Keeping In Touch With Your Intuition: Dr Jeffrey L Gurian On How to Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions
An Interview With Maria Angelova
Trust yourself when you have a strong feeling about someone or something. You will find that your initial feeling is usually correct, especially when it’s about another person, or a new person who wants to enter your life.
Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Where does intuition come from? Can it be trusted? How can someone tune in to their intuition? To address these questions, we are talking to business leaders, coaches, mental health experts, authors, and anyone who is an authority on “How to Get In Touch With Your Intuition And When To Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jeffrey L. Gurian.
Dr. Jeffrey L. Gurian is a 20 year Board member of The Assoc. for Spirituality and Psychotherapy, and a former Clinical Prof. at NYU in Oral Medicine and Oro-Facial Pain. He’s also a motivational speaker and an Amazon best-selling author with 8 books, the last three on Happiness, mindset, and changing negative thinking to positive thinking. He’s also one of the only doctors with a long-standing career in comedy, having worked with some of the biggest comedy stars in the biz, and is considered a thought leader on Happiness.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I was a very sensitive child. I didn’t know yet that I was an empath. I was a severe stutterer from the age of 6 or 7 through my 20’s and beyond, until I realized one day that I didn’t stutter when I was alone. That told me that my stuttering wasn’t real but something I had created. I worked on myself for years to kind of take my mind apart and examine my thoughts, and I developed a cure for stuttering which I used to cure myself, and now as an avocation, I work with stutterers all over the world.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite quote is “You can’t change your past. The only thing you can change is your perspective of your past!” This was very relevant for me in learning how to release the ” heart wounds” we carry in our heart chakra that we start collecting as children. Any time someone hurts your feelings, lies to you, breaks a promise to you, or breaks up with you in a relationship, we carry that hurt inside of us and I call them “heart wounds.” These heart wounds affect our self-esteem, our self-confidence and every decision we make in our lives, because they cause us to have thoughts that are not valid for us, thereby leading to poor decisions.
One of the talks I give is called “Don’t Believe Your Thoughts” because these negative thoughts often cause us to make poor decisions in our lives. Every time we have an important decision to make we think about what we should do. And if some of your thoughts are “in-valid” or negative about ourselves, invariably our decisions won’t work out.
It’s the reason that people see recurrent patterns in their lives, like the same bad job or the same bad relationship, over and over again, and the only common denominator is them! They are the ones that keep showing up. All the other people are different.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much? The book by psychic Marcy Calhoun called “Are You Really Too Sensitive?”
It confirmed to me that I was an empath. I had written to her to tell her the effect her book had on me and surprisingly I didn’t hear back from her. Two years later a friend asked me to try and do Healing work on his brother who was in a coma and dying from a serious illness at only 35 years old. I had never done Healing work for anything so serious before, but I felt I couldn’t say no.
To make a long story short I went and worked to strengthen his heart Chakra and the first night his chances went from 10% to 20%. The next night his chances went from 20% to 30% and I got really nervous because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I didn’t want his family to think his life was in my hands. The next night my Dad went into the hospital with something serious and of course I had to be with my Dad.
That weekend I was overcome with sadness. A kind of sadness I had never felt before. I felt hopeless and empty, and almost suicidal. I found out that young man had passed away. In the midst of this my phone rang and it was Marcy Calhoun, two years after I wrote that letter to her.
She said as a psychic, she felt I needed to hear from her at that moment, and she explained to me that as an empath I internalized that young man’s sadness because he felt that he let his family down by dying so young. She told me to go to the funeral home and tell him that it was ok. The wake was that night, and I attended, and approached the casket and told him it was ok and my sadness was lifted. Marcy Calhoun and I have stayed in touch ever since. I often recommend her book when I appear as a motivational speaker.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s begin with a definition of terms so that each of us and our readers are on the same page. What exactly does intuition mean? Can you explain?
The dictionary says “intuition is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning; or a thing that one knows or considers from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.”
I can only explain what intuition means to me. It’s a feeling or a sense of what you should do next when you have a decision to make about a path in your life or about a person.
How would you define common sense? Are intuition and common sense related?
Common sense Is just using your knowledge to come to what should be a foregone, or obvious conclusion. There’s only one way to look at the situation so the solution is just to use “common sense.” It’s not related to intuition because intuition is trusting a feeling about what you should do when there is more than one choice.
How are they different from each other?
As I explained, common sense is where there is an obvious solution where Intuition means “trusting your gut” due to a certain sense or feeling on which way to go when there is more than one possible choice.
What are the positive aspects of being in touch with your intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
The only positive aspects of being in touch with your intuition is if your intuition has led you in the right direction. I don’t think you can always rely on intuition. Your feeling could be incorrect.
In my own life in my early days of doing Healing work I discovered the music of Steven Halpern, considered “the Father of New Age Music.” As I often did in those days, my intuition told me to try and contact Steven and tell him how much his music meant to me and how much it helped me with my work. At the time I was a Clinical Prof. at NYU in the Oral Medicine/Oro-Facial Pain Dep’t. and I was using “Energy” work along with his music, to relieve Migraine-type headaches caused by Bruxism (clenching and grinding the teeth due to stress.)
