Ep#205 The GPS Inside You

In this conversation, we go straight into the territory most professionals tiptoe around: intuition, subtle energy, the “inner signals” you’ve been trained to ignore since childhood.

I talk about why Western culture is so committed to denial, how that denial fuels burnout, and why your quiet inner nudges are often the most honest, helpful guidance you’ll ever get.

We cover everything from witches and shamans, to Victorian emotional repression, to the modern addiction cycle… and yes, the moments in my own life when intuition slammed into me like a freight train.

This isn’t about superstition—it’s about reconnection. Tuning back in to yourself, to others, and to the deeper stream of intelligence running through all of us.

If you’ve been feeling disconnected, numb, over-stimulated, secretly exhausted, or like you’re living 10cm to the left of your actual life… this one’s for you.

In This Episode

• Why so many smart, capable adults are terrified of their own intuition
• The cultural training that teaches us to ignore our inner signals
• How denial and addiction quietly build modern burnout
• Why meditation and yoga don’t “fix” burnout unless you stop overriding your inner voice
• How loneliness dismantles your nervous system
• Stories from my own life of intuitive “hits”—the kind that make you question everything
• How subtle energy shows up in healing work
• Why reconnecting with yourself is the foundation of real leadership
• How burnout recovery gives you back your early dreams—the ones you quietly shelved
• What it takes to step into the “bigger you” you’ve been resisting

Key Takeaways

• Intuition isn’t fringe. It’s human.
• Suppressing your inner experience creates anxiety, addiction, and burnout.
• Reconnection—not productivity hacks—is what heals you.
• Your inner voice is rarely wrong. You’re just out of the habit of trusting it.
• Burnout is a transformation process. It pushes you back into contact with the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding.
• The dreams you abandoned still matter. They’re signals, not fantasies.
• When you stop running from yourself, your life stops running from you.

If You’re Ready to Get Your Mojo Back

If you want support reconnecting with yourself, healing burnout, and stepping into the version of you that actually feels like you—book a time with me at:

https://mini.dexrandall.com

Let’s map out what your next chapter could look like.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Burnout Recovery
• 0:22 Exploring Intuition and Psychic Energy
• 2:12 Societal Suppression of Intuition
• 2:48 Modern Disconnection and Its Effects
• 3:38 Personal Struggles and Addictions
• 5:23 The Role of Social Connections
• 8:31 Embracing Subtle Energy for Healing
• 13:54 Personal Experiences with Intuition
• 16:29 Invitation to Transform and Shine
• 24:34 Journey to Healing and Coaching

Transcript

Ep205 Intuition and invisible energy
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. My name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout Recovery Podcast where I teach professionals to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hey, this is Dex and what we're going to talk about today is intuition and invisible energy.

[00:00:28] I am, for want of a more accessible word, psychic. I recognize an invisible stream of energy about people, places, events, and times beyond conventional access. Actually, I see this energy as universal and available to everyone, but most people ignore it and subdue it because it freaks them out; because it's not socially acceptable and normal.

[00:00:59] And acknowledging it has really been trained out of most people as children. ' cause of course, in earlier times, such people would've been branded witches. The test for which was attempting to drown said witch in a pond, and if they survived, if they floated, that was witchcraft and they were burnt at the stake.

[00:01:18] And of course, the shaman. Always portrayed as pretty eccentric, wide-eyed, chanting in some invented tongue, dancing around in strange animal-part headdresses, weird body paint. Looking a bit dislocated and unhinged, mind, body and spirit, probably off their heads on drugs. A human just about, but untamable not of this world and thus possessing strange powers that could heal or kill members of the their own tribe.

[00:01:49] All sounds a bit risky. No wonder they got a bit of side eye.

[00:01:54] So that said, that's it then!

[00:01:56] People who believe in quantum physics are sane.

[00:02:00] Psychic people are dangerously nuts.

[00:02:05] So why on earth do we hold this view? Why am I talking about it today? You might ask!

[00:02:11] Here's a thought. Most Western people walk in this world in a fog of massive denial. Think Victorian England, children should be seen and not heard. Always perfectly presented, nothing out of place. Very carefully choreographed engagement with particularly the adults in their world.

