“Clear intuition requires the ability to respect your own impressions. If you need another person to validate your own impressions, you interfere tremendously with your own ability to intuit.” ~ Caroline Myss

Most people would claim that they aren’t intuitive and instead use logic and reasoning to make important decisions.

Intuition is that small, quiet voice inside that tells you the truth about everything. Our logical minds really only tell us a fraction of the truth about a particular situation.

As an Intuitive Coach, I am often asked how it is I could possibly “know” things about my clients just minutes after meeting them. They ask how I get my information about who they are, past issues or things that have happened in their lives that they’ve never told me about, or a vibe I’m picking up on about another people in their lives.

I admit that I can never really answer that question the way people want me to. Because I’ve never had a really down-to-earth answer for how I know these things other than that I use and completely trust my intuition and inner guide when it’s speaking to me.

Some people would argue that there are people in the world who have this gift, and others who don’t. I would argue that we all have it, but we just need some assistance in knowing how to tap into it. Nine times out of 10, when I am working with a client and I tell them what I’m picking up on their current situation or about a particular person they are asking me about, their response is, “Yea, I was kinda thinking the same thing,” or “I felt that way too, but wasn’t sure if I was making it up.”

Which just goes to show that we usually know things intuitively but want another person to validate it for us because we don’t trust it.

Intuition exists in all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not. The more we can tap into it, the more we can use it to make really important decisions in our lives and avoid people and situations that can hurt us.

These are some of the simplest and easiest ways to tap into your own intuition so that, like a muscle, you can start developing it, making it stronger and then using it out in the world:

1) Quiet the mind, and your soul will speak. Turn off the radio, your phone, the computer and all other distractions and quiet your mind. We don’t do this often enough. We constantly feel the need to be checking Instagram or Facebook, texting our friends or listening to some other noise in the background because being quiet and still feels somehow uncomfortable to us.

It’s no wonder that so many of us can’t tap into our own intuition. Even if it was trying to tell us something, we wouldn’t hear it. The best way to get answers about something we are struggling with is to turn off all the distractions, find a quiet place and just listen. Yep, that’s right…listen to what your soul is saying. What your mind is saying. What your gut is saying. I promise you it’s never wrong and will tell you more that you need to know in 15 minutes than you could learn talking to a friend about it for two hours on the phone.

2) Automatic writing. One of the most powerful and important tools I’ve used over the years to develop my own intuition and learn to trust it was through automatic writing. Automatic writing is when you go to a quiet space with no distractions, ask a question, either out loud or in your head and write the first thing you are “given” or you hear. You will hear something, I promise you. You know the information is coming from a higher source other than your own mind when the words are coming so quickly, you don’t have time to even think about what’s coming.

Don’t overthink this when you’re doing it. A lot of people say they ask a question and get nothing. Just write whatever comes up for you. It can be as simple as “yes” or “no” or it could be a feeling that’s coming up for you as you ask the question. Just write down whatever you get. You will go back months later and re-read these automatic writings and see how much truth was in what you wrote, which will help you start validating and trusting yourself.

3) Honor physical feelings in your body. All of us have at one time or another had a physical reaction to a person or situation that hasn’t seemed quite right. I like to call it our “spidey sense.” It’s that feeling inside of us that something is off and our body is trying to let us know. Listen to these physical cues. Your body never, ever lies.

Anytime a certain someone lied to me, I would get these horrible physical symptoms. My heart would start racing, I’d start to feel hot, my head would start throbbing and my stomach would be in knots. Every fiber of my being was screaming, “He is not telling you the truth! Something is not right.” I would chalk those feelings up to “paranoia” and then shut them down.

But my body was trying to tell me something and it was right. This person was lying, I later found out. And I could go back to every single one of those times and remember the physical feelings my body had, which I tried so hard to ignore. Don’t ignore them. Your body is your most intuitive tool. Listen to it. A general feeling of ease, comfort and inner peace means you can trust a person or situation. When you are feeling anxious, nervous, fearful or just “off,” it’s your intuition telling you something is wrong and to look more closely at it to see what it’s trying to tell you.

4) Meditate. This sounds clique but meditation is one of the best ways to tap into your intuition. This is more than just getting quiet and disconnecting from your phone and computer. This requires going much deeper inside yourself.

The best time to meditate is an hour or so after you get out of bed in the morning or right before you go to sleep. Put on some quiet, relaxing music in the background (I love “Reiki: Hands of Light” or anything by Liquid Mind), sit in a cross-legged position on the floor or lay down and do some deep breathing. Set intentions before your meditation. Ask for guidance about a particular situation or answers to questions you’re having. Then go within and see what comes up. Trust me…something will come up. Often, a lot more than we think.

Some of the most skeptical people I know said their entire life changed once they started meditating.

I worked with one guy who said he couldn’t meditate if I held a gun to his head. I challenged him to do it for just one week and he called me completely excited later on and said, “I can’t believe this meditation thing actually works,” and went on to tell me all the answers he had gotten for himself on something he’d been wrestling with for six months. He’s been using it ever since as one of his primary tools for tapping into what I call his own “inner knowing.”

5) Listen to your dreams. Ask questions before you go to sleep at night and see what your dreams tell you. Ask for intuitive guidance right as you’re dozing off and see what response you get. Our dreams are telling and often reveal to us things that we can’t access when we are fully conscious.

Keep a notebook by your bed and write down anything you can remember as soon as you wake up. It could even be a feeling about the dream, if you can’t remember the details. It may not make sense initially but over time if the same themes or people keep popping up in your dreams, your intuition is trying to tell you something.

We all have a deep level of intuition inside ourselves that just needs to be developed through practice. The more we use it, the stronger it will get. It just requires some practice, some trust and just a little bit of faith in yourself!

Author: Dina Strada

Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: NataliaDrepina/Deviantart