Six Ways to Strengthen Access to Intuition
How to build your connection when it’s feeling weak.
By Robin Arnett, LCSW
Modern life keeps us in our heads most of the day, planning grocery lists, leading meetings, and fretting over existential dread. We have so many demands placed on us that it can be easy to lose connection to our intuition. Living intuitively is the key to finding peace and balance in a chaotic world, but connecting to our gut can feel difficult when we’re stressed, overscheduled, and disconnected from our bodies.
Thankfully, forming a relationship to your intuition is not as difficult as it may sound if you’ve never done it before. This blog will teach you a few ways the strengthen your access to intuition that are simple, reliable, and powerful.
Identify and Address Barriers
One of the biggest reasons that people struggle to access intuition is due to a barrier or block. Common barriers to intuition are:
Blocking beliefs
Inconvenient truths
Internal “parts”
Cultural ideas around norms and logic
Self-doubt
Difficulty with boundaries
(This blog post takes a deep dive into each of these blocks, and how to work to remove them.) Becoming aware of your blocks and taking steps to address them is one of the most important ways to build your relationship and start living intuitively.
Practice with Small Decisions
Our logical brains like evidence. Because of this, it can be hard to convince ourselves that our intuition is right when it’s telling us something that doesn’t sound “logical” on paper. That’s why it’s important to give it proof by using intuition to make small, relatively insignificant decisions. Practice using your intuition to make a decision around something like what plans to make for the weekend, what movie to watch, or what art you’d like to buy for a room you’re decorating. Look for a feeling of calm confidence in your belly and heart, and don’t allow yourself to think through pros and cons. If it helps, you can present yourself with a couple of options, and compare the responses. Then, see how it plays out.
Intuition is a good decision maker, and you’ll be able to see that by starting small and then gradually raising the stakes. Consider keeping a journal that you can use to keep track of those decisions and how they played out. You can even create a set of data on decisions that you made using your analytical brain (i.e. pros and cons, lists, etc.), and see how the results compare.
Take the Next Right Step
Connecting to intuition is about small, daily, in-the-moment actions and reactions. We don’t create a five-year plan using intuition. We may be able to sketch out what feels right to us, but life takes shape in the moment. It is so common to get stuck in trying to figure out the “right” decision by jumping years ahead to try to predict how something will develop. The fact is that we simply don’t get access to that information.
You can strengthen your connection to intuition by creating space for yourself to live moment-to-moment, knowing that this is truly to only way to plan. When you feel stuck, ask yourself, “What is my next right step?” You can create a vision and think through the steps, but know that flexibility is key, and intution will tell you what’s right in the here and now.
Build in Time for Internal Connection
Our intuition speaks to us in quiet moments, when we give it the space that it needs to communicate. Creating this space looks different for everyone; some people enjoy a daily sitting meditation practice, some find it on long walks, others connect to themselves through journaling. Your practice could be any of these, something totally different, or a combination. Whatever it is, simply make sure that it feels right to you, that it feels doable and enjoyable, and that you commit to making it happen.
Connect to Your Body
Our intuition communicates with us through the body. If you’ve spent too long in your head, intuition can feel far away, when, in fact, it’s there waiting for you when you tune in. Feeling into body sensation can be intimidating if you are living with high levels of stress, or even PTSD. Start to open up body awareness through a daily body scan where you titrate the sensation (for example, saying you will allow yourself to feel 50% of what is there, and gradully increasing the percentage) and pendulate between difficult sensation and connecting to a place in your body that feels calm and stable.
Other ways to build your connetion to your body include yoga, breathing exercises, and body work like craniosacral therapy, massage, acupunture, and integrative chiropractic.
Set Your Intention
Intention is everything. Whatever our endeavor, nothing happens without a strong intention behind it. At the same time, nothing with a strong intention to support it will fail. If you set a strong intention to build your connection to intuition, take steps toward that effort, and stay consistent, you will see results. Finally, surrender to the process. Our intuition connects us to something higher and more powerful, which seeks to support us in ways that we could not imagine for ourselves. Commit to the process, but be willing to step out of the drivers seat and see what happens. There is magic on the other side.
