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Rumer Godden, a writer whose career spanned 60 years, once said, 'There is an indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms; a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every toom everyday, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.'

As parents we have an obligation to encourage our children to acknowledge the rooms in their house, to visit and explore them with gratitude and gusto, enabling them to feel good about themselves and to become well-rounded, balanced human beings.

it is in one of these rooms that intuition resides, a treasure of the psyche and one which will serve our children well if we help them to cultivate it.

Intuition is a remarkable tool at our disposal. It can tell us whether to go or stay, forward or back, left or right. It is another sense, the sixth sense. There is nothing spooky or weird about it, it is a valuable instinct to use in conjunction with the other five senses, and with our intellectual reasoning and empirical thought processes.

When small children play, they see pictures in their head, they hear voices, experience emotions, and nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. This 'make believe' world at first flourishes, then flounders and finally fizzles away for all but a very few of us. The pictures in our head are dismissed as daydreams, the feelings are trivialised and as for the voices, who among us is brave enough to admit to those? So we admonish ourselves for the daydream, ignore those gnawing gut feelings, tell the voices to shut up and perhaps walk headlong down the wrong path.

In the charming Hollywood movie, 'Harvey', James Stewart plays an endearing character named Elwood P. Dowd who has a best friend in the form of a 6' 8" invisible white rabbit; a pooka or fairy spirit. Elwood's rabbit is really quite insightful and regularly counsels Dowd. Through the help of the rabbit Stewart's character has reinvented himself into the epitome of niceness, someone people are drawn to and want to be near. Dowd's embarrassed and shamed family attempts to have him committed. At the 11th hour however, they realise that treatment will render Elwood 'normal', no longer Mr Nice Guy with his beloved brand of simple goodness. When interviewed years later, Stewart himself recalled the film as one of his favourites and fondly remembers having "a special admiration and love for that big white rabbit."

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