By Kerry Pieri

Intuition can feel like this abstract idea that most people believe in, but few can explain or, more importantly, use consistently. Fleur Leussink is a psychic medium that lives between Portugal and New York City with almost two decades of experience reading for clients. It can’t be ignored that the Internet is slightly obsessed with her being called Lana del Rey’s personal psychic. Her most recent work, though, is teaching others how to hone their intuition with a course that she created. Leussink is quick to explain that her psychic and medium gifts are quite separate from her intuition, except to note that her abilities help her to see where others fall short in honing their own intuition, “I think everybody is intuitive,” she explains, “My particular gift is that I'm able to understand why it works for some people and not for others.”

Leussik went down the path to broader teaching because she felt like she could help more people discover how to live more fully realized existences. “I am currently focused on teaching intuition because I do believe that it's been misrepresented and misunderstood. The reason that I came into that work was I had been working as a psychic medium for a very long time and witnessed a very small selection of people actually making intuitive decisions in their life, and therefore creating really powerful lives for themselves,” she explains, “And I watched the other 98% of people not do that and I felt like I could help create a bit of change there for people to really understand how they can access intuition.”

Leussink believes fully that intuition is the key to living life authentically, and that beautiful outcomes occur when people are plugged in. “That's the secret,” she says, “No one wants you to know that while everyone else is following a checklist, anyone that's done anything major in their life has done it through intuition.” Below Leussink defines what intuition means to her and how that differs from society’s broader definitions, and of course, introduces how you can begin the path to honing your own intuition. 

How did you first realize that you had psychic-medium and intuitive abilities?

I've been working professionally now for 16 years, but I was definitely a very open child. So there were instances that made my parents pay attention. I personally didn't really have an understanding of it until I was about 18, but my community saw it early on and they are very practical, very black and white people. And so they were paying attention to this child of theirs, having and saying things that I shouldn't have known. There was a reflection back, I think, from a very young age, but I really started to work with it when I was 18.

How do you think intuition plays into your particular gifts?

I think everybody is intuitive. My particular gift is that I'm able to understand why it works for some people and not for others. I can very clearly read people's energies, and, in part, I was therefore able to see why they were not reading their own. So I have an intuitive sense, and I think all people have an intuitive sense, but that's quite separate from my psychic medium work. So the work is like, I'm looking at you and I'm reading you, and in part I can see, okay, intuition's not working for you, and these are the reasons. But over time, after having done 20,000 readings for people, it became really clear that people were repeatedly doing the same things wrong. And therefore, I've created this methodology that really identifies one of the six places where people get very stuck in how their intuition works—or doesn't work. Of course, I do my own methodology. I think in my own life, having a working intuition, it makes all the difference. It's a cheat, right? It really works out for you when you listen to it.

How do you define intuition?

I love this question because if you go to any dictionary and look up intuition, it is defined by what it's not rather than by what it is. So it'll be something like, it's something you know without thinking about it or it's something you feel without origin. What's really interesting about those definitions is that one, they speak to what it is not rather than what it is. And two, there's a reverence for it, which I also find quite interesting. A lot of those definitions will say it's true or it's factual. You don't know how you know it, but it's a true thing. We understand that it's something we have access to, but we don't know how to define it. So personally, I've turned to a definition of intuition that's almost scientific in a way. It is: intuition is the energetic information that we translate through the physical body into conscious, rational thought. And so it comes off of the idea that intuition is a byproduct of a nervous system that can take that information on and a brain state that allows it to be processed by the conscious mind. And so my methodology really focuses on how your nervous system is working and determining if your conscious brain state is available to the information? That is a big building block of the methodology. 

What overall what do you think is blocking people from their intuition?

We look at our world and we're all frazzled, right? The nervous system is on high alert. So we're really not in a state of being able to fine tune to the information at times when we need it most. We can't calm our nervous system down and we don't know how to shift brain states. And so the methodology really works on: how do we calibrate really easily and really quickly to allow the ultimate definition of intuition to take place—which is we're taking energetic information and we're translating it through this vessel. It's not mystical, it's not out there, it's not otherworldly. Everyone can do it, but you do need to know how your translating vessel works.

