Ask Your Unconscious: The Pendulum Technique

Most of the time your conscious, talkative mind runs the show — and it has opinions about what you should think. This is a way to step around it and get a straight signal from underneath: a yes or a no from the part of you that doesn’t argue. It looks a bit witchy. It’s actually just ideomotor response — tiny involuntary movements your body makes that your conscious mind doesn’t direct. Useful, and oddly honest.

You need a pendulum: a small weight on a short string. A hippy crystal works; so does a builder’s plumb bob, or a ring on a thread.

Set it up

Hold the pendulum still and let it hang. Then say, out loud:

“Sometimes the unconscious likes to give a signal for yes that looks like this.” (gently swing it one way) “And a signal for no that looks like this.” (swing it the other way) “Now — show me yes. … And show me no.”

Don’t try to move it. Just hold it steady and let it drift. Within a minute it’ll usually pick a direction for each. Those are your signals.

(Want it even simpler? Lay a sheet of paper down, write YES on one side and NO on the other. Hold the pendulum over the centre and watch which way it drifts.)

Ask your questions

Now you can ask anything that takes a yes/no answer, and watch:

• “Is it okay to work on this problem today?”
• “Do I already know what to do about it?”
• “Is there something more important underneath this?”

And to make change concrete, borrow the structure the practitioners use — ask it to commit to a when:

“Sometimes a part of me starts solving a problem like this in as little as ____, and sometimes it takes as long as ____. So — how soon will I start? … And how soon will I finish?”

Treat what comes up as information, not gospel. But you’ll be surprised how often the weight on the string knows something you’d been talking yourself out of.