[00:02:35] And all of this largely based on suppression of their true natures, in the thrall of so-called civilization.

[00:02:43] Could be a bit of a jaundiced view. What do you think?

[00:02:46] But these days it's slightly different. Now we're in the thrall of Insta-famous. Another disconnecting and suppressing concoction, designed to help us flee from our human or even animal essence and appear to be unassailably perfect.

[00:03:07] In our era, our collective suppression of the human experience is peaking, yet again! 

[00:03:14] We don't just deny that we are connected to our universe.

[00:03:17] We also sever real connection with one another, with our families, our spouses, our children, our peer group, our colleagues, and the community where we grew up.

[00:03:29] No wonder we're a mess.

[00:03:31] I dunno why this is making me laugh this morning, but it sure is.

[00:03:34] So let me ask you this. What do you believe?

[00:03:38] Do you have chronic stress or anxiety? Do you have addictive behaviors? I'm not just talking about alcohol and drugs here. I'm talking phone addiction, gambling, overeating, caffeine, fame, work, sex, exercise, sport.

[00:03:57] If you have inklings that you are overdoing anything involuntarily so that you can feel better or at least less bad, then this is you denying or running from your own feelings, which are unacceptable to you, or simply painful.

[00:04:16] All of that may be unconscious, but modern anxiety and stress are largely based on a denial and addiction model, and in burnout particularly, they're probably large chunks of life, perhaps your daily habits, that you'd rather not notice or admit to.

[00:04:37] You probably feel shame, but you don't need to because the addiction and denial processes are in fact, normal coping mechanisms that grow with our disconnection from meaningful, supportive, social relationships. And in burnout, our social connections do diminish.

[00:05:01] Your connection to yourself will diminish, if that's you. In which case you'll probably be free floating in a galaxy of inconvenient pain and you won't know what to do about it.

[00:05:12] So naturally you're going to bury your head deeper in the sand.

[00:05:16] Sounds a bit familiar?

[00:05:19] This is really, I see it as western culture in a nutshell, isn't it?

[00:05:23] My mother, age 90, has severe dementia and the constant and complex needs arising from that. She's had a live-in carer for the last four or five years now, I think it is.

[00:05:37] And this frankly saintly woman has her own grown family who live nearby. By origin, this woman is South African and a Christian. She's a big friendly black woman and she belongs to a church where many of her friends are likewise, black African carers who've migrated to the UK.

[00:05:57] She has the most grounded, beautiful, patient, accepting and loving nature.

[00:06:07] She's just 100% joy to be around, and my mother is not an easy person to care for or live with. And so when I think about this woman, I really imagine she's been raised in a very different culture than my own. So that faith, purpose, belonging, an open heart and a sense of wellbeing have been baked into her.

[00:06:32] I look at her frankly, and I weep for my own deficiencies, and of course with gratitude for her strength. My mother has had a painful life of great suffering and angst, and I've never seen her as contented as she is now, helpless to this woman, this carer. It's as if she's been waiting for this relief all of her life.

[00:06:58] By contrast to the previous dementia ward, where my mother was subject to extreme screaming paranoia fits. She lived in constant terror. They had to lock her into a room, which didn't really help.

[00:07:13] That's my contrast really to our Western way of being brought up, or perhaps it's just my particular personal experience.

[00:07:20] But looking at the way that most of us live now, it couldn't really be better designed to promote dis-ease and dysfunction. We're all adrift, alone and scared, aren't we? On some level.

[00:07:34] So if that's us, then we deny ever more of the inconvenient truth that our bodies actually feel and know our daily dislocated torture. Our nervous systems were never designed to withstand this. We are inherently social animals. We need the support of others.

[00:07:54] I've talked before about the negative health and mental health effects of loneliness, and we've let this happen on our watch. So many live in loneliness now, and we're scared and trying desperately to pretend that we are not, to gain some sort of higher ground so that we can feel safe.

[00:08:13] Running from our human existence and denying big parts of it, increases our pain and suffering and vulnerability.

[00:08:21] Rather than simply being disconnected from our fellows, we cut off from our own nurturing spirit too. The last support system that we have.

[00:08:32] Such is our unspoken fear of this hidden current of energy, which is our beliefs, feelings, illness, authentic nature, intuition, creativity, faith, psychic powers, call it what you like.

