HOW TO LISTEN TO AND FOLLOW YOUR INTUITION
“To live intuitively means honoring our inner voice over the voice of the world.”
– Unknown
In a world full of noise and constant activity, it is easy to become distracted and lose touch with our inner guidance. We all have the capacity to access intuition, but many are unaware of it.
Most of us have learned to look at the world through the eyes of the known, through what we have learned, and through logic. So, listening within and trusting our intuition doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us, even though it is natural.
When we are not used to following our intuition, we may doubt it even when we hear it because our intuition doesn’t always make sense or align with our usual ways of acting or looking at the world.
My intuition and inner guidance have guided me to let go of my old life, start anew, and begin to create a life that aligns with who I really am, my true self (you can read my story here). It would never have been possible without listening to and trusting the inner guidance.
It is a process that has taken years, and I had done a lot of inner work and awakened spiritually before the bigger changes occurred in my life. But an essential part of my journey has been listening to and following my inner voice instead of the known.
Two ways to strengthen your intuition
There are not only external distractions that cover up our intuition. There can also be a lot of internal noise and distractions. Our conditioned thinking, the ways we have learned to look at ourselves, others, and the world, and the constant noise of the mind can easily cover up our intuition.
If we constantly think about or evaluate what we are experiencing, there is little room for our intuition to come through. So, we must provide space for intuitive insights to arise.
Two ways to strengthen your intuition are to quiet the mind and to remove what is in the way of your intuition.
Quieting the mind
You can quiet the mind by practicing meditation or mindfulness or, for example, by walking in nature. By quieting the mind, you provide space for intuitive insights to come through, and even if it doesn’t happen the first time, you begin to create an environment for your inner voice to begin to make itself known. By quieting the mind, you also stop the momentum of the usual thoughts and perceptions and make room for what is beyond the mind to come through.
If you make it a consistent practice, it becomes more natural, and after a while, you may not even have to practice to be able to hear your intuition.
Removing what is in the way of your intuition
The other way to strengthen your intuition is to remove what is covering it up in the first place.
Intuition becomes clearer the clearer your inner world is. So, by doing inner work that helps you let go of old conditioning, such as thoughts, beliefs, cultural expectations and perceptions, and even inner wounds, you clean up your internal environment and make space for your intuition to come through.
The more you do, the more your inner voice and intuitive insights can begin to replace the voices of the world and the old learned ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving reality.
Three different kinds of intuition
So, there are ways to strengthen our intuition. Intuition can also develop gradually on our spiritual path, and heightened intuition can be a byproduct of spiritual awakening. Intuition can also come through in different ways.
Below are three examples.
Whispers, nudges, or gut feelings
We can experience our intuition as whispers, nudges, or gut feelings. It can also come through as a quiet knowing. Many people refer to this kind of intuition when they talk about intuition.
When you experience intuition as a quiet knowing, you may suddenly know what to do in a situation without knowing where that insight came from. The action is often not something you would have thought of yourself, and it may go against your logic. Still, you know it is the right thing to do. You can also receive information you could not possibly know without intuition.
When you experience intuition as a gut feeling, it is a little different, because you experience it as a feeling rather than an answer or knowing.
You may, for example, have been on several interviews for a new job, and now they offer you the position. Everything seems great; the colleagues seem nice and friendly, your boss appears empathic, and your salary is at your desired level. And yet, there is something that doesn’t feel right. Nothing on the outside confirms your feeling, and your friends and family are excited about this new opportunity for you, and you think you should be, too. But something feels off.
Many people brush the feeling off and go ahead and take the job anyway unless they find evidence for what they are feeling. But if they do take the job, the reason for their gut feeling may show itself as they start working there. So, you may discover later that your gut feeling about the place was right and that your intuition was trying to prevent you from going into an unhealthy work environment.
Guidance and insights
Guidance is a more evolved form of intuition than intuitive hits and gut feelings. Some forms of guidance are more psychic abilities, but there are different kinds of guidance, and some can be seen as intuition.
Guidance can lead you to places you need to go. You may, for example, be walking somewhere and get a strong feeling that you should take another path. Sometimes, it has to do with safety; in those cases, it is more of a gut feeling, as in the first example. But in this case, your intuition may guide you to another street, where you meet someone you haven’t met for a long time – and your conversation with that person gives you exactly the piece of information you need to move forward on an important project. Or information you need to help a friend.
Your intuition can also guide you to call someone, google a song, join a group, or stop by the library on your way home to pick up a book. You may even be guided toward moving to another country. And it can take some time to figure out why.
Guidance can also be more direct. It can be insights from beyond the mind, such as new ideas that are not part of your conditioned ways of experiencing the world. The insights may have to do with a situation you are in, something you are creating, or an idea for something you could create. It can also be a vision of what is possible.
Sometimes intuition also provides insights that help you see the bigger picture. You can even receive guidance on what you are here on earth to do.
Clarity
Clarity is the clearest and the “strongest” form of intuition.
Intuition is often quiet and more of a background knowing, but this is an exception. Intuitive clarity breaks through all doubt and all the noise of the mind. It is a clear insight into what to do, and the moment the clarity arrives, all other options and doubts fall away.
Intuitive clarity differs from the clarity that can come with planning, or looking at different options. It is more of a download that breaks through all the noise. So, you don’t have to plan or wonder whether it is the right thing to do or not.
The clarity may come as an answer to something you have been asking for. It can also be a solution about what to do in a situation you have been stuck in for a long time.
The answer or insight you receive is not always the answer you wished for, but it is clear and comes with a feeling of relief.
Distinguishing between intuition and thinking
The easiest way to distinguish between intuition and thinking is that intuition is much simpler and clearer, even when it comes through as a whisper.
Intuition is a knowing, a gut feeling, an answer to something you have been asking for, or guidance toward the next step. There is not much reasoning or thinking, and no inner debate is needed. It may be a download of information, but it is not a thought process.
You may want to think about and process what you have realized later as part of integrating what you have learned or discovered through intuition. But the moment that the intuition comes, there is not that kind of processing. There is just a clear knowing, an insight, a gut feeling, or clarity.
The importance of acting on your intuition
Our inner knowing and insights only become part of our physical reality if we act on them.
Intuition is the first step toward living differently, making changes, and understanding our reality from a different perspective. But the insights stay in the intuitive realms unless we act on them. So, to embody our inner knowing and the insights that come through, we must take steps toward them in the physical world.
The mind usually tries to keep us in the known and familiar, so it is often a good idea to act on intuition before the mind comes in and tries to talk you out of it.
Keeping your intuitive guidance private is also helpful until you have acted upon it, because people tend to try to talk us out of following our intuition. Not necessarily because they mean to, but because they often look at what we are saying from what already is, which doesn’t work with intuition. So, it is often better to tell others when you have taken action or decided what to do so that they don’t make you doubt our insights.
The more we follow and trust our inner guidance, the stronger it becomes. So, by listening to and honoring the inner voice, you can gradually build that inner strength to follow it, even amid chaotic circumstances and when nothing outside supports it.
And if you keep listening to and following your intuition, it can guide you toward what aligns with your truest self and highest potential.
