We are all built with an intuition, it was created for survival waaaaaay back when we needed to know whether the great white buffalo sensed us hunting him or whether we sensed the mountain lion hunting us. It kept us safe, surviving and evolving as humans while we learned the world around us and began to conquer it.
Nowadays, we rely on it a little less for survival and a little more as a BS radar… you can recognize modern day use of intuition by phrases like “I KNEW she was pregnant!” or “I had a feeling he was cheating!” or “As soon as I took a bite of that… trouble” or “I knew that was a scam!”. This is how we’ve climbed up the ranks of Darwins survival of the fittest; Using our intuition to catch cheaters, not eat sushi on Sundays and seek out scams. Serious #firstworldproblems.
What we are missing is that we can actually train and fine tune our intuition to work for us like a virtual BS radar. We can become our own psychics, in tuned enough to walk into a situation, not have all the facts or logic behind it, take a minute and check in with intuition then BAM have an answer. I’m not saying we will have the answer, as in you can use this for powerball numbers (Let’s be honest… The Hemsworth brothers would be feeding me raspberries right now if that were the case;-)) But we will be able to instantly access that “gut feeling”, our intuition that knows what right from wrong is, but particularly for us and our higher good. You know when you call the douchey ex-boyfriend late on a Sunday because you’re lonely, out of ice cream and the Eat, Pray, Love marathon just ended on Lifetime??? How every hair on your body is standing up and the voice in your head is screaming “Nooooooooo! He had frosted tips and wears Affliction…. Nooooooo!”??? That is your little internal radar piping up and trying to save you. Do you listen, maybe not but it’s there regardless.
So, if we always have this little psychic buddy in our pocket, how do we use it? Well like anything in the body, intuition likes routine, likes regularity and gets better with use. What we need to do is start training your intuition with simple exercises so that when you get to the tricky stuff, you have a little practice. Here’s a start:
Intuition Training Exercise:
Sit quietly without any distractions around you, calm your breathing by counting each inhale and exhale for 2 cycles of 10: Inhale = count 1, Exhale = count 2, Inhale = count 3, Exhale = count 4, Inhale = count 5, Exhale = count 6… until you reach 10. Then repeat.
After you’ve done that twice you should feel a little calmer. Now, placing your hands on your thighs and inhaling deeply I want you to imagine the breath coming into the very pit of your stomach. THAT is the magical little place your intuition lives! Ok so now that you are calm and have located your intuition, I am going to write some words and on first glance I want you to assign a “Good” feeling in the pit of your stomach or a “Bad” feeling ok? We’ll start with the easy stuff:
Relatively easy right? You should’ve assigned a Good or Bad value pretty easily. Ok let’s kick it up a notch, check in with your gut feeling on these:
Getting harder right? Ok final round, what’s your first gut punch on these:
See that was tougher, you know why? Because the first exercise was basic and common things that we all have a positive or negative association with. The next list was a little harder because you had to digest your feelings on each one a little more. The final list is a great example of how your intuition is specific to YOU. “Looking out a plane window” for me, is a positive association with travel = Good. For a lot of people planes are anxiety provoking = Bad. This is to show you how your intuition was created to be used as a barometer for how a situation, person or decision feels for YOU. So the next time you are faced with a difficult decision, check in with that feeling in the pit of your stomach, your intuition and see how you feel. If it’s murky, then break the problem into pieces and go smaller until you get a clear sense of what “Good” for you and what’s “Bad” for you. Most importantly practice, practice, practice and eventually one day you’ll be a sneaky psychic intuition pro. Have fun with it too!
More on this in the book I will eventually write… until then more of me on IG, Twitter and FB @paigeacunyc