I wrote to Steven to tell him all that and once again as with Marcy Calhoun, I didn’t hear back from him.
Earlier this year I got a message on my phone from a man who said he was responding to a letter he got 20 YEARS AGO! It was Steven Halpern and he had never seen my letter until recently. He said an assistant must have opened it and filed it away thinking it wasn’t important. Now he was working on his memoirs and found the letter and was so moved by it that he tracked me down. Fortunately, my phone number was the same.
We spoke for quite a while and developed a relationship. He was very impressed with my work and my books and said he wanted to put music to my words. I created a Guided Meditation and he put music to it and now thanks to trusting my intuition, I have a project with Steven Halpern. It took 20 years but it’s an amazing story and now my words are on his website and the Guided Meditation is called “Journey To Your Heart.”
A second example involved personal safety. I was a little late in leaving the house one day for a meeting when my landline phone started to ring. I was already at my open door, and had to make a split-second decision whether to answer it or not. My intuition told me to answer it. I did and took the call, then hurriedly left the house and took the elevator 16 floors down to the street.
When I got to the corner to cross the street, a car had just gone out of control, ran up on the sidewalk and crashed into my apartment building right where I would have been waiting to cross the street. A little child was lying on the ground who fortunately was not badly hurt. I can’t remember who it was on that phone call but stopping to take that phone call probably saved me from being severely injured or worse, as I was rushing to get to that very corner.
Are there negative aspects to being guided by intuition? Can you give a story or example to explain what you mean?
People tend to make choices that are in their own benefit and can blame it on intuition. It’s like asking for G-d’s will and then using your own will because that’s what you really want to happen.
Can you give some guidance about when one should make a decision based on their intuition and when one should use other methods to come to a decision?
From a Spiritual perspective, intuition can be thought of as doing G-d’s will. We are given Free Will which allows us to make our own choices and make our own mistakes.
When I first started studying Spirituality, I asked clergymen how to know what G-d’s will is for you and how you can distinguish it from your own will. They told me that when you have to make an important decision and you ask for G-d’s will to guide you, even if what you choose is not what you wanted but it makes you feel calm afterwards then that was God’s will for you. If your choice makes you feel nervous, it was probably YOUR will!
From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that hold someone back from trusting their intuition?
My answer is geared towards women mostly. My experience is that women’s intuition is not just a cliché. It’s very real. I feel that women function on a higher plane than men and are comfortable feeling their feelings except for the fact that society very often tries to tell women that they are too sensitive.
They are just as sensitive as they are supposed to me. Sensitivity is not a weakness. It’s a great strength. It’s just that there are people who will try and manipulate you because of your sensitivity, and you must learn to censor your life from such people.
Here is the central question of our discussion. What are five methods that someone can use to become more in touch with their intuition?
1 . Learn to meditate or “go within” when you have an important decision to make.
2 . Ask The Universe for guidance and then listen. You will always get an answer to any question you ask. You may not get it when you expect it or in the order you ask but you will always get an answer.
3 . Trust yourself when you have a strong feeling about someone or something. You will find that your initial feeling is usually correct, especially when it’s about another person, or a new person who wants to enter your life.
4 . Using your intuition is like using a muscle. The more you use it the stronger it gets. Try it out and see how it works for you. That’s the best way to become more in touch with it.
5 . Try ignoring your intuition and see how that works out for you!
You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would inspire a movement of kindness. If people were kinder to each other it would be a much nicer world. When I was in the hospital with Covid Double Pneumonia in March of 2020 when it first came out, I experienced the power of kindness starting with the two ambulance workers dressed in Hazmat suits that came to take me to the hospital. One of them took my hand and said to me, “ Don’t worry you’re going to be ok.” And I can’t tell you what that little act of kindness did for me. I had been alone and very sick for two weeks before I had to call an ambulance. No one could come to visit me. It was too dangerous. I felt very weak and very alone. And he was amazed that I could get on the stretcher myself. He said that most people needed to be carried.
Then there was the attention of the nurses who were only allowed in my room one at a time but a couple of whom held my hand and told me it would be ok. And then there were the literally hundreds of people I didn’t even know who sent me prayers and messages when my situation was revealed on Sirius XM radio. It was on a show I had been a regular on for two years bringing on celebrity comedians/friends like Trevor Noah, D.L. Hughley, Artie Lange, and Colin Quinn.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why?
Maybe we can tag them and see what happens! Gary Vaynerchuk known as Gary Vee because so many people have been telling me that we should know each other. Three different people on his staff approached me at different times at separate events to introduce themselves, and tell me that Gary and I should know each other because we carry a similar message. I was actually invited to his offices at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, to do a podcast which I did but he wasn’t there that day, and I drove two hours to meet him at an event at his father’s wine store, but it was too crowded and I had to leave. So I would like to meet Gary Vee. Maybe he’ll read this and make it happen!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I have a large online presence and people can Google me or look at my websites at https://www.comedymatterstv.com, or www,stopstutteringnowgurian.com There is also my Happiness Channel on You Tube where you can see my Five Things video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7ejkRDGjvU
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
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