Obviously that's super powerful. But just to put it another way, why is it important for all people to really hone in on?

It's important because it gives you a place of autonomy in which you decide how you move through life, given all the information. Of course, I do not believe that intuition should trump logical thinking or emotional intelligence. I like to see it as we're inviting all players to the conference table. But I like that intuition is a member of that conference and that it gets to speak just as loudly as logic. And I feel when I teach people, I've just never heard anyone say, now that I have access to my intuition, it's led me astray,

How is intuition misunderstood in our culture?

When we look at culture, interestingly enough, what we’re often saying about intuition is, “I don't know what it is, but we're saying it's true.” And that's the key. The tricky part about that is it's often misunderstood with fear and anxiety, and those things can lead you astray, of course. But I've just never had anyone say I had really strong intuition, I knew it was intuition, I followed it and it backfired. If it backfired, they would always look back and go, actually, now that I think about it, it was anxiety, it was fear. And it's because they don't know how it translates in the body and they don't know how to create space. So it gives you the choice to move through life in a way that you are the creator. I think when we're not working with intuition, we are in reaction, we react to the world. Something happens, we react, something happens, we react—and we feel very much like we're at the whim and mercy of the world. And when we work with intuition, we see opportunities that we otherwise wouldn't see. Intuition doesn't necessarily follow logic. So this checklist that we get in society, which is you do A and then you do B, and then C— I think the Gen Z generation really sees this—it doesn't work like that anymore. This idea that the Boomers had of, well, you get the degree and then you graduate, and then you get the job, and then you get the mortgage and it's like, well, this old pattern of logic isn't working. 

So can people exactly know when it’s their intuition and not fear and how can they know?

So there's two parts of my six-part method that really work with that question. One, you have to look at reducing the anxiety to start off. And fear is always going to be louder than intuition. The nervous system reacts, the nervous system is stressed out, the nervous system cannot receive intuition. So we have to release the nervous system first because that is also the same nervous system that will translate intuition for you. But when all it's doing is the job of anxiety, we have got to calm it down.

And second, there's so much interesting research these days about the body and how it speaks to us. And when we get really quiet and we ask the right questions, and you work with someone who's asking you the right questions, every single person will notice that the body speaks differently in patterns of intuition than it does in anxiety. It might, on first glance, be the same. For example, I had a woman that I worked with who was like, well, my intuition is anxiety, but when we really sat with it—and she wasn't wrong—she had this light bulb moment where she's like, oh, when I feel intuitive anxiety, it sits in my throat and my shoulders, everything around me contracts here, but when it's about just anxiety, it's in the pit of my stomach. It was a very big difference as to where the anxiety feeling was placed. And for others, there will be different ways of translating—maybe intuition is always a voice in their head versus a feeling. Some people will have very clear distinctions. For other people, it will be a little bit more subtle, but it will always be different.

And how does intuition differ from following emotions? 

Emotions are really beautiful, strong, and incredible, but they can be quite deceiving [when it comes to] what action to take. We can be in reaction all the time. So it's important to bring this voice of intuition to the table to at least counter with, ‘well, what opportunities are presented to me that I might not be seeing through the eyes of logic or emotion?’ And I think once you start identifying those, your whole world can change—whether it's in the types of partners that you pull in romantically, business choices, following that one opportunity that then unlocks everything else—even health, identifying what's really the core issue within yourself. There's so much wisdom within intuition, and once you really listen, it can open up roads and paths that you would've missed otherwise.

What are the first steps that people can start doing tomorrow morning to get to a place of understanding how their intuition works?

I created a free quiz that teaches you what part of your intuition is not working. Because the thing that I've seen over and over again is that I can't tell people one singular thing. It's the same as people who have 17 self-help books on their bookshelf. They're all valid, they're all amazing. But if that's not your problem, then doing that work will not get you anything. Right? It's not going to matter. So for me, the question is which out of the six are blocked? What's not working? Then you can go do that one little thing that will change your life.

