After 11 years leading the Institute for Intuitive Intelligence, I sometimes forget how radical our philosophy truly is. But lately, we’ve been talking about the teacher archetype, and it brought me back to why I began teaching intuition in this way in the first place.
If you’re on the spiritual path, you’ll inevitably encounter intuition. It’s part of the very fabric of spiritual awakening. And yet, I found myself repeatedly confronted by a glaring problem: we engage with intuition in profoundly superficial ways.
I’m not here to throw shade on those who teach intuition. But as a researcher, this wasn’t something I could gloss over. I needed to understand why the dominant model of intuition training felt so… hollow.
The Performance of Intuition
When I began developing my own intuitive capacity, nearly every training I found was geared toward using intuition for someone else. You’d sit in a circle, read for another person, interpret cards, channel guidance from guides, and while those methods might sound familiar, they all led to the same endpoint: giving your intuition away.
It didn’t sit right with me. I noticed something off in the teachers I encountered. While they could hold a space for others and deliver stunning intuitive guidance, their own lives weren’t demonstrations of that same connection. They were disconnected from the power they helped others access.
And I found myself thinking: if intuition is a true superpower, why weren’t they using it for themselves?
The Power Imbalance in Modern Intuition
We’ve collectively defaulted to this idea that intuition is best used when given away. That intuitives are meant to do intuition for other people.
This was the first huge red flag. Because it creates a dynamic where we, as seekers, are conditioned to bypass our own deep knowing in favour of someone else’s supposed wisdom.
I saw this up close when I was a shop psychic. People would come to me again and again, asking whether to sell their house, leave their partner, buy a dog, you name it. They didn’t trust themselves. They wanted me to give them an answer they already had inside them.
This is because we’re rarely given the training to develop our own intuitive authority. Instead, we’re taught to outsource our power, which only deepens our sense of disconnection.
Real Intuition Isn’t a Party Trick
We need to stop confusing spiritual performance with spiritual power.
All an intuitive is doing is accessing what already lives inside you, your subtle body, your energy, your karmic history. There’s no cosmic switchboard where the truth is stored. It’s you. You are the oracle.
But intuition cannot land in an unprepared vessel.
Stress, anxiety, trauma, and subconscious fear all block our access to that knowing. The access never disappears, it’s just clouded by the noise. That’s why preparing the vessel is the only way to truly increase intuitive intelligence.
And that’s what we do at the Institute.
We train spiritual teachers and seekers to meet and release their subconscious fear so that they can become clear channels for their own truth, not someone else’s version of it.
From Superstition to Self-Healing
Spiritual retail therapy is often where people begin. A crystal, a deck, a book. It’s a beautiful yearning that gets hijacked by shallow promises. If your subconscious programming still tells you that you’re not worthy of a happy life, then no crystal in the world can shift that. You’ll just be a little poorer, and still stuck in the same fear loops.
So I teach intuition as a tool for self-healing, self-trust, and self-reliance. Not as a flashy performance, but as a quiet revolution in how we relate to our inner world. That’s what intuitive intelligence truly is. It’s not intuition as a party trick, it’s intuition as a state of being.
The Ripple Effect of Self-Sourced Power
Without self-sourced power, even the most well-meaning spiritual guides keep their clients in limitation. Because when we give people answers instead of guiding them back to their own knowing, we reinforce separation.
This is why I’m now devoted to training those who lead others, to support you in becoming a true teacher of teachers, so that the ripple effect of self-authority can stretch far and wide.
If we’re going to reclaim our inner authority, we have to begin by preparing ourselves to receive it. And we must lead others to do the same.
That’s exactly what I’m teaching in my Teach with Power Masterclass Series. This is for you if you’re a spiritual teacher (or becoming one), and you’re craving real scaffolding, support, and substance, not just shiny slides and a good sales page.
We’ll talk pedagogy, curriculum design, the embodiment of the teacher archetype, and yes, we’ll touch on intuition (you know that’s my jam).
It’s time to move beyond trinkets and tropes. It’s time to prepare the vessel.
With so much love,
Dr Ricci-Jane Adams
Founder, Institute for Intuitive Intelligence®
Comments