THE KEY 3 STEPS TO DEVELOP INTUITION

Most people believe that having intuitions is a fairly uncommon thing. In fact we admire those people who we hold as being more intuitive than the rest, especially those who put their intuitive skills into everyday practice. The starting point of this article has to be that this perspective is wrong at best. We all have the faculty to be intuitive but some lack the basic disposition to be able to tap into it.

Think about it. You must have had at least one clear intuition that you heeded and followed through successfully. Some others you have perhaps ignored or dismissed but on hindsight you realised that they were missed opportunities. The fact is that those intuitions did not happen by chance or by some special intervention. You were just open and quiet enough to pick up the signals and hence you are able to do so anytime.

Having intuition does not require a special time or occasion but it requires that you build up the right skill set on the three basic pillars shown below. Once  you get the basics and lay a solid foundation, you might also want to keep on developing and sharpening your skills further. A very good comprehensive resource I highly recommend is Sonia Choquette’s ‘Positive Intuition’ course. You can find out more about it here.
1. Directing Attention inwards:
Intuitions as the word itself hints comes from inside – they are not signals or messages we pick from our surroundings but rather messages that arise from within. They are not thoughts or day dreaming and they are not strictly feelings although they may start that way.

Intuitions are subtle messages that emerge out of our deeper consciousness or subconscious. So this means that our attention should be oriented inwards. This is perhaps the biggest obstacle for most people since we are so distracted by signals and noise around us and also because we are so used to search for information outside of us rather than within.

So the first stage involves starting to put more attention to what’s happening inside – feelings, your body (your body holds and communicates a lot of information), flashes and subtle realisations. The more you do this, the more you are sending a sign to yourself that you are in listening mode and hence this results in more intuitions flowing in.
2. Avoiding Interference Patterns:
Another main block to out intuition besides attention is our own mind which is all the time creating interference by means of thought patterns, limiting beliefs, cynicism and worries among other things. The analogy is to someone trying to pick up what someone with a soft voice is saying at the other end of the room when there is loud music or noise going on.

This is in fact what happens most of the time. The intuition would be there talking softly but our mind would be playing the music, switching on the T.V and sometimes also using the vacuum cleaner at the same time!

What this means is that in order to start ‘hearing’ your intuitions, you need to quiet down the room or step outside of it. You need to stop your mental chatter – stop thinking, banging on a problem, worry about consequences, etc – and pause, keeping your attention in the present. If you practice to stay long enough there, you will soon start picking up the messages and the more you do that, the louder they become.
3. Empowering the Voice:
When you start learning to listen and picking up more intuitions, you need to then start giving them more authority because otherwise they would remain faint in the background. You don’t just want to quiet down the room but you also want that soft voiced person at the back of the room to step forward and sit on the same table with you. You need to empower it.

You do so by giving it more trust and freedom. It used to happen often to me that I would get intuitions but not give them full support or trust. In other words, I used to get carried away by some current set of circumstances or by other’s advice instead of believing firmly in those intuitions and make sure to follow them through.

So in other words, believing firmly in your intuitions and grounding them into your reality will empower them to grow further and stronger in the long run.