One of the most common questions I receive as an intuitive is about how people can learn how to trust their intuition. Nearly everyone—myself included—has heard a voice or received a message that they were certain was true, only to later learn that it was not at all correct. We can be left angry and hurting by this, wanting to trust that our intuition or some higher power has our best interests in mind and is working for our highest good, but then what’s this shit? That voice we want to trust is lying to us?
How do we handle that seeming betrayal?
What I have learned over the years–from much experience, including with those “lies” or “false messages”–is that only practice and some cool reason (once we’ve removed ourselves from strong emotions and the heat of the moment) can help us trust our intuition.
I’m currently working on creating a program to help people begin trusting their intuition, following the path I went through during and after my Year of Shadow and Light that eventually led me to having regular trusted conversations with my intuition and my guides. In the meantime, however, I’ve created a list of five steps to begin trusting your intuition.
You can listen to the audio recording below for more details, or if you just want the “quick and dirty” points, keep reading.
- When you receive a message that you believe is from your intuition, write it down/record it in some way. Along with the words of the message itself, be sure to make note of any sensory or emotional input that you experience along with the message. Recording it for posterity allows you to come back to the message later to see if it turned out to be right or wrong. This practice also allows you to start noticing the commonalities between all the wrong messages, the commonalities between all the right messages, and the differences between right and wrong messages. Ultimately, this helps you recognize what else can confirm or “disprove” the truth of the message—whether a correct message always comes along with a pressure on your third eye, a ringing in your ears, or the smell of your deceased aunt Bertie’s favorite perfume.
- Regularly practice meditation or a mindfulness technique. If those negative thoughts are from you, meditation or mindfulness practice will help slow, and possibly even stop, those messages. People who regularly practice some sort of prayer/meditation/mindfulness technique often report increased intuition, or increased awareness of intuition. Such practice also can make you aware of the sound of your own thoughts, and the patterns the thoughts tend to repeat, as well as how your mind reacts to stimuli. In this way, you can begin to distinguish your intuition’s messages from your mind’s more regular thoughts and though processes. After each such meditation session—or maybe at the end of each week—record what you noticed going on: not all of it, but the high points, like what types of thoughts kept recurring, or whether one thought stood out above the others.
- Get outside opinions/feedback. Sometimes we are simply too close to an issue to see it clearly. Of course, if you’re so worried about and experiencing so much tension or fear around a topic that you can’t really hear the advice that your loved ones/trusted advisors offer, you’re also going to have some difficulty hearing your own intuition clearly. The outside feedback can be from anyone or anything you trust: a very good, honest friend; an oracle of some sort; a therapist; or even a psychic/intuitive. (You know how most therapists have their own therapists? Same thing with psychics—we recognize that there are some things we are just too close to to hear/see for ourselves, so don’t feel like talking to someone else about it is a failure.) Oh, and once you’ve received that outside feedback? Write it down.
- Do something that relaxes you. I find that clarity often comes in the (usually really long) bath or shower. Other people find clarity while exercising, meditating, doing yoga, praying, or even reading a good book. Whatever this thing is for you, to be effective, it must be an activity that usually takes your mind off your troubles. Then, when you’re not focusing on the problem, clarity can arrive. Once you get some sort of clarity on the issue—even if it’s only about one tiny, possibly “unimportant” aspect—record that clarity.
- Write down your worries, and then give them up. This is different from writing down the messages you think are from your intuition. In this case, you’re giving focus and attention to the worry and fear, then burning the paper or burying it, or even just walking away from the thoughts afterward. Sometimes, all of our thoughts spin inside our heads over and over so much that we couldn’t think through the issue even if we tried. If your intuition is trying to speak to you but your head is full of worry, the message won’t come through. It’s like a friend yelling at you from across the room at a very noisy party where the music is cranked all the way up. Writing everything down and then disconnecting from it is like turning down the volume at that party and walking over to your friend to hear him or her. As an added bonus, sometimes in writing down all of my worries, I get into something of a meditative state and start to hear and feel the messages from my intuition. In such cases, I transition to writing down questions and then also recording the responses I receive from my intuition.
You’ve likely noticed these all boil down to two things: Practice regularly, and write everything down! It’s the best way to learn how to trust your intuition.
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