How To Develop Your Intuition:
Awaken Your Natural Gifts
How to develop your intuition? It's is a worthy goal for anyone, but especially for energy healers. Most of us rely heavily on our intuition, so it makes sense to nurture and care for it like the exquisite gift that it is.
We all have intuitive abilities. There are many ways to develop and
expand them. Perhaps the most important is just to use them. Practice,
practice, practice! It works for most things in life. We get better at
what we devote time to.
Remember, in developing intuition,
it's important to get out of your intellectual mind. Our culture reveres
this part of our faculties, and so it often gets glorified and
prioritized over our intuitive mind. There's no need for this. As in
most things, balance is what we should strive for.
How to Develop Your Intuition: 20 Ideas
Here are some tips and techniques for how to develop your intuition, so that you can bring more of its creativity and light into your energy healing sessions as well as your daily life.
- Cultivate your sixth chakra. Also called the Third Eye, it is the center and seat of your intuition.
- Free-write in your journal. Set a time--5 minutes or so--and just keep writing. Don't stop to edit or think, just keep going. Often you'll find unexpected insights within the words you've written.
- Mediate regularly.
- Keep a dream journal.
- Cultivate the right side of your brain. The right hemisphere of the brain is the side more associated with creativity and intuition.
- Create! visual art, poetry, gardens, meals, clothes…. anything works. Just make stuff. The creative and intuitive processes are closely related, so opening yourself to creative flow will nurture your intuitive flow as well.
- Exercise. This doesn't need to be intense. Just moving your body helpful. Walking is an excellent choice here. I'm not sure why, but exercise/moving your body just seems to get us out of our thinking minds and helps open us to intuition.
- Intuition often speaks through our bodies, so pay attention to it. When and where do you feel good in your body? When and where do you feel discomfort in your body? Watch for patterns.
- Pay attention to thoughts that just seem to pop into your mind or that feel different from your ordinary thoughts.
- Set aside time to be quiet and still so that you can hear your intuition.
- Play intuition games (e.g. guessing what cards will come up next in a deck), or explore tools such as divinatory cards (e.g. Tarot or Oracle)
- Ask your intuition for information or help, and wait/watch for answers.
- Respect and trust your intuition. When you receive intuitive information, write it down (consider carrying a notebook or putting it into a notes app on your phone) and act on it. When you honor your intuition by listening to it, it tends to show up more.
- Remember times that your intuition has shown up and helped you. How did it show up? This would make a good journal topic or prompt for a free-write. (See #2 above.)
- Identify and work with your particular intuitive style. Learn more about it at this link.
- Get out into nature. It clears the mind and makes space for intuition to appear. Also, you may find that things that appear to you when you are in nature have divinatory meaning. (For example, I consider the appearance of a bald eagle to be a good omen for whatever I am talking or thinking about when I see it--especially if it flies right over me or in front of me.)
- Get a book that you find inspirational. Hold it on your lap. Close your eyes. Open the book at random and run your finger down the page, stopping when it feels right. Open your eyes and consider the sentence and/or paragraph your finger is on.
- When you enter a new environment, notice how you feel.
- Try using muscle-testing or work with a pendulum. Sometimes having a tool helps us focus.
- Be playful! Being too serious about intuition is counter-productive.
How To Incorporate Your Intuition In Your Life
The best advice I can give for developing intuition is to use it. Here are a few ways to incorporate it into your daily life. Use intuition to:
- identify and handle problems before they get out of hand
- "read" the environments and people around you, including whether or not they are safe and benign for you
- to enhance imagination and creativity when you are working on a creative or art project
- make decisions with less angst
- discern between opportunities that are helpful to you and those that will pull you off-path
- tune in to the feelings of your loved ones (or anyone)
- check out worrying situations so that you can either act or set your mind at rest
- check with areas of discomfort in your body to see what your body needs or what needs to change in your life
- tune into the natural world around you for signs and lessons
- notice patterns that might turn out to be meaningful
- find lost items
- choose clothes, foods or furnishings that support your well-being
- discern when to wait and when to act, when to stay the course and when to make changes
- interpret dreams.
I know you can think of lots more ways to exercise your beautiful intuitive powers. Practicing
with your intuition in your daily life will make it easier for you to
access it when you are working with clients in healing sessions. Plus,
it's fun! Try to take a playful approach and not overthink the process. Being too serious or getting your thinking mind too involved can actually interfere.
Enjoy!
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