Tapping Into Your Intuition

Do you feel like you’re stuck, or like things in your life aren’t flowing easily? If yes, then perhaps you need to start tapping into your intuition more! Your body has many perceptive abilities, and tapping into them more fully can allow a more efficient and meaningful way of navigating through your life, in a way that is more consistent with your authentic path. When you allow yourselves to follow a more intuitive path, coincidences and synchronistic events are more likely to become a natural part of life, and life can seem to flow in a more effortless way.  If however, you ignore or drown out your intuition and allow your mind to dominate as your only form of perceiving, then you are missing out on the full range of experience, and probably making bad life decisions as a result.

What is intuition?

You may think that intuition is a foreign or unfamiliar thing, but we are all using our intuition to varying degrees.  Say you are looking to buy a particular house, which ticks all the right boxes, but when you go inside, it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. Or if a person you meet is supposedly an upstanding member of the community, but for some reason you still don’t like them. How do we explain these feelings or sensations?  It is another source of intelligence which doesn’t work in the same way as logic. Whether you choose to understand intuition as separate from the typical cognitive and perceptive processes or as a variation of them, the point is that it is a real and very valuable source of knowledge.

Tapping into your intuition isn’t about abandoning your logic, but about honouring and respecting your instincts and intuition as it arises.

The optimal state is to have a healthy balance of both logic and intuition, mind and body. In western culture, there seems to be an obsession with analyzing and breaking life down into chunks which we can consider on a purely intellectual level.

“Rationality and reasoning is often promoted as the primary or only valid way of navigating your life. This is a common mistake in our culture.”

Yes, scientific, analytical thinking is an essential, practical, even beautiful component of human experience and perception, but it is not the only part.

Tapping into your intuition

Tapping into your intuition is about bringing conscious awareness to the body.  Each person is their own unique instrument which they themselves must learn to play skillfully or else be destined for uninteresting or incoherent music.  This unique path is not an exact science and there will be significant variation between different people. This being said, here are some general things to tune into to access your intuition:

• Body sensations as they arise – (pay particular attention to your chest and abdomen)
  • e.g. Changes in breathing, changes in heart rate, tingling, shivers, sweating, smells,
• Emotions
  • e.g. Quick shifts in emotion, extreme emotions,
• Connections between your thoughts, emotions and body sensations.
  • e.g. Every time you think a particular thought, a feeling of anxiety in the gut occurs.
• Connections between your internal states and external circumstances.
  • e.g. Certain words which trigger emotions, or certain people whose presence changes your internal state.

Meditation, or any activity which helps you to pay attention to what is going on in your body, will also aid this process of becoming more in tune with your intuition.

Interpreting intuitive signs

Ironically, learning to interpret and access your intuition is an intuitive process. Sometimes these signs will be subtle, but for some reason, certain things stand out as important and meaningful, and it is these times where you must pay particular attention, and ask yourself what the meaning or message is.  You may not always be right, but over time you will develop the skill of discernment and learn to trust your instincts more. Some general tips for interpreting signs:

• Trust yourself, pay attention and be willing to explore.
• It is a personal process, so you are your best teacher.
• Look for patterns i.e. recurring connections. e.g. Always feeling anxious around a particular person.
• Expect meaning to come in the form of symbols, not in the form of simple, logical, linear explanations.
• Ask yourself what you think it means when these body reactions occur.
• Signs should make sense to you. e.g. unpleasant sensation = something bad, pleasant sensations = something good.

Like a flower, we come out of the world, not into it. We are expressions of the universe and are inextricably connected to it.  If we pay attention, we can rediscover this innate connection to our surroundings and utilize the vast knowledge therein. If you have the courage to trust, play, and explore, your intuition will allow you to navigate your life in a more effortless, yet exhilarating and fulfilling way.

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