Laura Day

In Her Own Words

"If I believed in predestination, I would never do another prediction in my life."

interviewed by Ron Hogan

Laura Day is the author of Practical Intuition and two sequels applying its principles to business and love.
RH: You start Practical Intuition by recounting a test of your abilities that took place in Rome, but it seems as well that you knew about your powers before you got to that point.
LD: I was very conscious when I was younger of healing and transmitting energy from an experience I had involving my mother. I was very clear that I could see what I saw, but I didn't have a clear sense that not everybody could do this, or that not everyone was aware of it. When I heard these abilities being described as being separate from normal experience, it was like a light going off in my head. It's like if you had a rare disorder and saw somebody talking about it on TV -- "Why, I have that scabby red skin in heart-shaped patterns all over my lower arms, too!" Then when Bruno del Russo and the other doctors did the tests in Rome, and decided that intuition did exist, but that only I could do it, and maybe a few other oddballs, I didn't buy it, and Dr. del Rosso didn't buy it, either.

I took the experiments they had conducted, tried them out on other people, and found out that anybody could do them. Yes, I believe that some people are especially gifted intuitives without effort. With effort, though, everybody can become an intuitive, just as, although there are some people who are highly gifted artists, everybody can learn to draw well enough to do something representational, like a map to get to the store.
RH: Let's talk about how you decided to create a book out of the seminar you've been teaching for a number of years.
LD: A lot of it was just for practical reasons. I love teaching, but I had an infant and couldn't travel as much. When I was nursing my son, I would see ads for psychic 900 numbers in the middle of the night, and think to myself, "Who calls these places?" Then I thought sadly that the people calling psychic hotlines feel desperately in need of help, and call people of dubious reputation to do something they can do for themselves. So I wanted to write a book that was easy to understand and would allow people to develop their own intuitions well.
I want to separate out the difference between an intuitive and a psychic. Intuition is a faculty like your sense of smell; it's a simple survival skill we all have that's innate in us. Being 'psychic' implies that you have access to 'the' truth or that you have to adhere to some special philosophy. Use of the word 'psychic' overmystifies and disempowers people. If I believed in predestination, I would never do another prediction in my life. I wouldn't even look, I would stay away from it.
I believe in ESP, except I don't believe in the E. Nothing's extra, it's all sensory. We don't have to learn to do this; we do it all the time. We can learn to make it conscious. We can direct it at goals rather than neurotic fixations. I always say that your intuition, like your intellect or emotions, goes to one of two places: either your area of interest or expertise, or your areas of neurotic fixation. In the beginning of Practical Intuition, I ask, "What are your questions, what are your goals?" Direct all your resources -- not just your intuition -- towards that.
One of the things that I get into my more advanced classes is that you start with a question, and that question raises other questions. It's important to get the minutiae. Accountants are my best students because they're really good at that. Psychotherapists are my worst, because everything's interpretative -- although Jungians are pretty good at interpreting symbols if they can just throw out the book and realize that everybody has their own symbolic language. As you get used to interpreting your intuition consciously, it returns to being an unconscious process -- the data's put together for you already, the interpretative stage takes place unconsciously, and you end up with the conclusion. But to get to that point, you have to be aware of all the intuitive data that you're getting, and learn to assemble and target it. You'll find that your readings, your intuitive 'hits,' will become much more conversational as you speak them aloud. They won't be just short phrases like, "Tree. Fall."
People can feel empowered by learning how to do this, but for some people, it's very upsetting. In the book, I tell the story of a man who took my workshop -- and there's one of these in every class --. who started out by saying, "Well, this doesn't exist, it's just this and that." So I told him to just be quiet and do the exercise, which consisted of holding a sealed envelope with a person's name inside, a name you didn't know, and giving specific details about that person's life. He did it fabulously, better than average for a first exercise, then didn't come back the next day. I asked his wife what had happened to him, and she said, "Well, now he thinks it exists, but he doesn't think it's right to do it." I told her to suggest to him that he was doing it all the time., and wasn't it "more right" to add integrity to that power by making it conscious?
I teach a huge range of professionals how to do this, and they come up with ways to use intuition that I wouldn't have thought of before. It's useful in evaluating anything where some sense of a future result is important. It's certainly useful in evaluating a company. An engineer can make a better machine. A writer can frame an article in ways that their target audience can more easily digest. Marketers can create a better marketing plan. Usually doctors, along with big companies, are the last people who want to admit to working with intuitives, but that's changing. For example, I worked with Dr. Larry Waites a few years ago; we did some drug research in which he was the medical brains and I was the intuition. It worked out really well, and I print the letter that he wrote about it in the book.
