Reading time: five minutes.
Intuition.
That gut feeling, inner knowing, a message from Spirit.
Whatever you call it, everyone’s born with it, but unfortunately, a lot of people have suppressed it once they reach their adult years.
In this post, I’ll be exploring what intuition is, why you’d use it, and lastly, I’ll give you some tips to get you started with training your intuition or just deepening your current practice.
Humans, along with many other species have five basic senses to perceive their environment. Intuition is often referred to as the sixth sense, it’s that part of you that warns you, informs you, creeps up on you, and gives you information surrounding situations, or scenarios.
It can also be random unannounced thoughts and feelings, that you maybe can’t place right at that moment.
It can be experienced as a physical feeling, both acute or chronic, a visual, a dream, a whisper in your ear, or just that gut feeling. It’s different for everyone, but over time you’ll know to recognise the signs more.
Intuition can enrich your life in many ways, it deepens your connection with your inner self, can help with decision-making, and finding things, warns you in perilous situations, and the list is endless.
When we exercise, the main goal is to strengthen our body and mind. Well, intuition also needs training to get it switched back on, and in keeping it maintained, so that it gets its most optimal chance to shine. There are several things you can do to strengthen your intuition yourself, whether you’re a beginner or already practising everyone can do this.
First of all, I’m just going to straight up mention meditation, me-time, and being creative. I’ve talked about these three elements before, and I believe they are the key to growing your intuition. You won’t travel far along your path if you’re not making yourself a priority first.
What I primarily want to look at is certain exercises you can do yourself, or together with a partner, just fun simple ways to train your intuition.
The first one is a simple visualisation exercise:
Get yourself in a comfortable position, as if you’re preparing for a meditation session or relaxation session, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and try and quieten down your mind.
Then, for this example, we’ll use a candle, I want you to try and see if you can imagine a candle in front of you, in your mind's eye.
What it looks like exactly is entirely up to you, the aim of this exercise is for you to use your visualisation capabilities to create that image in your mind's eye, that there’s a candle in front of you.
You can imagine it burning, which colour it is, is the flame flickering or not. It’s about training your visualisation skills to get this image in your mind's eye.
You can do this with any object you want to, imagine a tree, bicycle, or whatever you like.
I‘ve found in the past that it was easier for students to start with single objects, and with regular practice, you’ll find your ability to create the image, but also maintaining your focus whilst doing so will become easier.
Secondly, you could do a visualisation exercise together with someone else:
This requires that you both get prepared and quiet for the session, but also that you’re both practising alone regularly, as intuitive awareness needs to be present in both parties.
This will highly likely fail if your partner is a sceptic, for example. Also, this partnership is actually what you’d refer to as telepathic communication, the sending and receiving of intuitive messages.
To get to work, you’d think of a colour, either just focusing on the colour itself, or thinking of everything about that colour. Let’s say you want to project the colour green, you’d think of fields, trees, vegetables, you name it.
The idea is that the other person will be able to receive what you’re seeing in your mind's eye, maybe you’ll project feelings or say something in your mind.
This will have a lot to do with your natural manner of sending information (hearing, seeing, feeling, knowing it), and the same applies to the other person, and how they interpret the received information.
Whilst holding that image or feeling you’re going to try and ‘send’ it as it were, to the receiver, as a projection of energy.
What’s also fantastic for working on your intuition which I highly recommend, is regularly listening to guided visualisation meditations.
The third exercise has become a tool for me, for the moments when I’ve misplaced something:
When I find myself looking for something I ask myself (preferably with a quiet mind at that moment) “Where is….”
And the answer is usually received (for me) as a visual, or word in my ears. This exercise is quite a fun one to do, and easy to incorporate into your daily life, the stronger you’re in touch with your intuition, the more present it will be, and will therefore prove a very valuable tool for you too!
How you receive the messages in this exercise will differ for everyone (hearing, seeing, feeling, knowing it). I’ve mentioned these a couple of times now, these methods of receiving information are often referred to as the ‘Claires’ ( the official names for hearing, seeing, feeling, and knowing it), and are again, in itself another huge topic for a future blog post.
A fourth exercise can be a simple but effective addition to your daily practice:
This one is specific for use with divination tools, such as the Tarot or other cards. You could select your card intuitively, and before you turn it over see if you can pick up on any information about what you’ll find on that card.
Is there any movement in the scene? Which colours, or objects are present?
Anything else that comes to mind? See what you find when you turn your card over.
I’d like to close by just mentioning a couple of things about how your intuition can be affected or even blocked completely:
The first block for all of us is the daily mind chatter that we’re all affected by. The stress, schedules, deadlines and all the other aspects of modern life make it physically and mentally more challenging for us to find that quiet space inside.
Having distractions around us, especially when we’re practising with our intuition, can severely negatively affect the results, so make sure for those moments you’re in a quiet environment, and with no foreseeable distractions (where possible).
Self-doubt is another big killer for any intuitive work, so watch out for that.
Sometimes, when we’re not feeling well, mentally or physically. Again, when our heads are so full, for whatever reason, we seem to lose touch with that voice that’s trying to help us stay on the right track. Your health takes priority, so be kind to yourself if you’re feeling less in tune with your intuition, your guides will still be supporting you.
Being aware of these negative influences will help you and your success with your intuitive work, if you’re finding any of these to be relevant to you try and focus on your self-care and daily routine, these will help you stay grounded and connected with your intuition, even through the harder times.
For the benefit of your intuition work, I recommend keeping a written diary of your practice, exercises, experiences, self-reflection and personal development work.
There are still so many things that could be covered with this topic, believe it or not, we’ve just skimmed the surface here. I wanted to explore divination tools more and look at how things can enhance your intuition such as working with stones, incense, herbs oils, etc. “All in good time” I hear my intuition call…
I hope that this post was helpful to you and that it inspired you to apply it to your practice, to get you exploring your intuition more. Thanks for your time, feel free to use the comments section below to share your thoughts.
Have a beautiful day,
Yvonne Martha x