This is Part 2 of this series, to read Part 1 click here >>
In last week’s blog post, we talked about what intuition is and how so many of us lose touch with it. This is such a frustrating topic for so many people because in many ways, the people who teach about intuition the most assume that you already have a halfway decent connection with yours. They don’t bother explaining what it is or what to do if your intuition seems to be broken and so a lot of people just go about their lives assuming that they just don’t have an intuition or are somehow intuition deficient.
This could not be further from the truth! We all have an intuition and the ability to hear it is innate, we’ve simply learned to ignore it. The good news is that it’s completely possible to regain an awareness of your intuition and learn to use it to your best advantage in your craft and your life. You’re not broken, nothing is irreversibly lost, your intuition is hiding down there somewhere and you just need a little guidance to help unearth it again.
Learning To Recognize Your Intuition Again
As I mentioned last week, if you’ve read the previous post in this series then you are already on the path to regaining your intuition. Half the battle is learning what intuition is and how you lost yours. Once your mind is made aware of this information, it goes to work. Our brains are connection-making machines. Every time you put new information into it, it starts pulling up old information and memories and trying to create connections and links between them. Your mind wants this new information to fit neatly in with what you already know, so it’s working like crazy in the background trying to assimilate what you’ve learned. You’ve probably already remembered moments in your life where you DID listen to your intuition, even if you didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. This is exactly what we want! Your mind’s natural inclination is what we’re going to use to rebuild your connection to your intuition.
That said, rebuilding a connection to your intuition can be a slow process. It’s not something that you’re just going to be able to fix overnight and suddenly it’s all intuition all the time. You have a lifetime of conditioning that you have to unlearn and replace with new mental habits. This process is not particularly action-oriented and I know that’s going to frustrate a lot of you because you want to be able to just do something concrete and fix your damn intuition already. You have to be patient, though. The majority of the work that you’re going to be doing to rebuild your awareness of your intuition is going to be simply noticing your intuition when it happens.
1. Noticing after the fact always comes first
The first step of rebuilding your intuition is noticing when your intuition has been speaking to you after the fact. Most people will not be able to jump directly into hearing their intuition in the present moment. Instead, you’ll have moments where, upon looking back at a situation, you realize that your intuition was telling you something, and you were ignoring it. These moments of clarity are incredibly important. You’re now aware of your intuition as a concept and aware of how you have been trained to ignore it. Your job is to begin looking for the ways that you have ignored your intuition in the past, both the near past and the far past. You can do this by simply reviewing your day every evening, or thinking over the past week to see if there were any moments where your intuition may have been speaking to you.
Anytime you become aware that you ignored your intuition in a situation, don’t beat yourself up about it! This is a frustrating phase to be in, but you will get through it if you just keep at it. When you recognize after the fact that your intuition was trying to speak to you and you did not listen to it or were not aware of it in the moment, stop and replay that memory in your mind. What did your intuition feel like in your body? What sensations, feelings, or emotions were you ignoring in that moment? How was your intuition trying to communicate with you? Was it discomfort? Was it a gut feeling that someone was untrustworthy? Was it just a general sense of “not this”?
In all likelihood, the moments of intuition that you’ll begin to notice will be negative intuition. It’ll be your intuition telling you that something is wrong. This is okay. Those are the signals that are loudest when we have been trained to ignore our intuition, so those are the ones that are going to be the easiest for you to begin noticing. This does not mean that your intuition is stuck in negative mode or something.
Over time, as you notice your intuition after the fact more and more often, you will begin to notice it sooner after the incident. Instead of recognizing that you ignored your intuition the day after it happens, you’ll start noticing it a few hours after it happens, or even a few minutes after it happens. This is one of the surest signs of progress in your reconnection with your intuition. The faster you become at recognizing when you have ignored your intuition, the stronger your connection is growing and the more aware of your intuition you become.
2. Next you’ll begin to notice your intuition in the moment
Eventually, the time that it takes for you to realize that you are ignoring your intuition will become so short that you are recognizing it within minutes or even seconds of beginning to ignore your intuition. At this point, you’re essentially recognizing your intuition in the moment. Congratulations! You’ve managed to achieve a connection with your intuition that is actionable. You can actually listen to your intuition and change how you are acting based on it at this point. To continue progressing, in fact, you need to begin acting on your intuition when it comes up. If your intuition is telling you to get out of a situation, you need to get yourself out of there. If your intuition is telling you that a person in your life isn’t trustworthy or isn’t good for you, stop spending time with them.
Your connection will strengthen if you give it the weight that it deserves. Becoming aware of your intuition is only useful if you are willing to use that information and change how you are acting in your day-to-day life. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an intuition at all? If you want to go deeper and get full access to your intuitive capabilities, you must start listening to your intuition and acting on what it tells you. At this level, you’re likely still getting almost entirely negative intuition, and that’s okay. You will eventually start getting small glimpses of positive intuition as well but in order to foster your connection to your intuition you have to prove to yourself that you’re actually willing to make changes based on what your intuition tells you. That is what people mean when they tell you to trust your intuition. You are trusting that what it is telling you is accurate enough for you to act on.
3. Finally, you achieve a solid connection
In the final phase of developing a connection with your intuition, responding to and acting on negative intuition becomes second nature, and instances of positive intuition begin to happen with more regularity. Positive intuition is any kind of gut feeling or intuitive knowledge that is telling you that something is right for you. This can feel like a yes in your body. It can feel like being drawn towards a person or a situation. It can feel like coming home or suddenly getting a sense of comfort or rightness. This is that feeling when you meet someone and you know immediately that you’re going to be best friends with them. It’s the feeling when you walk into a job interview and you just know that this is the job for you. It’s picking up a book at the bookstore because it just felt right and buying it, only to find out that it contained the exact words that you needed at that time in your life.
This is also when you begin to develop the ability to reach for your intuition consciously. Rather than waiting for it to tell you something, you’ll be able to reach out to it with questions or to get a read on a person or a situation. You’ll have a strong enough connection to your intuition that you know exactly what it feels like and where in your mind and body you need to put your attention to hear it and get the information that you need. Again, this will happen as a natural extension of simply learning to notice when you’ve been ignoring your intuition. There are no crazy steps that you need to take, you don’t need to go out of your way and do a bunch of exercises, you just need to learn to notice.
Trust Yourself!
Your intuition is an innate part of your being. Whether you are connected to it right now or not, whether you can feel it or not, it is a part of you and nothing can take it away from you. Trust yourself on this journey. Your intuition is a natural extension of you, and by simply opening your awareness to what it is and how you lost touch with it, you will inevitably begin to expand your awareness of it and regain your connection. You don’t need to rush the process, and you don’t need anyone else to tell you how to connect to your intuition. You simply need to learn to listen and hear what you already know deep inside of yourself.
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