“When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be.” ~ Lao Tzu

It was during my late teens and early 20s that I began practicing and experimenting with techniques to enhance intuition and my ability to find more “flow” in my life. I was continuously blown away by the synchronicities during these early years and it wasn’t until I began traveling to other cities and countries that I felt like I began to lose this ability.

For many years this puzzled me—it didn’t make sense.

I thought I had an understanding and knowledge of how things worked and operated in the universe, yet I was becoming more lost in my personal life.

Many years passed and I started to find holes and contradictions in many of the new age style teachings that I had become so familiar with. So I began focusing only a select few teachings and authors whom I found to be clear and penetrating. I also included the practical aspects of yoga and Buddhist style meditation more seriously into my daily life.

And so the stripping away of information began.

After stripping away a lot of the information I had learned, I found a lot more space inside and new insights and understandings began to come more readily.

The more I continue to strip away, the clearer things seem to get.

I still read a lot and am interested in new knowledge, yet I have come to see that it doesn’t hold much power and is more superficial and more for entertainment than anything else.

What holds much more power than knowledge is the simple, daily practices of moment-to-moment awareness, meditation, contemplation and observation.

What I realized is that intuition doesn’t involve having psychic powers or having to visualize white lights coming out of our heads. These common “new age” style techniques are not at all necessary to develop our intuition. In some cases, these techniques further impair our capacity to be intuitive simply because they can add more clutter into our minds.

Developing our intuition is not about adding more or wanting more, it’s about throwing things out and wanting less—when we have cultivated a healthy space within, we can hear, see and feel our intuition more clearly.

Below are three very simple and practical steps to develop intuition. They are progressive steps, therefore it is advised that we work on them in succession, giving each step a week or so before adding in the next practice.

Everyone is different, however. Some people will pick it up easier than others. It’s important not to compare our progress with others, just keep working on it for yourself.

1. Clear Out The Clutter

The primary reason for lack of connection with intuition is too much clutter in our minds and lifestyles. We hold on to too many ideas, opinions, judgments—all sorts of fancy and useless knowledge and information. Our lives are often cluttered with large amounts of non-essential items and decorations.

This clutter simply fogs up the lens of perception, it sticks buds in our ears so we can’t hear, it fills our lives with so much junk, that we use our energy simply trying to organize and manage it.

We must learn to continuously and ruthlessly throw out the non-essentials—both in mind and in our physical world. Throwing out this clutter helps us to cultivate the space within and allows us to be more receptive and open to our intuition.

2. Connect With Our Body

Our nervous systems are electrical pathways that are plugged directly into the electrical system of the universe (the field). Our nervous systems can receive messages from the field itself, experienced as subtle sensations throughout the body. Therefore, if we can learn to connect with and sense the subtle sensations running throughout our bodies, we can read and sense our intuition more clearly.

One of the easiest ways to gain clearer access to these subtle sensations is to learn to connect with our body.

Sense your heart beating, your legs, and your breath. Notice how it manages itself without any conscious input or effort? There is an intelligence governing all of life and no human mind is required to keep it going.

Conducting regular body scans is the best method to connect with our body. We can body scan almost anywhere, anytime. We can do it when we are sitting on the bus, sitting at our desk at work while taking a break from the computer and we can do it while we are lying in our bed at night. Simply, begin at the feet and slowly work attention up through the body making sure to “touch” each of the main body parts with awareness. This is the best way to establish a conscious connection with our body.

3. Drop Any Sense Of Urgency

After practicing the process of connecting and listening to the body, it will be a lot easier to recognize if we are in a state of Urgency. This is the constant feeling of “I must get this” or “I must get that”, “I need to get home” or “I need to get this done,”,  “I need to understand” or “I really want to finish this” etc.

Usually, any self talk that has want, need or must involved is likely to generate a sense of urgency in our body and mind. This sense of urgency keeps us from being able to stop and “smell the flowers”, so to speak. Being able to stop and smell the flowers means being able to see and sense the whole picture rather than a limited tunnel vision. When we can sense the whole picture, we are open and receptive to whatever signals or messages may present itself in each moment. In every moment, I believe some kind of message or signal is being presented for greater insight and understanding. Most of us just can’t sense it because we have our tunnel vision switched on due to our state of urgency.

Sometimes the sense of urgency may be required to complete a task or reach a deadline, but most of the time we really don’t require it. We get so used to “urgent mode” and come to feel it is the normal way to be in this world.

This is because others regularly reflect this state of urgency back to us. Unfortunately, most humans are frivolously running in a state of anxiety and urgency. We don’t have to do the same…try dropping it as soon as you see it in yourself. Practice “dropping urgency” at least once a day. Notice how much more relaxing, pleasant and joyful the simplest things in life become.

The more we practice it, the easier it becomes.

Eventually, being “out of urgency” will be the norm and other people will notice how much more relaxed, peaceful and pleasant we are to be around.

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Assistant Editor: Zenna James: Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: The Glowing North Stars, elephant library