[00:08:48] We have a great fear of that, and for this, I am sorry.

[00:08:53] Personally, I find this subtle energy, neither toxic nor threatening, but heartening, potent, healing, uplifting, and connecting. It reaches across time, space, logic, and belief with information and experiences that will help us heal and belong as we are designed to.

[00:09:16] It provides a unifying context that we lack.

[00:09:20] And myself, I've felt those ancestral connections, perhaps in a way the indigenous peoples talk about. They have ties to the ancients, the continuity of energy across generations that convey values, nurturing and give meaning to lives. Indigenous cultures tend to maintain in common a profoundly stabilizing and supportive link to both country and ancestors that keeps them rooted in those values and gives them this historical continuity.

[00:09:55] It informs their cultures, child rearing, faith, land stewardship, ceremonies, and healing capacities in ways that Western cultures have abandoned for so-called evidence-based processes. And by the way, those in power do know that power and money buy research results, don't they? They do know that statistics can be made to prove almost anything?

[00:10:21] With any research, if stubbornness arises in the capacity to bend results to your liking, the study can always be abandoned. I did once hear a meta study of 200 20-year-old clinical trials, that they, after 20 years, they reran all of those trials and only 20% of the results were sustained in the new version.

[00:10:45] We've implied the way that we live now onto indigenous people, causing an extent of fractiousness, confusion that hasn't done them any good either.

[00:10:54] I'm looking as well at things like the studies of cholesterol, saturated fat and heart disease, Dr. Ancel Keys in the 1950s. Although saturated fat was exonerated at that time, the embargo on saturated fat and the belief that ingested cholesterol drives heart disease are still relied on 70 years later as gospel. It is pretty weird what we believe, isn't it? Anyhoo, that was my rant. Had to have one today, I think.

[00:11:23] So, how deep is our denial? It's a good question to ask.

[00:11:29] Think about your own life experience for a moment. Think about the intuition, the quiet whisperings of your mind, body and soul. What's your relationship with those? Do you have some kind of disturbing reactivity to them?

[00:11:46] Do you have an urge to distract and silence 'em? Are they quickly denied?

[00:11:52] Or do you listen to those murmurings and act?

[00:11:56] Because they're just these tiny little fire danger warnings and directional urges. They're quite quiet.

[00:12:03] If you can feel or sense those urgings, if you recognize what I'm talking about, what do you think animates those up surgings of energy in you? Are they for your good and healing? Or pushing you deeper into the murk?

[00:12:20] Chances are you're routinely and vigorously blocking signals from your nervous system, mind, body, and soul.

[00:12:29] The very signals prompting you to heal.

[00:12:32] And burnout is an expression of this denial. The deeper the burnout, the bigger the denial. As you become increasingly afraid of your inner rumblings and feelings.

[00:12:44] And this is why doing things like yoga, meditation, walking, enduring team lunches, or going for a relaxing beer with your friends will not fix burnout. Unless they've released those inner signals to front of mind and you stop ignoring them and take remedial action.

[00:13:04] Even then, you're going to need expert guidance to process this upwelling of sanity safely.

[00:13:12] You'll need high quality support to change your deep-rooted avoidance habits and gently heal those self-protecting mechanisms, because we suppress what is inconvenient in our beings. Keep it hidden from the world and ourselves, by social contract.

[00:13:32] So, of course we convince ourselves: We are not sick. Our guts are fine. Our brains are well managed. Our temper is even. Our behavior, of course, adult and civilized. Our relationship's, normal.

[00:13:46] Our needs, well, they're not really needs are they? We can manage without.

[00:13:51] Am I painting a picture that resonates here with you?

[00:13:54] Alright, now I'm going to tell you about me for a minute. I'm going to give you a couple of my own examples of listening to this inner voice and you get to decide if I'm a witch or not.

[00:14:06] In March, 1987, an eight deck car ferry from Zeebrugge in Belgium to England capsized. The ferry's huge bow doors had remained open on departure and it quickly flooded. 193 people lost their lives.

[00:14:26] In real time, I received this as a clear, sharp vision of the ship capsizing and experienced severe distress and alarm alongside the people in peril. It felt like an impossibly heavy sensation, the weight of terror and despair of so many people, and me being so helpless to do anything for them.