And then based on that, there are just little things you can do. And we actually have these five minute speed coaching videos that are free that people get upon completing the quiz. But I do think it's important to recognize that oftentimes why those self-help books don't work is because you are looking in the wrong place. And it doesn't mean that that might not be helpful for you down the road, but it's not going to make the biggest difference now. And lastly I would say just based on the way that we live these days, 40 to 50% of the people that take the quiz do end up seeing that nervous system regulation work is their weakest link. 

Do you have any examples of techniques that might counteract that?

The techniques that we use are very body focused, simply just massaging your earlobes for 30 seconds to a minute, and recognizing that when you do that, your body has a stress release response, the vagus nerve in the body goes, ‘Hey, let's cool down.’ 

I loved the post that you did about painting. Can you speak a little bit about flow state activities and how people can discover what theirs are?

One of the six parts of the intuition activation method is that when you have a vessel that's working, when your nervous system's working, when you've got boundaries, when you know how to recognize intuition from anxiety, when you've done all the other stuff, then we take a look at—can you turn it on and off at will?

That's where flow state becomes really important. Like I said, intuition needs to have an available nervous system, and it needs to be able to access the right brain state. If you're a sponge and you are filled with water, you need to ring out that sponge first. Otherwise there's no space. But for the information that your body collects energetically to come into a conscious, rational mind for you to have the moment in intuition where you're like, ‘he's cheating on me,’ or ‘I have to apply for this job,’ that moment of ‘I know’—you have to have a very specific brain state. And that brain state is most linked to Theta states—and that state is what we call flow. So it's almost like the moment that the body has absorbed all this information and it's finally able to bring the awareness into the conscious mind. But you still have to have the moment where the brain goes, oh, that pain in my belly means I shouldn't do this thing. You always have to have the moment in which the mind recognizes it, and that is most easily done in a flow state. 

I also thought it was interesting when you spoke about how narcissism can be confused with relying on or using your intuition. Can you speak a little bit about that?

I think intuition is not always, ‘I know best,’ but it's also knowing what external information is best to take on and whose opinion is going to be most effective for me? And that feels like an important distinction, right? Because I think sometimes when I teach intuition, it's like, ‘oh, it's your experience about a thing.’ And that is true, but it's also branching out into the space of, well, whose advice works with my vision for my life? Because we can look at any topic in the world these days, truly any topic, and find competing opinions as to whether it's good or bad. You could take the idea of doing vigorous exercise three times a week. Is it good or is it bad? Well, it depends on who you are. It depends on how your body's doing. It depends on what kind of bodily needs you have. I think we have an intuition that can also say: This is what’s right for me;  ; That's the right medicinal path for me; That's the right diet for me. Because we know now it is not a blanket thing for everyone—nutrition, or exercise, or how we live. 

What sort of changes have you witnessed people see in their lives when they've really done the work to get to a place where they can access their intuition?

It is profound. I think most people come back and they tell me they have more confidence, because they can now make clear decisions for themselves. You're not second guessing. You come across as more assertive, which already gives you more opportunities, I suppose, and there's less second guessing of those decisions. So you're not lying awake at night.

I have heard that it has created new opportunities for people. Of course, we think about intuition as like, Ooh, I know I'm going to do this, or I know I'm going to do that. But the after-effects are so much larger than that. It changes how you show up in the world. It changes the things you say yes to, and how confidently you say yes to them. We're all on this life highway, but when you've got a working intuition, you see the exit that changes your life versus just staying on the highway with everybody else. Working intuition shows you another way.

I've had people tell me, I have my creativity back and I'm more confident to put my artistic work and self out in the world. I feel less anxious about being a mother. I am able to just trust what I know is best for my kids without getting lost in the overwhelming feedback of the world. I've heard that it helps people choose their partners more consciously where they know, this is my fear speaking versus this is actually a relationship to run away from. Right? So it helps in all sorts of categories. I think it is a really profound confidence-boosting experience.