Teo Degas' Books & Decks

 "What’s intuition? It’s a clear understanding that comes not from our logical mind— the part that knows how to do the math— but from a deeper part of our being." (loc. 188) "The intuitive antenna inside your body that picks up the pictures, symbols, images, ideas, and feelings from your intuitive mind and beams them onto the screen of your conscious awareness. This antenna is constantly receiving and transmitting messages from within and without." (loc.303)

THE GOOD

Powerhunch explains in a very simple language how intuition works, which sort of questions you can ask, how and when to ask them, and which sort of approaches you can use to help in your decision making or to answer precise questions, no matter how difficult or trivial they might be: personal relationships, job challenges, health issues, relocation, insights re situations and people, directions about timing and paths to follow.

Stress blocks our logical decision making, so intuition is  an  alternative helping hand. Besides, developing your intuition leads to developing your creativity, so you can just use intuition for artistic purposes. Intuition is not something that some special enlightened people have, we all have it, it is a matter of learning how to notice it, use it and handle it properly, how to cultivate it and how to weed it.

The book gives good advice on how to fire up your creative juices, how to work with visualisation, dream interpretation, learn when to risk, when it is the best time to do something, how to figure out somebody's dynamics, to solve romantic, social and work relationships, and find balance, release stress, promote self-healing and to use different breathing techniques to get you relaxed and favour the intuitive spark.

Dr Emery is a pioneer in the field of intuition and has a great knowledge of how intuition works, and how we can use it, so she provides the reader with a good deal of fun and easy-to-remember exercises. She uses a mix of intuitive exercises to open our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual channels, and mixes them up with dreamwork, synchronicity, and visualisation techniques. 

The many examples of real cases mentioned in the book come from the 225 people Emery interviewed for this book. 

The best virtue of the book is its practicality: the exercises and techniques that Emery  describes, and the clear guidelines she gives to carry them out. Some of my favourite exercises are the Yes or No button, the Powershift technique (which reminds me greatly of Jungian techniques for dream interpretation), the intuitive timepiece exercise, the environmental clues, and the metaphor exercise. 

THE NOT SO GOOD

> Powerhunch has a chit-chat tone that can be innervating at times. It does not favour the author either because dilutes her wisdom in a soup of blah blah blah, so her enthusiasm appears as rambling, and some of her colloquial writing more proper for a blog than for a book. Pity because many of the techniques Emery mentions are stupendous.

> Besides, the book has an endless number of real life examples, a good deal of them totally unnecessary.  I enjoy real life examples and the description of how a real person deals with a specific personal intuition clue, but if the examples are not to the point or too many they become a bother and not something inspirational or enjoyable.

> I find  shocking a PhD recipient making statements of this sort: Physicists have demonstrated the existence of eleven dimensions. (loc. 147-152) So, who exactly? Which are these eleven dimensions?

In cases like this I tend to blame the editors. Because, it is their duty to remove unnecessary fluff and demand from the author more substance, remove repeated information, help with the structuring of the work,  promote a reference note system when necessary and so forth. Also, the headings of the book are humongous in size, some of them occupying a lot of space, so they become another filler!


> We live in the digital age. Writing page after page describing a breathing exercise is a reflection of a bygone era. One can easily record an audio with the exercises and offer them to readers for download, so they can do some of the exercises using Emery's guiding voice. This wouldn't cost much, but could have brought the book to the present 21st century.

MIND

The book was published in the year 2001, so the bibliography is out of date.

TYPOS

> senstive to context (loc. 142)
> activtate your  (p. 26)

IN SHORT

An entertaining light introduction to develop your intuition based on Emery's course of the same name, Powerhunch! The breathing exercises and many of the intuitive exercises in the book are excellent, so I recommend making flash cards on your Kindle, or manually to use them once you finish the book, so you don't have to go all over again as there is a lot of unnecessary talking in the book that you don't need to re-read. 

MY ADVICE

If you are interested in developing your intuition, start with PowerHunch!, and then read Laura Day and Sonia Choquette's books. Personally, I think that Laura Day's  books Practical Intuition and How to Rule the World from your Couch, take you to places that Emery's never does, and the same can be said of Laurie Nadel's Sixth Sense. Some of the exercises that Emery offers in the book are also similar to those that Robert Moss recommends in Sidewalk Oracles but she did present those years before. 

SAVE SOME MONEY

I paid almost 14 bucks for this e-book, but the same e-book in another edition is sold at half the price in Amazon, PowerHunch!.