[00:14:54] And I didn't know where all this was coming from. Only later on did I discover the news about the ferry and put two and two together.

[00:15:05] Similarly, on September the 11th, I was asleep in Australia when I had a vivid and terrifying dawn nightmare of wholesale disaster. I woke up sweating with my head pounding.

[00:15:20] Overwhelmed by shock and distress. The weight of the world pulling me down, body and soul. I felt nauseous with this oppressive leaden pressure and intolerable despair, and I had no idea why, but I knew it was large scale devastation, and again, I could do nothing even though I felt souls reaching out, tugging at me.

[00:15:48] I could barely crawl outta bed that day. Shattered in a way that I couldn't process or even understand. I couldn't begin to think about working on a day when I had feelings like that, I thought I must somehow be very sick. So I made a cup of coffee and I sat on the carpet and I turned on the tv, and the rest is history.

[00:16:11] I watched the planes, the towers, the devastation. I couldn't work that day. I couldn't think. I couldn't do anything. I just sent love and I mourned, and I sickened, and I'm still deeply saddened as I think about it now.

[00:16:29] Yet here I am many years later and now I work in healing. This is no surprise. I had a lot of help figuring out that I should be here and how to get here. I did always want to, even as a youngster, but I was so dysfunctional myself, so drowning in my own hell, so unable to heal myself, so poor at relating with other humans.

[00:16:57] The whole thing just seemed completely implausible out of reach. I always promised myself that if I found a way to support myself to the point of being healthful enough and functional enough to support others, then I would. It took a very long time. Oh, dear me!

[00:17:17] I started meditating in 1999 as I came out of a broken relationship, and I really wanted to connect with my inner world, my broken body, heart, soul, and mind, and to find out what was misaligned, work more directly and skillfully with that. 

[00:17:37] I've continued to meditate. Mindfulness has really brought me closer to myself, that forbidden territory we're not supposed to visit, and to understanding the patterns of my energy, fears, desires, weaknesses, and strengths.

[00:17:53] Eventually, I started learning healing skills and practices in 2015, and it worked very powerfully on my fellow students to my surprise, partly because I intuitively heard what their bodies were trying to tell them.

[00:18:12] Their energy told me what they needed and how to connect with that, how to help them heal, and I learned that I have been gifted some sort of skill in facilitating healing. And perhaps, again, we all have that if we can tap into it.

[00:18:28] In any case, for me, that was my go sign. In the following years, I gulped down healing practices, learning a lot of skills in relating gently with the human experience and energies of others, and of course, myself. And I started practicing on volunteers. And then I started a side business. I practiced like crazy and I learned exponentially, and it kept working for people. My clients loved it.

[00:18:58] I learned also the theory and practice of Chinese medicine because it really felt closer to me to the organic energy flow that I could feel in the human entity, and it helped me understand internal dynamics in a way that complimented what I'd learned through the healing practices, intuition and mindfulness.

[00:19:22] Then of course, I got another tap on the shoulder. My startup job crashed. I quit unceremoniously and promptly had a major heart attack. Funnily enough, I wasn't that worried. When I survived it, even in ICU when I couldn't talk, I was okay about it because it didn't quite kill me and I could see straight away it was just a wake up call.

[00:19:46] My doctors advised me to spend three months lying quietly on my sofa, resting my injured heart. So I spent that time researching more healing techniques and practicing them on my own crumpled body. I practiced John Kabat Zinn's mindfulness based stress reduction MBSR program to gently restore my by then rather fragile ecosystem.

[00:20:13] I took on a coach as well to help me with burnout recovery, upgrading my beliefs, processing my doubts, fears, and the slow boiling anger that had always been inside me. It helped also handling my inner life with more skill and increasing optimism, becoming more friendly towards myself and my own failings.

[00:20:38] To be honest, it worked bloody well. I was impressed! It worked actually better than anything else I'd ever tried to fix my problems, and I soon decided to become a coach in that style myself.

[00:20:50] But then I got an extra tap on the shoulder six months after my heart attack. I was hit by a car, went through the windscreen, cartwheeling at high speed down the road, wearing shorts and no shoes, unfortunately.

