(photo courtesy of peasap)

Are you an active participant in creating the life you want? Or do you feel as if you are at the mercy of your life; living uninspired; living just to get by?

According to self-development consultant and author Melissa Casas, we all have the ability to manifest the lives we desire.

“Most people, myself included, have very little understanding of how powerful we actually are, and I mean that quite viscerally. We carry very powerful energy around us, and that energy is powerful vibration inside of us.”

But how do we tap into that creative energy?

“We’re putting that energy into motion with every thought, and our intuition – our ability to perceive inner guidance – is telling us if we’re creating in the direction of what we really want, or creating in the direction of what we don’t really want to experience. That information, that guidance, is there for us in every moment if we know how to read it,” says Melissa.

However, Melissa has a unique view of our intuition.

While many use intuition as a decision making mechanism — do what feels right, or do what your intuition tells you to do — Melissa learned over time that this view may be a bit simplistic, and that there is an important difference between asking “what should I do” versus “what do I want to do?”

“I (first) thought that the primary way of working with intuition was to listen to feelings, and I think that the way I was trying to use my intuition was to help me make decisions. I was very hesitant to make a lot of decisions in my life (big or small) without first asking myself the question ‘What should I do?’, and what I realize now that I didn’t realize then is that I was basically deferring my power of decision-making over to a place in myself that doesn’t even exist. The place from which intuition comes from is waiting for each of us to make the decision and then follow intuition on how to move in that direction.”

What are we deciding?

According to Melissa, it’s first up to us to decide what it is we want in life. However, what we should focus on is not just the form or specific content of the life we want — living on a yacht, having our own widget making company, or owning a Porsche. Instead, we need to be clear on how these things make us feel. We need to decide on what we want our lives to feel like.

After being clear on this, we can then follow our internal guidance to lead us there.

The problem, says Melissa, is that it’s often difficult to follow our intuition because it gets polluted by muddy thinking — thinking that is loaded up with judgments, assumptions, and old habits of thought that aren’t necessarily in our best interest.

She uses kitchen pipes as a metaphor to clarify this idea.

“Imagine two kitchen pipes. One is junked up with lots of old food and lots of gunk in it. The other is pristine and clean. If you pour beautiful clear water into each pipe, at the other end it’ll be apparent which water you’re going to want to drink.”

Intuition, in its true form, is the flow of pure information, just like pure clear water. It is our internal guidance, but a guidance that we can’t follow clearly if it is polluted by our muddy thinking.

“The biggest question people ask me is how do I know that’s really my intuition talking, or how do I know that’s inner guidance? You’re not going to know until you get a handle on what you’re thinking.”

Through her doctorate work at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Melissa has developed a communication method called 3-C Communication. It is a way of cultivating clean, clear, and caring communication with ourselves and with others so that we can harness the creative power of our mind and listen to our intuition.

Melissa’s advice for people?

“(to) cultivate awareness of what they’re feeling, and understand it for what it is, which is guidance in the moment. Whether you are using your very creative tool of your mind to think about what you want or to think about what you don’t want, you are creating either way, but your feelings will tell you every time what that creation is about to manifest into. We’ve become a world where, for multiple reasons, we’ve stopped listening to the feedback of our feelings, and when we stopped doing that, or at least numbed ourselves to that, we lost the ability to really understand how we’re using the extremely powerful tool of our minds.”

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Checkout the podcast to hear the entire interview with Melissa Casas.

Also, for more information about Melissa, her coaching, her books, and her 3-C Communication method, visit her official website: www.MelissaCasas.com