened, like when you're noticing that your parrot, who just happens okay, I just noticed. Or you're watching the video version. I was like where did she go? You notice your parrot is very, very quiet and you think I need to go, I need to get up, I need to go check.

Shannon Cutts: 45:19

My mom tells the story of when I was little. She was in another room and all of a sudden she just noticed that she wasn't hearing any noise from me and she got up and it was like all of a sudden, the silence itself was noisy to her. She got up and she found me. I used to have this thing where I wanted to climb my own dresser doors and I would like pull out the doors and try to climb into one, and I just had no concept that this thing could follow her on me and literally kill me, because it was heavier than I was, and she found me just about to tip it over. I was climbing it up and it's like that is an example. You just start to notice her body. Even it was like her listening ears, it was like she was. So start to notice how your body's moving. I just share these stories as examples from my own life. You can kind of try it on for size and just see if you ever noticed that you're.

Shannon Cutts: 46:12

When I met my Pearl, my soul bird and I talked about in the last episode, and my hand just spontaneously reached out to him, I was like everything in me was like no, I don't want another parrot, I don't want to fall in love again. I'm going to get hurt again. What if they die? What if something get hurt? What if we're separated? I mean, I just couldn't handle it and my hand just moved.

Shannon Cutts: 46:32

Now, when I'm intuitively connecting whether I'm in meditation I'm connecting with my higher self, or I'm connecting with an animal, one of your animals, or I'm guiding students to connect with an animal A lot of times I'll notice my right hand will just start to lift. That's a little weird. I'm not going to lie. The first few times it happened I was like do I need to tell somebody about this? This has gotten a strange. But now I just kind of recognize it. I have one student she just cries. When she connects, she, her heart opens and she cries. It's not like oh God, something's wrong with the animal, she just cries. That's just her way. I have another student who gets kind of a tingle on her head or skin starts to kind of tingle. Another one of mine is I get goosebumps when I'm talking with an animal. Intuitively, I just start to get goosebumps when they're putting an exclamation point after what they're saying.

Shannon Cutts: 47:21

The more you notice what's going on in your body, the more you will notice and the more you will realize that what you're noticing is trustworthy information. So I want you to give this a try to spend the next week or so noticing what's going on in your body and acting on it, making a decision just for right now. You don't have to do it for the whole day, but just for right now. I'm going to trust that this information has something for me, that it's valid, I'm going to act on it and I'm going to see what happens next. And then my final tip for you in this two-part series on how to tune into your trust and follow your intuition in this wonderful, pivotal tipping point year of 2024 is to take a break. Take a break.

Shannon Cutts: 48:14

This can be very heavy stuff. This can actually be very heavy stuff. It can be heavy in the heart. We want, especially if you're like me and you're like, oh, I want my intuition to really turn on. I'm going to take this course and I'm going to do this and I'm going to practice all day and I'm going to meditate and I'm going to say, oh, my goodness, suddenly you're no fun at all and you're stressed yourself out. And if there's one thing I've learned over many, many, many years and decades now, as although I don't have time to do it anymore, but as a songwriter and as a musician, and I've learned that if I try to force creativity, which is essentially intuition intuition taps into the same sensory pathways as imagination and creativity, because what we're doing is we're bringing new information to light that we cannot access any other way.

Shannon Cutts: 49:13

One of the things I talk with my animal communication students with over and over and over and over again, is that the left brain logical, analytical, rational mind has its place, but it can only exist in two places the past or the future. You cannot access intuition in the past or the future. All you can access are memories and projections. So if you're looking for your intuition in your left brain, rational, logical, analytical mind, you will be looking forever and you will never find it. What you need to do is anchor in now and now and again.

Shannon Cutts: 49:56

Believe it or not, but this taps into your fight, fight, please, tend or befriend sympathetic nervous system, the same one that we think is locked in our so-called reptilian brain somewhere. That system is the system that is the bringer of new information, information that is vital, information that is needed right now, information that will keep us alive. These sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. They're treated as enemies, really, or frenemies at best. They're treated as opposites. Actually, they work in synchrony. They have different pathways and they have different functions, but they're partners, they're best friends, they're equally valuable to us, and one of the things that the fight, fight, freeze, tend to befriend sympathetic nervous system is really good at is anchoring us in right now. That's who it almost puts blinders on us like.

