You Were Born With 64 Senses. Here’s Why You Only Use a Few

Tingles up your spine.

A sick feeling in your gut.

Sparkles at the edges of your vision.

They mean three different things. But no one taught us in grad school how to translate subtle sensations. Honestly, even most intuitive training systems can’t tell you the difference.

When I met my Apache teacher, Maria Yraceburu, I finally met a teacher who knows the difference. She learned the map of the eight atmospheric layers of your energy body when she was still a kid. She practiced using all eight of her sensory layers, growing up on the White Mountains Reservation, in order to track and hunt rabbits. She sat with her great-grandfather who used the eight sensory layers of the art of Ya’Odishido (sensual telepathy) as a part of everyday life - the best way to get things done.

Recently, I sat to have an inspiring conversation with her on this topic, which you can hear as a podcast episode on Channel Your Genius podcast. But I want to give you the low-down right here, because it’s important.

Mental telepathy, says Maria, won’t get you very far. It’s limited to the mind. The more useful perceptions for healing, for connecting, for finding what you need- these come when you can feel, track, and leverage the subtle sensations that your body uses to speak to you.

A lot of us have general tags for this stuff: My intuition says this. My gut says that.

But what am I actually feeling?

What I love about learning this from Maria is that she is mapping the woo. Not dumbing it down or turning it into a cute little chart. Actually tracking what’s what.

Her family has been tracking these layers for generations, and the way she teaches is experiential. We learn through feeling (not just thinking) the body, the land, the sensation, and the relationship.

Maria talks about the difference between intellect, intuition, and instinct, and she keeps correcting how most of us collapse instinct into fight-or-flight. It’s not that. Instinct is the body’s language. It’s primal, often subtle, sensation.

In a world where we think every pain or pinch or tension is “wrong,” it’s a real turnaround to hear what Maria suggests:

Don’t run from your sensations. Find out what they mean.

Because we do run. We receive a sensation and think we are getting sick, spinning out, or becoming too much. We feel something move in the body and immediately want to manage it, explain it, or make it socially acceptable.

But what if the sensation has information?

If you are sensitive enough to feel the room, the client, the decision, and the stress-frequency of the humans around you, that’s a lot to be carrying around untranslated.

Maria talked about decision-making as ordering the different intelligences. She starts with the body: How does even talking about this make me feel? Then intuition, guides, and the otherworldly layer come in. Then the intellect helps put the puzzle together so an actual decision can be made in actual life, with money, calendars, and people involved.

And the land is part of the conversation.

Maria shared how, when she is out on the land, she may suddenly stop because sensation tells her an offering needs to be made for connection. Maybe there’s a snake on the trail. Maybe a layer of history wants to open and reveal itself in the landscape. She talks about rubbing your hands together, then finding a power spot on the land through feeling instead of your thinking mind.

And when you find that spot through feeling and not the intellect, you can sit there for hours and never get tired. As she said, it is like Mom says, “This is your place. I’m ready to hold you here. I got a spot for you.”

That’s a powerful co-creative relationship with the body, the land, the higher intelligence.

And it makes me think about stress differently.

Life is supposed to be challenging, but it is not supposed to be stressful. - Ten Bears (Maria’s great grandfather)

I recognize how much stress I still hold in my body and field, even with all my practices. Ugh.

Maria notes that this world is vibrating on a frequency of stress right now. We humans are saturated in stress, overwhelmed with so much sensation.

When we collapse every sensation into one overwhelmed pile, we miss what’s actually in there. This one’s the stress one. This one’s a message. This one over here is just me needing a glass of water and lunch, because I’m still a mammal! It’s a lot to navigate when you don’t know how to map your senses.

So how do we learn to map and track and use all these sensations in a good way?

Ironically, Maria suggests we start with “I don’t know.”

And yes, this requires humility.

The kind Maria gave us straight, with no fancy spiritual outfit on it:

Can you allow yourself to say, “I don’t know. Show me what I need to know”?

That may be the hardest thing for modern intuitive people - especially those of us who wake up to our supernatural stuff and make ourselves important real fast. We decide we have the truth. We stop hiring mentors, stop entering rooms where someone can challenge us, and then wonder why we got stuck. Whoops! Spiritual arrogance. Yah. Been there done that. But I’ve also had Maria around me for the past 25 years or so to give me the mom-look or the protocol-correction I needed to get humble and become empowered.

It’s easy to get arrogant thinking you know everything when you’re overeducated and people always say you’re smart and now you can ask your cellphone to do all the research you want.

But there are cosmologies, like Maria’s, that have been tracking and using the invisible subtle stuff of energy for thousands of years. And there are still a few teachers like Maria, who teach these arts to those who are ready to learn them. I will continue to sit at her feet and learn for as long as I can. Because the applications of this art of Ya’Odishido are endless. And there is a real danger that this modern world is forgetting the natural art of sensation that is most natural to us, most powerful for us, and most important in co-creating directly with spirit and earth.

I recently sat down with Maria for a conversation on Channel Your Genius about Ya’Odishido, sensory intelligence, and learning the language of the body. Listen to the full episode if you want to experience the deeper layers of this teaching.

https://channelyourgenius.com/blog/2026/indigenous-energy-healing