[00:21:06] Spent three months in hospital with a very smashed up body. Three non-functioning limbs, minor spinal injuries. Couldn't sit up, couldn't wipe my own ass. Clearly I hadn't listened hard enough about living in helplessness.

[00:21:20] Again, I knew this was happening for me, not to me, so I just got on with the rehab. And against the odds, by the end of the year, I was in fact running again and coaching very successfully. I'd survived that humbling experience and I grown my compassion a bit more. I had a new appreciation for human life and quite a bit more skill in supporting that.

[00:21:45] So that's a bit of a run through of some of my guides, but really, where did that apparently socially unacceptable set of inner and outer guides lead me?

[00:21:56] Well, what I did is I refined and essentialized everything I'd learned about healing burnout. I systematized it, and I began coaching others out of burnout.

[00:22:08] And it worked from day one, and it still does.

[00:22:12] So that story might be a little bit random. 

[00:22:16] Perhaps you see what happens in your life as random too ? 

[00:22:21] But is it? Or is it some unseen, loving hand ushering you in the direction of your own healing and your own dreams, to finally confront whatever has hurt you and move on?

[00:22:34] I'm a big believer in people and life. Our brains sometimes wanna see life stacked a bit inky black against us. But really, is that the true story? Is it the whole story?

[00:22:47] So here's another question for you.

[00:22:50] If you think back to an earlier time in your life when you had the spark, of passion, creativity, adventure, what did you want to do?

[00:22:59] What did you dream of doing back then?

[00:23:02] Did you do it? Did you try it? And if you did, did it deliver what you wanted?

[00:23:08] And if not, what was the obstacle?

[00:23:12] Sometimes in life we see our dreams apparently swerve away from us, and sometimes we just think we ended up with a shit sandwich.

[00:23:23] But maybe that's not the end of the story.

[00:23:25] Maybe we can become ready and accepting of a new destiny. One beyond our dreams, if we just stay the course, if we use a bit of grit. 

[00:23:36] And really, this is how I define burnout recovery. This is about getting your secret dreams back, the person you really wanted to be, the talents you wanted to express, the adventures you wanted to have, the quality of relationships that would help you thrive.

[00:23:55] So finally, what if the barrier to your dreams was partly in your own mind? Coming from your self-doubt, anger, fear, distrust.

[00:24:05] 'Cause time and again, in my work, I've seen the late bloomer effect.

[00:24:10] It's very powerful. So is it time to get your mojo back and see what you can do once you've got a bit of fire in your belly?

[00:24:19] Would it help you to listen calmly to those inner voices and wonder what future they point to? ' cause they never point anywhere you can't get to. Do you want to accept that challenge?

[00:24:33] The leadership coaching system I use today has evolved, of course, and extends far beyond burnout recovery into the rare air of achieving passion, purpose, and excellence.

[00:24:45] But in essence, it holds the same truth: that you have what it takes already, you're just sitting on it too hard, in fear.

[00:24:54] Don't be ashamed of your dreams, of who you are.

[00:24:58] People need you to be big hearted, passionate. Show up with your whole big old heart. They're aching for you to lead them, show them the way to open up to their own success.

[00:25:12] You can do it! 

[00:25:13] So I might be a bit unusual. Perhaps I'm a witch or a wizard? Perhaps I'm a bit out there?

[00:25:20] But don't panic. It's intentional.

[00:25:24] This is who I'm supposed to be. I'm actually now the person who knows how to guide you, where you want to go, if you choose that.

[00:25:34] We would begin by eliminating burnout, if you are burning out, and then going on to the really exciting part where you can become the full shining, you. The one you were meant to be. If you dare.

[00:25:49] Even if you almost dare.

[00:25:51] So, what's your inner urging saying about that?

[00:25:54] Can you hear it? Perhaps it's right?

[00:25:57] Because you can have more than this. Whatever you're experiencing or putting up with now, you can have more than this. It's out there waiting for you.

[00:26:06] If you do want that, come and talk to me and let's make a wee plan for you to shine. Book in a time for a chat at mini.dexrandall.com. The link is in the show notes.

[00:26:18] And I'm signing off this rather strange epistle today with my very warmest wishes for your future. Promise you that.