Shannon Cutts: 51:00

I am right here right now. Tell me what I need to do next to stay alive, and that's the same place that we need to be to capture information that's coming through right now, in the present moment. Treat every conversation, treat every step as if this is the most important conversation you've ever had. This is the most important step that you've ever taken. And how does that relate to taking a break, you might ask? Taking a break freeze us up to be in the present moment. Taking a break, freeze us up to walk away from the gridlock of all these systems? Well, especially this is especially true when we're trying really hard to learn something new. When we're trying, we're efforting, we really, really, really want it so much that we're actually actively repelling it away from us.

Shannon Cutts: 52:00

So many times for me as a songwriter, and then later as a copywriter, and now as a writer, writer and a course creator and a podcast hostess, I have discovered that the only way the I can get the information flowing again is to walk away to take a break, whether that's to go place my palms or the soles of my feet on the earth, whether it's to take a shower. I love this. One Intuitive teacher, sonia Schoket, is a big fan of showers and baths with Epsom salts, detoxifying lavender and Yang Yang and some of these wonderful essential oils, to just the energy of water, the flow, the quality of water. Just take a break and go run your hand. Another one of my intuitive teachers, jill Fubuster, talks about just allowing you. Just place your hand under the under a stream of water and just feel it. What's the temperature, what's the quality, what's the texture? How fast is it flowing? How does it feel? What part of my hand is getting the most force from the water? So many different questions that we can ask that. Just really focus our mind.

Shannon Cutts: 53:17

Just go take a walk, go play with your dog or your cat or your parrot or your turtle or your bunny or your guinea pig or your pig or your horse or your goats or your sheep. Aren't there so many wonderful animals in the world? Your chameleon, your bearded dragon? So aren't we so lucky to have all these wonderful animals that we share our lives with? Just take a break. I wouldn't be at all surprised, the very first time you try this, that you have a major intuitive breakthrough.

Shannon Cutts: 53:49

But again, don't take my word for it. Give it a try. If you're wrestling with a decision and you're like I am going to do this or else that is the right moment to get up and walk away from it, like I can't, cannot move from the spot until I make a decision, that is the right moment to get up and move from that spot. Walk around the block, walk around the tree in your front yard, go get a cup of coffee or drink a glass of water. Do a stretch or two. Put your palms on the earth, get nose to nose with your pet. Synchronize your breathing, feel your heart beating. Watch something funny on YouTube. Reread a favorite passage from a book. Do some yoga. Play with a toy whenever too old to enjoy toys. Go ask your houseplants if they need water or food or sunlight or whatever they need, and just take a breather. Give yourself a minute.

Shannon Cutts: 54:51

We started this podcast series by giving ourselves a minute. Let's close out this podcast series by giving ourselves a minute. We always deserve a minute, a moment to breathe, to hydrate, to move, to rest, to be. Your intuition is your best friend and your partner, and it is always there for you, and there are so, so, so many ways that you can be friend, that you can connect with it, that you can learn from it and that you can enjoy all that it has to offer you and the ones that you love, and all of us. Every, every human animal who activates their intuitive system is a blessing to all of us Because it adds more intuitive energy. It adds the energy of inspiration, of creativity, of new possibilities, of expansion, of emergence to a world that desperately, desperately needs it and truly appreciates it. So thank you for joining me on this two part learning journey to kick off 2024. I am grateful to be your friendly neighborhood woo woo hostess for Let's Talk to Animals podcast to podcast all species can enjoy together.

Shannon Cutts: 56:18

If you're interested in working with me, please do head over to animallovelanguages. com and just hit on the green schedule button at the top and you can. You can get your session scheduled if you would like to study with me and learn animal communication directly. People to talk with your own pets living in in spirit. Be able to talk with other other human animals and their pets, their beloved pet companions, to be able to talk with wild animals in our wild planet, head over to animallovelanguagescom, back slash, enroll and you can find two free mini classes as building blocks, stepping stones if you will, to the big journey that will set you on a path of being able to communicate with all life with confidence and clarity. It's my honor.

Shannon Cutts: 57:07

If you have topics you'd love to hear about, please do let me know. Drop a comment in the show notes. If you have time to give this podcast a review, please do. It really helps us elevate and emerge through the throngs of podcasts that are now flooding the airwaves and just have a little more visibility. If you have a friend who would enjoy learning more about their intuition, please do share this episode and bookmark us. Every two weeks she'll be hearing from me and I look forward to hearing from you. Okay, may your 2024 kickoff brightly, brilliantly and with so much blessing and so much love. Okay, all my love. Bye for now. We'll see you soon.