How to develop your intuition

 

Are you ready to take steps — however small — away from basing your decisions and reactions on fear and moving toward trusting in yourself and the universe?

Developing your intuition is a vital step in living a life connected to Spirit. Intuition is, after all, a direct connection to Spirit — to your own higher self and the intelligent energy that manifests itself in all life.

In order to hear the still, small voice inside you (and help it become louder and clearer), you need to find ways to get quiet and still the mental chatter that takes up so much of our head space and drowns out our intuitive sense.

Each of these ideas and practices could be a post of their own, but here are some brief thoughts to get you thinking (and moving forward).

Meditate

It’s a repetitive refrain, I know, but meditation is key in getting in tune with yourself (whether or not you ever want to connect with folks in Spirit). Meditation does so much good for you on every level — it helps you calm and focus your mind, reduces anxiety, gives your body all the oxygen in needs while you take long, slow, deep belly breaths. Plus, its benefits last long after your 5-15 minute meditation session.

Yes, even 5 minutes a day will produce positive effects in your life.

See my recommendations for meditation music and tips and types of meditations. I’ll write more about my meditation journey with tips for how to incorporate it into your life soon.

Write down your dreams

Your dreams could be telling you something. Even if they’re not profound prophetic dreams, they’re a way to get in touch with your emotional self and what you’re working out on the inside.

Don’t think you dream? You do. We all do (or we’d go insane). But you may not be remembering them when you wake up. You can start remembering your dreams again — and if you already remember some things, you can increase the amount you remember.

If you don’t remember any of your dreams, when you relax in bed at night before going to sleep, set the intention that you’ll remember your dreams when you wake up.

If you remember some of your dreams when you wake up, at least some of the time, write down whatever it is that you can recall as soon as you wake up enough to hold a pen (or open your laptop). The more you do this, the better your recall will become.

Move your body

Exercise has lots of benefits for your mind as well as your body. It grounds us energetically and helps us reconnect with our physical vessel. Your body is your soul sac — you can’t experience life without it — and it’s important to treat it with compassion and kindness. That doesn’t mean pampering it with a pedicure or a massage every now and then, it means feeding it nourishing food and moving it around so that it works as well as it can.

Exercise also allows your mind to relax. There’s probably a cool scientific explanation about heart rates and endorphins, but there’s also the well-known anecdotal evidence that “getting the stink blown off” (by taking a walk, for example) helps you feel better and clears your mind.

When I have an issue I’m mulling over, or when something just isn’t sitting right with me, and I take a walk, inevitably by the end of the walk I’ve reached a conclusion or found some measure of peace (and sanity) that I didn’t have before. My mind is calmer and, through the application of putting one foot in front of the other, I manage to get out of my own way enough to hear my inner self’s voice.

Give yourself time

Developing any skill or ability takes time. So give yourself time, space and permission to take as long as you need to unfold. Especially if you’ve recently been through a difficult period in your life, where you’ve instinctively gone into survival mode and plowed on through, or are coming out of a period of depression and self doubt. Give yourself time. When you’ve been emotionally tightly curled in a ball or flexing your armor-covered muscles, it takes a bit to relax and unfurl and be emotionally vulnerable enough to get quiet and listen to yourself again.

So much of this journey is about trust — trust in Spirit that the universe is ultimately a good place that says “yes” to us and trust in ourselves to ask for our own highest good. I believe in you.