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November/December 2003 Living Now
The Power Of Intuition

by Dr. Judith Orloff

Dr. Judith Orloff

I’m a psychiatrist and intuitive. What I do isn’t my job. It’s my life’s passion. With patients, I listen with my intellect and my intuition, a potent inner wisdom that goes beyond the literal. I experience it as a flash of insight, a gut feeling, a hunch, a dream.

Now, listening to intuition is sacred to me, but learning to trust it has taken years. I’ve described the experiences in detail in my memoir Second Sight, which is meant to assure anyone who thought they were weird or crazy for having intuitive experiences that they are not!

I grew up in Beverly Hills the only daughter of two-physician parents with twenty-five physicians in my family. From age nine, I had intuitions that would come true. I could predict illness, earthquakes, deaths. This confused and alarmed me and my parents. Eventually my mother forbade me to mention any of my other intuitions at home. So I grew up ashamed of my abilities.

Luckily, many people pointed me to my true calling as physician. In the sixties I got involved with drugs trying to block my intuitions out. Following a car accident at sixteen when I tumbled over a treacherous Malibu cliff, my parents forced me to see a psychiatrist. This man "saw" me--not who he wanted me to be, but who I was. He taught me to value my intuition, and referred me to Dr. Thelma Moss, a intuition researcher at UCLA, my first mentor. While working with Thelma I had an amazing dream which announced, "You’re to become an MD to legitimize intuition in medicine."

When I awoke, I felt like someone was playing a practical joke on me. I’d never liked science, and I was bored around my parent’s doctor-friends. I was a hippie living with my artist-boyfriend in Venice Beach, selling towels in the May Company. The last thing I envisioned doing was medicine. But because I was beginning to trust my intuition, I enrolled in one class. This led to fourteen years of medical training at USC and UCLA.

During my training I avoided the intuitive world. Traditional psychiatry equates visions with psychosis. I’d keep seeing psychotics strapped to gurneys, accompanied by cops with guns. These patients professed to hear God, to be psychic, and also were psychotic. No one tried to sort through this mishmash of claims. Instead these patients were shot up with Thorazine. Seeing this so often, I doubted whether it was safe to integrate my intuitions in medicine.

When I opened my psychiatric practice, it was strictly traditional. But soon I had a heart-wrenching wake-up call--an intuition that a patient was going to make a suicide attempt. Because she was doing well--nothing supported my hunch--I dismissed it. Soon she overdosed on the antidepressants I’d prescribed and ended up in a coma for a month. (Had she not survived I would’ve been devastated.) The hardest part, though, was feeling that I’d harmed her by not listening to my intuition. This was intolerable for me, and I knew, as a responsible physician, I had to integrate my intuitions into my work.

My journey to bring intuition into my medicine had begun. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I put out a silent prayer to the universe to help me. Soon, I began meeting people who showed me the way. I had so much fear about coming out of the closet as an intuitive, fear of what my physician-peers would think. My mother warned, "It’ll jeopardize your medical career." Ah Mother: I loved her, but thankfully I didn’t listen. Finding my intuition has been my path to freedom.

Sure, there’s a risk when you stretch yourself, but the rewards are enormous. Recently I spoke at the American Psychiatric Association convention. I’m pleased to report the response was wonderful. Sadly though, my mother didn’t live long enough to see this. But, on her deathbed, she told me our "family secret." I was astounded to learn that I came from a lineage of intuitive healers--my Jewish grandmother who did laying-on of hands, aunts and cousins I’d never met. Also, my mother, herself had a strong inner voice which guided her with patients. She’d secretly used her healing powers to keep her lymphoma in remission. "Why didn’t you tell me?" I asked. She said, "I wanted you to lead a normal life, not to be thought of as weird like your grandmother was." Oh

Mother... I’ll always be grateful for what she shared, but, still... she’d waited so long.

I hope that my journey can help you. One thing I’m certain of: if you follow your intuition, you can’t go wrong. Intuition is about empowerment, not having to conform to some notion of who you should be. It’s about being true to yourself, and all the goodness that comes from that.

Judith Orloff, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist and a practicing intuitive in Los Angeles. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Orloff’s column to New Connexion and invite readers to send their questions about intuition and life issues to her at DrOrloff@newconnexion.net.

Judith Orloff is also the author of the bestsellers Guide to Intuitive Healing and Second Sight. Her third book Positive Energy, is due out from Harmony Books in April 2004. Dr. Orloff is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and an international workshop leader. Her work has been featured on CNN, PBS, A&E and NPR. For more information about Dr. Orloff's workshops and books visit www.drjudithorloff.com.