Continuation of Part One: Intuition
The definition of Intuition… an unexplained feeling, a natural ability or supernatural force that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence but you know it to be true. It is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning, often defined as a gut feeling.
Today more and more people are awakening their intuition to achieve tremendous success and abundance in all areas of their lives, including money, relationship, career, and much more.
All of us are born with this intuition, but can we hear it? Are we paying attention? Are we living a life that keeps us on the pathway to keeping our intuition unblocked?
Whether we’re aware of it or not, intuition is a unique form of communication we all have within ourselves and with ourselves. It is always there, always reading the situation, always trying to steer us in the right direction. We just need to learn to pay attention to it. Feeding and nurturing your intuition, and living a life in which you can make use of its wisdom, is one key way to thrive and succeed in life.
When the subconscious mind passes information to the conscious mind, this is a form of inner communication that enables us to see and feel things differently and notice things we can not explain by logic. When we channel into this form of inner communication, which I believe is the communication with our Higher Self, we can benefit from it in many ways.
Most importantly, this form of communication helps us uncover hidden knowledge about ourselves, people around us, places and situations. When we are in touch with our Higher Selves we have more self-protection and awareness. It helps us be more relaxed, live with less stress, less fear, and less anxiety. It helps us make better decisions, and make better choices in our lives. It keeps us in the present moment, in the NOW, but gives us warnings or signs for the future. So how can we strengthen this natural ability and learn to live with it by being in an awaken state of mind?
It is not as hard you think and with just a bit of practice, anyone can improve and strengthen their intuition. Here are 10 things you can do to improve your intuition.
1. Take time out for meditation and reflection
Meditation heightens your intuitive awareness making you more open taking in everything around you, which in turn nurtures your creativity. There are many forms of meditation and all are excellent ways to get centered and quiet the mind. Even just a few minutes of meditation daily can increase your ability to hear your intuitive voice. Messages from your intuition tend to be quiet, so spending time in silence will help you hear and interpret these messages. Meditation helps us become more aware with our subconscious mind and clear our head from clutter. Practicing mindfulness meditation is the most beneficial. Its focus is to keep us in the present moment by making us pay closer attention to our bodies and our surroundings. It is a good way to learn to recognize our 5 senses. It teaches us to better handle our problems and opens doors to find solutions for these problems. It helps us also recognize the positive things about ourselves.
2. Engage in creative activities
Engaging in creative activities, such as music, reading, writing, painting, drawing, scrapbooking, or free-flow journaling, quiets the cognitive mind, the left side of our brain which allows your intuition to speak up. Both hemispheres of our brains actually work together but, when we improve our creative skills we also improve our perception and recognition skills such as recognizing faces, emotions and little things that are easily missed by an ordinary eye. All of these are gifts we can use to improve our intuitive skills as well. Once we are aware of what the left side and the right side of the brain do to our thinking and feeling, we learn to tell the difference in a given situation if the information our subconscious is passing us is coming from left or the right side. Meaning, are we thinking or are we feeling a certain thing? With more practice, you can easily tell the difference between thinking and feeling.
3. Become comfortable with how you feel
Feel, don’t think. The mind thinks, always chattering away, arguing with itself like a crazy person. Intuition, on the other hand, feels. If you’re not sure whether you’re listening to your fearful mind or your trustworthy intuition, see if you can differentiate whether you’re thinking or feeling. Start noticing all that you can with your five conventional senses. Doing so can raise your sensitivity to your sixth sense. When you have a gut feeling about something, someone or some place, listen to it. Analyze it. Figure out where this is coming from. Does it make you feel uncomfortable? Does it cause fear? Whatever it is, learn to face your fears and become comfortable with your feelings. Allowing fear dominate your mind will only cause blockage in your progress.
4. Trust your hunches and feelings
Learn to recognize your hunches and feelings as a different form of communication and information. For example do you get flash images about certain situations? Do not dismiss these flash images. They mean something. Figuring out the message is your mission. Pay attention to your initial feeling when you meet someone or when you go to a place. Each situation is full of signs and symbols. Nothing is coincidental. It only takes a trained mind’s eye to see and interpret these signs and symbols. In order to achieve this you have to learn to trust your feelings. If you have feelings about what might happen in the future, write down your hunches, then check them later. See how often you were right.
5. Spend more time in nature
It is easier to hear the whispers from the soul when your mind is quiet and open. Take a sabbatical or an extended break from your daily life and work where you are completely disconnected from technology, distractions, and responsibilities. Try to find a place where you can spend a lot of time in nature just being. Take long walks, meditate, journal, stare at the ocean or mountains. Listen to the sounds of nature. Give your brain and body full permission to tap into your intuitive processes and invite insights and “ah ha” awareness. Sometimes we need a full detox from our busy lives in order to kickstart intuition. Nature is a gateway to our Higher Selves. It has a unique way of grounding us and making us feel complete, at ease and relaxed. All these things are necessary to get in touch with our intuitive side.
