We don’t get much guidance in developing or trusting our new found intuition, and like a muscle, it gets stronger with practice, so here are 10 easy ways to cultivate our intuition.
Break your routine – Do something different. Anything. Drive a different way to work, walk on the other side of the street, create an all-new meditation practice. This will help you stay alert and in the moment, so you can notice when our intuition is pulling at our sleeve.
At a restaurant, choose to order the very first thing that you see on the menu – If nothing else, it’s pleasant to have more time for conversation and less time for silently obsessing.
Take the long way home – Just let the car take you wherever it wants to go. Or walk a different way home. Deliberately get lost. See where you end up.
Keeping some kind of notebook beside our bed and record just the images from our dreams – We never worry about remembering the plot—dream logic is too confusing to try to capture—but We usually remember a few images, and those can be quite illuminating.
Try some version of automatic writing – just try to write faster than our mind can think.
Right hand-left hand exercise – Let our dominant hand ask a question that we really want the answer to, and let our non-dominant hand write the answer. (Yes, the writing of our non-dominant hand will look like that of a child within. No worries.) Keeping the dialogue going until we feel satisfied.
Talk to animals – Get quiet and communicate in thought pictures with the animals in our life.
Connect with new people in our daily life – If we feel a pull toward someone we don’t know, reach out in some way. Make eye contact with people at the grocery store and at the gas station. Allow ourself to notice what we believe at first glance about them. (In other words, when we really look at someone, we might get little flickers of thought: “She looks lonely,” or “I bet he was wild as a teenager.” Just let that impression bubble up.)
Truthfully answer the question, “How are you?” – On being asked, take a second to check in with ourself and give a real answer. Caution: this might lead to a real conversation.
Obey the “How dumb would I feel?” rule – This rule kicks in when I pull into a parking space with my computer on the front seat and think, “Oh, I don’t have to put that in the boot; I’m sure it will be fine.” Then I think, “Yup, I’m sure it will be fine, but how dumb would I feel if I came back out here and it was gone?” I would feel pretty darn dumb, especially since I had just had this conversation with myself. Make it a daily practice to pay attention to your niggling thoughts and suspicions.
Little changes action stage
Choose one intuition cultivator from the list above and do it today.
The 6 Intuition Killers
Just as we can develop our child within, there are also some easy ways to suppress it. Here are six killers of our intuition:
The need to be right – We need to be smart, documented, and logical in all of our decisions will cause us to ignore the whispers of our child within and do foolish things, like marrying someone who “looks good on paper” or taking a job just for the money.
The safety of “I don’t know” – Sometimes when we say, “I don’t know,” it’s because actually we do know, and we just don’t like it. Other times we allow ourself to stay dissociated so that we don’t have to commit to a decision. If this is a habit of ours, try using the stagers trick of saying, “If I did know the answer, it might be…”
Fatigue and dehydration – Physical depletion often leads directly to poor brain function and unreliable interpretations of the signals our child within is trying to
send us.
Depression – When we are caught up in hopelessness, grief, and nonstop self-criticism, it is very hard for us to hear that deep, calm, knowing voice of the child within, and even harder to trust it.
Talking ourself into and out of decisions – When we second-guess ourself, we confuse ourself and develop self-mistrust.
Routine – Being on autopilot causes us to stagnate and go to sleep.
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