I come from three generations of physicians, so I think the applications in medicine are very interesting. I believe most good physicians are good intuitives. My father is one of the best intuitives I know. A couple months ago, I had a friend with a two-year old daughter. The baby had diarrhea and a fever. The pediatrician had recommended an electrolyte solution and Tylenol. My friend called me, and I had a strong sense of the child really not being in good shape, but of course I'm not going to say that to a friend who's calling me for reassurance that her baby will be okay. But I did call my dad, and I described the situation for him, and he went through his usual spiel -- "Laura, I'm not going to give out medical advice like that, that's just not the way that it's done" -- and in the middle of this, he said to take the child to the emergency room, that it sounded like a particular life-threatening condition. It turned out that the baby had drank some E. coli-tainted apple juice and contracted this fairly rare condition. She was put on dialysis; if she'd been taken to the hospital any later, it's likely that she might have died. He made that diagnosis on almost no information -- baby, fever, diarrhea -- but he's used to using his intuition to diagnose cases like that, although he would never describe it that way.
You can intuit about anything you can do logically and a lot that you can't. The thing is that people need to go beyond the first gut instinct and make their intuitive process as vigorous as their logical and empirical processes. In your daily life, rely on whatever works for you. But if you want to have an extraordinary life in some way, which I think we all do -- whether it's in love, work, creativity, or childraising -- intuition is really important. It's the only thing that gives us an edge. We all have access to basically the same information. Intuition is the only methodology that allows somebody to do the right thing in the right way for them. The biggest complaint I hear in the early parts of my workshop is, "You're not giving us enough information," and I tell them that if they intuit exactly like I do, they won't be as good intuitives as they could be.
So it's really a skill building set, rather than a lifestyle you have to embrace to be a 'more evolved' person?
LD: I want to state right now that I will never give up red meat, and I am not highly evolved. I always wonder about people who are trying so hard for the realm of spirit. If that's where you were supposed to be, you wouldn't be in a body. Love is spiritual to me; friendship is spiritual; sex is spiritual; food is enormously spiritual. It's important to be in life, and as a faculty, intuition enables us to be in life. You can't really be a good intuitive unless you know what your resting position is, what you're feeling in the moment. It's a good life-enhancing skill.
I always tell people that if they meet somebody who claims to have the truth or to be 100% accurate in their predictions, that's a person to be very frightened of. And I'm a perfectionist. Each little percentage point of error makes me physically ill. I hate being off, but that's why I realized that there is no perfection in this, and there's an evil in people who are trying to sell you perfection.
My greatest complaint with the New Age is that you need to put out your values to be proven or disproven. Otherwise it's a belief that's not safe to share as a reliable methodology. It's very important for these new techniques of healing and gathering information to set themselves up for a test. If people need these techniques, they don't need mistakes. And you also refine your own ability by putting it to the test. I spent a long time putting myself to the test, and I still test myself today. It's very important for information providers, or care providers, to be more rigorous with themselves than anybody else will be with them, to always undersell your ability.
I might or might not be capable of doing a medical diagnosis as accurately as a trained physician could do, but I'm not qualified. I haven't been to medical school, I don't have a degree. If I'm wrong, you can't sue me because what I do doesn't exist as a profession. When a psychic is seeing a client on a weekly basis, it's unethical. That's not psychic, it's psychotherapy. If a person is in such need that they require weekly input, the psychic should refer them to the appropriate professional.
Until I wrote Practical Intuition, I never advertised. I didn't even have a business card. I had a nice, quiet, private practice for years, and now I'm out there being talked about in public. I believe in what I'm doing, and I hope that it's empowering to people. But I admit it's weird. There are times when it's a little humiliating to be confused with people who channel an angel for three hundred dollars an hour. And I hate reviews where I can tell they haven't read the book. People did a review where they claim I say to throw out logic and just use intuition, when the whole book is about balancing the processes. The gossip also really bugs me. Gossip is hurtful under any circumstances, and lying gossip is even worse. It's bothersome as a mother to have my life intruded upon in that way. On the other hand, it's a privilege to be able to speak to people essentially about themselves.

Suggested further reading
John Kehoe | Harry Moody