6. Get in tune with your body
Your intuition speaks to you through your body, and the more you cultivate somatic awareness, the more sensitive you become. If you get an uncomfortable physical feeling when you’re trying to make a decision, pay attention. Do you feel light or heavy? Got a sick feeling in your gut? Saddled with a headache or stomachache? It could just be the result of stress responses activated by false fear, but it could also be your intuition ringing loud and clear. Our bodies give us many signs. Not just feelings but we feel these physical symptoms as well when something does not feel right. Or the complete opposite, we see improvements in our physical conditions when something is going right. Listen to what your body is telling you. For this, a Body Scan Meditation can be very helpful. By just allowing yourself 10 minutes at any time during the day, you can practice this special kind of meditation and get better at recognizing your physical symptoms and work towards eliminating them from your life.
7. Analyze people more often and pay attention to how you feel around them
Practice sensing into people before you know them. See what kind of information you can glean from observing people and feeling their energetic signature before you talk to them or learn anything about them from other people. The more you pay attention, the more you’ll realize you already know things you couldn’t possibly know with the cognitive mind. It is not visible to an untrained eye, but each of us have an aura (aura is the energy force of the body, dimensional body). The reason why we feel a certain way around certain people is their vibrations (vibrations or frequency is the emotion, state of being). We are all made from energy, just like everything else in the universe. Each frequency corresponds to a certain vibration that can be detected by certain colors. Even though we can’t really see it, we feel it. That’s why some people make us feel at home and relaxed right from the start and some people don’t. Trust your first judgement.
8. Pay attention to your dreams
While you are sleeping and your conscious mind is at rest, your soul has the opportunity to bring intuitive information to you through your dreams. When the cognitive mind is busy, it can override the intuitive right brain and the subconscious mind, the wellspring of intuition. But when you’re sleeping, your cognitive mind rests and opens space for the subconscious mind to signal you in dreams. Dreams are messages given to us by our subconscious mind. When we can’t notice certain things about ourselves and others, when we try to suppress certain feelings in our daily lives, our subconscious mind does not stop taking notes. It gives us messages and answers in our dreams. Take note of your dreams and try to figure out what they mean. Get a good dream interpretation dictionary but also instead of taking these interpretations literally, apply them to your own reality.
9. Learn from the past, detach yourself from situations
Recall a negative experience from your past, ideally something fairly recent. Before this thing happened, think back to whether you got any feelings that urged you to steer clear. Maybe you got a gut feeling something wasn’t right. Maybe you had a foreshadowing dream or a vision. If so, did you pay attention to that feeling, dream, or vision, or did you talk yourself out of it? Try to remember exactly how you felt. Recall as many details as possible. The more you can get in touch with the part of you that tried to warn you, the more you’ll trust it next time.
If you want to be more in tune with your intuitive side, you need to learn how to become detached from situations and how they make you feel. It sort of sounds cold and perhaps selfish but think of it this way: In order to come to an objective conclusion, you need to let go of your fears, your subjectivity and your feelings. Perhaps you find yourself in a situation that reminds you of a past experience. If you dive into this new situation with the frame of mind and state of heart that past experience had put you in, you will be clouding your judgement and you won’t be able to see things clearly and objectively. This requires complete honesty with yourself and is not an easy thing to do sometimes. But with meditation, you can certainly make faster progress.
10. Keep a journal
Not everyone finds it easy to write a journal every day, but the benefits of writing one are huge. If you are a beginner to journaling, you may at first feel like you are just making it up. But, you don’t have to create a masterpiece. You just need to write every day to get into the swing of it; so, start by thinking small. Writing a journal takes time and practice, but it is one of the most powerful ways that you can use to tap into your intuition. Write down every hunch, feeling, sign, and dream you have gives you physical confirmation of just how much guidance you receive, especially on days when you’re feeling disconnected or doubtful of your progress. Journaling also provides you a safe place to tinker with your predictions. Nobody’s going to see it but you, so write freely and often!
Journaling helps get you in touch with your Higher Self (soul). When you take time to write or journal, you tap into thoughts, feelings and ideas you’re not typically conscious of. This is an excellent way to release inner messages, insights or hidden knowledge about a situation or problem that requires attention.
Intuitive messages are subtle and can fade from your conscious mind very quickly unless you take action to record them. Journal writing is a highly effective way to access your intuition and capture its wisdom. Don’t worry about whether you’re ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Intuitive guidance is often symbolic, and it’s up to you to interpret your unique way of receiving; writing your encounters down will help you do this. When you find out you were wrong, try to analyze if maybe you were not paying attention to your feelings but instead you were acting upon your thinking. journaling is a great tool to learn from your experiences and strengthen your intuition. I suggest you make a regular practice of journaling – you’ll be amazed at the clarity of what comes through!
