How Can You Get In Touch With Your Intuition, And When Can You Trust Your Intuition When Making Decisions?
Like anything else in the holistic wellness space, it is about developing intentional pauses, practices, and micro-moments where we tune out the noise, get quiet, and put on our curious scientist hats to tune in and listen to our bodies. What is our body telling us when we ask about our deepest desires, values, and the actions we want to take in the future?
The trust part comes over time. We can ask our body. Pick a zone of the body you feel already gives you the most guidance. Your gut? Your heart? Your pelvic floor? Your root chakra or erogenous zones? Or you feel more guided when you tune into your whole body and ask what it wants to do in a given situation: Run? Hide? Rest? Wait? Find more information? Resist? Let go? Or Contract?
Maybe this is all sounding a bit cuckoo to you, so let me break down some other ways you can start to develop a deeper relationship and connection to your body and the subtle signs and guidance it is sending you. It most certainly helps to clear our system of stimulants, drugs, and alcohol that confuse our connection with self and our most profound, safest senses of inner knowing. Here are some great ways to start developing a deeper trust for your inner guidance system this year:
What five methods that someone can use to become more in touch with their intuition?
#1 Meditation
Meditation or some sort of daily mindful practice that has you practicing being more present in the present moment, more present in your body, paying less attention, and being less judgmental of your thoughts is key to helping you become more in touch with what your intuition might be telling you. In my experience, meditation was life changing. My first experience with it was the short, seated meditation at the end of an Ashtanga yoga class before I signed up to get certified as a teacher. Then, being trained as a teacher, I was exposed to many types of mindfulness and meditation that allowed me to be more present in my own experience of the present moment, in the present, and my body. As a Type A personality, getting out of my head was very new in a sober state of mind. It quickly allowed me a new space to acknowledge and feel my feelings about recent and long-past things. It showed me how to be more attentive to what my body told me – all my inner guidance systems.
#2 Breathwork
Breathwork could be thought of as a type of meditation. Still, I wanted to highlight it separately because many people find it easier to get on board with and/or see the benefits more immediately. Our breath is fundamental to our survival and directly reflects our inner state of being. Frequently, we are fearful, anxious, angry, uncertain, or nervous when we hold our breath. Actively and consciously breathing, even for just 2 minutes a day, can dramatically impact our nervous system and quickly make us more aware of what our breath often tells us. We don’t do our best thinking or decision-making when we are low oxygen. When we have taken a few deep, grounding breaths, we are much more capable of noticing how we feel about a given situation or what our intuition (outside of a survival state) is telling us. When panicking or breathing quickly and shallowly, we cannot tap into our more profound inner guidance or long-term intuitive thinking. When we are in survival mode, it is difficult for us to connect to our deeper desires.
Something extremely interesting to consider is using our five senses when making a decision. Our olfactory sense is our oldest, most foundational guiding system. When practicing breathwork, we open our channels and deepen our awareness and connection to this ancient sensory indicator that may inform our intuition. For example, when you get a whiff of your mother’s perfume when you were a child or an ex-lover’s cologne, it immediately transports you back to your emotional memory that greatly informs our intuition on how we currently feel about that person.
#3 Journaling – Morning Pages
Morning Pages is a practice that Julia Cameron shares in her iconic book The Artist’s Way. The practice is simple but powerful. Daily, you write – hand write, pen to paper, three pages of your consciousness. There is no editing, re-reading, or sharing it with anyone. Over time, you come to see how powerful it is to have this release valve on your thoughts on the one hand, but on the other hand, the majority of our daily thoughts are the same as yesterday. We tend to go in circles when we don’t allow ourselves to vent. Writing down our thoughts, ideas, intentions, hopes, dreams, prayers, wishes, and desires is a compelling way to tap into our intuition and parse out which thoughts are ours and which are from somebody else or just cultural or societal norms coloring our intuition on what we should/want/will do.
#4 The Full Body Yes
Embodiment is a very trendy word in the online space, but it is a concept that has been introduced previously in the yoga world. It is the practice of being more in your body on a nitty-gritty level, detecting where you are tense, clenched, weak, tight, or numb. It is the process of tracking sensations in your body. If you sit still and pay attention, can you feel your heartbeat? Can you sense your windpipe? Can you pay attention to your diaphragm as you inhale and exhale? All these body scans and body awareness practices often interwoven into a good yoga, meditation, Pilates, or breathwork class help you to be more in tune with what your body is telling you – and in turn, if your body is telling you yes or no about a given decision. You get to know what your body feels like when it is saying no, even or especially when your mouth is saying yes. Therefore, a Full Body Yes is when your heart center, your gut, and/or your pelvic floor feel at ease or maybe even excited about the idea or path forward.
#5 Gut Health
This is a more literal and less intuitive way to become more tapped in, embodied, and aware of our body’s feelings about a decision. When gut health is on point, our gut lining is intact, and our gut’s enteric nervous system is in an optimal state our gut intelligence is more accurate. Our gut lining is the boundary between our inner and outer worlds – literally and energetically. When we eat things damaging to our gut health, we make it much more difficult for our body to feel intact on a micro level, which directly impacts how we feel emotionally on a macro level.
“Big changes in the gut’s enteric nervous system may send signals to the brain that trigger mood changes, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. This may explain why disorders like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis are often tied to symptoms of depression and anxiety.”
When eating optimally to support a healthy gut microbiome, that is, plant-based, whole food, we keep ourselves more in tune with our deep inner guidance systems, especially our gut intuition. Excerpt from the full interview with Medium here.
This is the perfect time of year to Detox your mind, body, and spirit. Our body’s natural intelligence does a pretty good job of detoxing our system of what no longer serves, but it can use extra support in doing this a few times a year. When we clear out the clutter to get clear-headed, we can more easily see and accept what and how is interfering with our ability to feel safe and connected with our internal guiding system – our intuition. Book a complimentary wellness chat with me here.
Sober Curator Pro Tip: Can a Healthier Gut Microbiome Boost Mood? (everydayhealth.com)
Let’s lean into our instincts and learn to trust them this year. This is an essential wellness tool worth developing to help us feel grounded and stay aligned with our true north amidst all the overwhelm and information overload. You already have intuition; you just may have lost touch with it or forgotten that you can trust it. Personal, embodied sovereignty is the new black for 2024.
ENERGETICALLY YOU PODCAST: Welcome to the ENERGETICALLY YOU Podcast where Sober Curator Megan Swan will be talking about integrated wellness, abundant mindset and sustainable energy practices for high performance humans, leaders and modern companies.
Megan Swan is an Integrated Wellness Coach + Consultant specializing in helping people and companies optimize their wellness lifestyle and/or culture so they can boost clarity and confidence in their decision making, show up with sustainable energy without burnout. She has 11 years of integrative wellness experience as a certified IIN Health Coach, Plant-Based Chef, Yoga Teacher and Educator.
She is on a mission to empower more humans through optimal wellness.
At 30 she sold everything to embark on her own “Eat, Pray, Love” journey of sorts and now at 43 finds herself still on her first stop where she fell in love with one of her English students. She and her husband have two beautiful boys and three adorable dogs. They love to travel and explore the lesser-known beaches of Mexico.
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