Magical Consciousness & Intuition

This essay explores what it means to cultivate intuition, not as a mysterious gift but as a way of perceiving the world differently. It reflects on twenty-five years of embodied practice, shamanic training and nature connection, and asks how we might rediscover a more participatory, enchanted relationship with everyday life.

For many years I intensely workshopped, travelled to meet different teachers in Europe and even in the US. I worked with shamanic, dance and dream teachers, and diligently applied the tools and techniques I learned in my everyday life. Instead of just ‘participating’ in workshops, I prioritised the integration of insights, as one of the most essential things I pay attention to in life. From cultivating new skills and choosing different behaviour, I am now fully anchored in a different world view.

Most shamanic and druidic apprenticeships take between 17 and 21 years to ‘steep’ in the medicine you’re learning and not just open different windows into reality but steadily integrate new foundations. From my shamanic teacher Jonathan Horwitz I learned how to expand my consciousness, and ask nature a question. Active dreaming teacher Robert Moss speaks of opening yourself to synchronicity, to ask life your questions and see what comes back.

Perhaps the biggest thing I learned was to cultivate a different way of seeing, as if all I witness is an answer to the question I ask that day or week, or offers an insight in a situation I’m living at that time. It’s like building a personal 'library’ of symbolic meanings. When I see a Darter or Dragon Fly roam the air just above the water it shows my healing teacher is involved - my answer might lie in that direction. When I observe the river flowing from source to sea I am reminded of the bigger picture and connect to the river of time. When I recognise symbols in the clouds I might remember a dream. These ‘observations’ mean something to me - and will mean something different to you as you are building your own references and connections.

This way of being hasn’t disconnected me from the scientific or cognitive paradigm and pedagogy, but it has widen my perception to being with life. It has given me a stronger muscle to expand and contract my consciousness, to formulate clear questions to life, and then be open to answers, to be present to the symbolic, archetypal language that nature is offering us all the time.

People often ask me if that is the same as intuition. I don’t really know where intuition comes from, if that is something coming from inside of you, a connection to your higher self, or to a larger source of wisdom still that exists within and all around us.

Intuition can be a flash of insight that comes unasked, magically bubbling up from nowhere. You reach for something and suddenly your hand stops. In the supermarket you spontaneously add an unusual product, and on coming home you finding out that that was exactly what your partner needed. Taking a different turn on a familiar road, and later realising there was a traffic jam on your normal route.

So intuition is often linked to a gut feeling, an instinctual sense of knowing without being able to explain why. But if we look at the root of the word, from the Latin intuitio, from the verb intueri, it means “to look at,” “to gaze upon,” “to contemplate,” or even “to keep one’s eyes fixed on.” So at its root, intuition is about a particular kind of seeing. It is an attentive gaze, that is receptive to information.

Strengthening my intuition always sounds a bit airy-fairy to me, but perhaps that is exactly what I have been doing all these years, without even knowing it! It is about being available to perceive a deeper layer of connection, living in a worldview in which there is no separation and everything is connected.

Scholars like Christian de Quincey and Susan Greenwood call this expanded mode of awareness or perception participatory consciousness, magical consciousness. In my 2017 publication Re-Discovering the Enchanted Garden, I explored the role of improvised, conscious movement in nature as a way of reclaiming this direct experience of the metaphysical. I discuss aspects of the body and embodiment such as awareness, alignment, presence and connection. I zoom in on specific ingredients of improvised movement as a way of negotiating the unknown and waking up to the sacred all around us. When you bring this practice out into nature, you too can participate in an enchanted world.

This is not to put on rose-coloured spectacles and deny or repress current global affairs or our responses to them. However, this connection can serve as an antidote so we can navigate fear, frustration, overwhelm and anger, in a different, perhaps more healthy and connected way. You can read more about this in my previous essay on Medicine for These Times.

The Wild Kin Collective I started two months ago, offers simple nature reflections and practices to find your way back to this sacred connection. Metaphorically, I see it as different streams flowing to a pool where creatures (human and more than human) gather to drink. It is about experiencing another way of being with your health, your dreams, your symbols that creates meaning, that brings connection, that gives a respite of the hustle and bustle and pressures and rat race of every day.

Our next monthly meeting is on 31 July. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll send you the Zoom link (or you can simply sign up right away!)

Christian de Quincey: Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness through Relationship, Park Street Press, 2005

Susan Greenwood: The Anthropology of Magic, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2009.

Eline Kieft: A Personal Relationship with the Mysteries. (Re)discovering the Enchanted Garden Through Movement and the Body. Théologiques 25/1 (2017) p. 139-154. (DM me for a pre-print copy!)

Eline Kieft: Dancing in the Muddy Temple. A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body, Lexington Books, 2022 (Link to 30% discount)

If you’re yearning for conscious movement in community too, here are some Wild Soul Ways:

Wild Kin Collective (weekly prompts and 7 yearly meetings)

Qi Gong Studio (4 classes weekly, live on zoom and via replays - 14 days free!)