Tapping Intuition: Discomfort Can Be the Right Thing Insights April 2009By Patricia WallThere are three common challenges to tapping into your personal gift of intuition. First, many people have trouble distinguishing intuitive guidance from their own thoughts. How can you know if you are just talking to yourself, imagining things, or if you’re actually being guided? Second, how can you know if you should follow your intuition, when what it guides you to do is so contrary to what your rational mind would decide to do? Third, how can you distinguish the positive influence of intuition from the guidance that comes from your subconscious – which can feel the same as intuition – but your subconscious is guiding you to recreate patterns in your life that might be negative. I’ll be teaching a workshop for SFC on Saturday, April 18th that help people identify the messages of their intuition. Even those who are comfortable with their intuition will discover new information that is provided in ‘language’ they are not used to receiving. For example, people who are used to the physical signals of the kinesthetic can learn to receive visual messages. People who are used to verbal cues can learn to receive kinesthetic. For those who are uncertain of their intuition, it is an opening of access. For those comfortable with their intuition, it is an opening to more forms of communication. In the meantime, you can help yourself develop access to your intuition, or to develop expansion of your abilities, by practicing receiving in different forms. Here’s a simple way to practice. Sit somewhere you can see many people, such as a café or a mall bench. Calm yourself with breath, music, or meditation to focus on what is happening in your body and your thoughts. Pick one person and ask yourself these questions, one by one, with time to perceive any information that may come to you.
Intuition is often metaphoric. For example, if you’re opening your perception to sense a stranger, and your thoughts go to war, or how busy you are, or you suddenly feel hungry, that is a reaction in you to what you’re picking up in the other person. It may be literal, meaning that person is thinking about war, or how busy they are, or feeling hungry. More likely it’s a metaphor, meaning that person may be feeling conflicted about something (war is all about conflict,) or the person could be feeling pressured to make a decision or participate in an event (busy stress is often a result of obligation or external pressure from other people,) or they may be struggling with unmet needs (often an urge for food is a response to other needs that need to be met, because it may be easy to meet the food need as compensation.) I’ll get into the methods of identifying the underlying message at the workshop. Make sure that you use a Detox method after this practice to totally disconnect from the person you’ve tested sensing. The second challenge is listening to guidance that is inconvenient, or even annoying. The cognitive brain deals with rationale, facts, schedules, and requirements. I remember driving down the 401 in Toronto and being guided to get off the highway. Later I was able to return to the highway. The detour cost me a half hour of travel time for no apparent reason. I absolutely know the universe had a really good reason to take me off the highway for that interval: perhaps it saved me from an accident, or a traffic jam – there was a reason. I have no idea what that reason was. That’s where our inner control freak has a problem – and everyone, no matter how laid back their personality – has some control freak inside. If we could know the why of the guidance, we’d feel more in control because we’d understand the purpose of the action we’re being guided to take. The bottom line is to get comfortable with surrender – with knowing that your higher self has a helicopter view and access to information your cognitive brain does not have. Here is a simple tool for helping yourself to feel safe with guidance that makes no obvious sense. Sit quietly. Form a ball of light and put your entire self inside the ball of light so the light is spinning through you and around you, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Imagine the light bringing love, comfort and safety to all of your being. Imagine ‘I am safe’ in the light, penetrating your tissues and your energy, teaching your body and mind to feel safe accepting guidance. When you feel done for today, release the light. It is more effective to do this more often, for short periods of time, than to try to do it for a long time. The third problem is more challenging, because it involves the influence of the subconscious mind. Many times someone will say to me: ‘I met a person, and it felt so right, so incredibly right – then later it all went bad.’ In this situation, the ‘feels right’ came not from intuition, but from the subconscious. Listening to your gut can actually mean you’re tuning in to subconscious influences that may seek to recreate negative patterns. For example, if you grew up with a passive aggressive parent, it will ‘feel right’ when you meet a passive aggressive person. It’s vital to learn to distinguish this from listening to intuition. The key is to recognize how your body conveys messages from your subconscious, versus messages from your intuition. The simplest way to distinguish is to think about times when something has ‘felt right’ and how it felt in your body. There will be different sensations at different times, which is specifically the difference between an intuitive knowing and a subconscious reaction. We’ll practice this in the workshop so that it becomes really clear. Now that you understand that these messages may have come from your subconscious, you may be able to understand why sometimes, it seems as if intuition is ‘wrong.’ Intuition is not wrong, it may be a misunderstanding of what is being communicated – and it’s very valuable to learn to distinguish the signals in your body so you can know what is truly going on. You can learn to be guided to what is wonderful for you, to experience all the gifts and blessings the universe has to give.
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