Copthorne Macdonald's review of:

BEYOND INTELLECT :
Journey Into the Wisdom of Your Intuitive Mind
by Susan McNeal Velasquez

Published by Row Your Boat Press, Laguna Beach, CA. 2007 
Paperback. $18.95.   ISBN: 978-0-9796410-0-8

Available from Amazon.com and other booksellers.

In addition to being endowed with a reactive/emotional mental process and a thinking/planning/reasoning/ intellectual mental process, we humans are also blessed with a behind-the-scenes intuitive process. Always there to help us in our attempts at creativity and living wisely, it is a soft-spoken process. It is, in fact, so soft spoken that most of the time its subtle promptings are way below the noise level in contemporary minds dominated by intellectual and emotional content.

What can be done about this? How can we gain access to those wise and helpful messages from the intuitive process? Several writers on the subject have recommended adopting a meditation practice to help quiet down those competing processes. My own experience has been along these lines, and if one is willing to put in the necessary time and effort, it works.

In Beyond Intellect, Susan Velasquez offers us another approach — or more correctly, a whole basketful of approaches. For many years she has led personal development seminars. In the process, she has seen a host of different ways in which we get in the way of that oh-so-beneficial connection with the intuitive mind. One by one she addresses each of these unhelpful, unskillful ways of being, and advises us on how to deal with them. The result is a book that is likely to speak to each individual reader differently. The author acknowledges this, in the Introduction saying:

Remember to simply give yourself permission to be open and receptive to the information that seems to talk specifically to you. Then listen, gently and patiently, for your intuitive guidance, always through the basic method of cherishing, honoring, and respecting yourself and others.

The chapter headings give one a good sense of the book's scope and focus:

  1. Going Beyond Intellect to Discover Your Life Path
  2. Defining What You Long For
  3. Courting Intuition
  4. Revitalizing Your Soul
  5. Sparking New Possibilities
  6. Walking Through Doors and Coming Home
  7. Thriving: Living Fully and Loving Well

For Susan Velasquez, as for other writers on this subject, quieting the mind is part of it. At one point she says:

To establish a substantial, full, rich, and abundant inner core you must learn to redeem your inner calmness and peace by seeking time to muse and dream, to contemplate, to learn, and to uncover and discover the forgotten, the disowned, and the disused aspects of yourself.

I'm sure that many readers will find Beyond Intellect an insightful guide on the road to that wiser, fuller, more peaceful way of being that the author calls thriving.

The book's website is at www.beyondintellect.com. The author's website is at www.susanvelasquez.com.