The power of intuition

Listening to and developing your intuition is a topic that comes up over and over again in the readings I give.

It’s a big topic — and an important one — so this is the first in hopefully a series of blog posts about intuition, what it is, how it’s useful to us and why it’s vital that we feed it and follow it in our lives. This is true for everyone — we can each safely rely on our intuition to help us have better lives, but especially so for folks wanting to develop their psychic, mediumship or healing abilities. A healthy and well-developed intuition is where it all begins.

What is intuition?

Intuition is a late Middle English word that comes from the Latin intueri, which means “consider.” It denotes spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication and means, “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”

Intuition, in short, is a direct connection with Spirit. I think of it as the connection with our spiritual selves, that higher part of us, our inner selves, our source energy. (My understanding is that we’re really all one energy, all connected and part of the God source of all that is.)

Why is intuition important?

One of my favorite stories about intuition is in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With The Wolves. She tells the story of Vasalisa The Wise. Vasalisa is given a tiny doll which looks just like her by her dying mother. As she lays in bed, frail and thin, her mother says, “Should you lose your way or be in need of help, ask this doll what to do…Feed the doll when she is hungry.” And then she dies.

There’s a lot more to the story, but the essence of it is that Vasalisa keeps the doll in her pocket and feeds it and, when she needs help or guidance, the doll lets her know what to do. The doll, of course, is her intuition.

And by listening to the doll, she’s safely guided through many challenges.

Your intuition can do the same for you. Intuition, as Estés writes is, “great power…composed of lightning-fast inner seeing, inner hearing, inner sensing and inner knowing.” Intuition can nudge you in the right direction, and keep you safe from dangerous circumstances and people in your life.

Finding your lost intuition

Your intuition is always talking to you and telling you what it needs you to hear. Unfortunately, many of us stop trusting ourselves somewhere along the way. Difficult things happen in our lives, we get hurt, we feel lost and we become disconnected from our inner/higher self.

When we’re in that state of unbalance, we often stop listening to our intuition. I know there have been blows in my life that have rocked me to the core. When unexpected things happen and we’re reeling in the aftermath, sometimes we go into survival mode and stop trusting our inner knowing. Life happens. It’s OK.

Even if our use of intuition is rusty, even if we’ve forgotten how to trust ourselves, we can regain that knowledge and ability. How? By regularly nourishing it feeding it.

Feeding your intuition

Given that our intuition isn’t actually a magical little doll in our pocket that we can feed crumbs of food to and feel jump up and down when we’re in danger, feeding our own intuition is slightly trickier.

I’ll share suggestions and exercises for developing your intuition and learning how to listen to it (again) in future blog posts. But, for now, consider this: what you feed, grows. When you feed your anxieties and doubts — by listening to them and acting on them — they get stronger and you hear them louder and clearer. When you feed your intuition, the same thing happens to your own inner voice.

So listen to that small, still voice inside you. It might be faint, it might be hard to hear exactly what it’s saying, but listen. The more you do, the louder and braver it will get. Even just the act of being open to your own wisdom will make it come through more. Try it. And tell me what happens.

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net.