Our minds are constantly working. The flow of thoughts and emotions can feel unstoppable and uncontrollable. This steady stream of energy is usually reliving your past or planning for the future but it’s rarely focused on the present. Intuition only happens in the present moment and if you’re not there, you will miss it. Meditation can help you be in the present and connect to your intuition.
Thoughts, emotions and body sensations are three of the ways that intuition can present itself.
Recognizing Intuition Through Thoughts and Emotions
The first step to opening yourself to your intuition is learning to recognize that you are not your thoughts. You are the person who is thinking the thoughts. When you remember being in a car accident, watching a movie or enjoying a concert, you know that you aren’t the car accident, the movie or the concert. You are the person who experienced those things. Just as you are not your thoughts, you are also not your emotions. You are not joy, grief or calm. You are a person experiencing joy, grief or calm. As you continue the practice of accepting that you are the person experiencing the thoughts and emotions it will become more natural for you to be able to see incoming energy as a separate energy. Meditation is a tool to help you go deeper into yourself, past the thoughts and emotions to your core. Connecting to your core helps you to be fully present in the moment and makes it easier to recognize incoming information as intuition.
Recognizing Intuition Through Your Body
Your body is an excellent source to help you recognize your intuition. This is where the saying ‘listen to your gut’ comes from. It’s not just your gut, your intuition can try to wake up any part of your body to get your attention. If you’re going about your day and all of a sudden you feel tension in any part of your body or your throat tightens up, shoulders sink, posture slumps or you get goosebumps, it could be your intuition trying to connect with you.
As you learn to tune in to your body, you’ll become more aware of how people and situations affect you. A Body Scan Meditation is the best way that I’ve found to tune into your body’s signals. The body scan is a tour of your body. As you follow the instructor’s directions, you’ll go from toe to head focusing on your breath while becoming aware of each separate area of your body. As you focus you will naturally begin to relax and become aware of which areas feel at ease and which don’t. The areas that don’t feel at ease are usually the areas that are the most sensitive to your intuition. The more tuned in you are, the quicker you’ll be able to sense the changes. When you’re going about your day and sense a change in your body, open your awareness to what is happening around you. You will be amazed at how quickly you begin to recognize your intuition.
YouTube is a great resource, offering many options. Enter “body scan meditation” into their search and you’ll see a plethora of different teachers. This is a good place to try your intuition. Close your eyes and take a few slow deep breaths clearing yourself of excess energy. Then open your eyes and see what pops out to you. It’s also fun to experiment. Teachers bring their own take on meditation and you can learn different things from each teacher.
In my monthly free Introduction to Meditation class, we do a short body scan meditation. Here is the link: https://victoriajuster.com/event-schedule/
One of the reasons that I meditate is because it helps me disconnect from the constant flow of incoming energy. It also helps me to release excess energy and to identify incoming energy.
When we can identify incoming energy as intuition we are able to glean the information more quickly and use it for its purpose, to help ourselves and those whom we love.
I am always right when I trust my intuition. Thank you for this very well written post.
Dropping energy from the head to the gut during meditation helps to strengthen intuition, especially after a body scan. Meditation is probably the best action to set up any given day.
As a longtime meditation teacher, I love this piece. I have never tried to write about intuition, and you have done it so well! Thanks for coming at this body of work from a fresh angle.
This is such a good read. I am going to add meditation to my 2022 list. I used to do the Headspace app before work and loved it. Maybe I’ll try that one again. Thanks for the gentle nudge on the benefits of being present.
I just started recently trying to do some meditation and find it hard to stay focused. I know they say it will take time, so I will keep trying. I have to say this post put a new perspective on it. I have been doing it to try to just relax for a few and focus on myself for a few. I now have another incentive to keep going 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
“Intuition only happens in the present moment and if you’re not there, you will miss it. ”
I never thought of that.
Back when I was working in tech-oriented environments (wait, I’m back in IT. Never mind) I had a hard time arguing with these managers. They wanted facts and figures and not to follow my gut, intuition or hunches. Over time they sort of learned to trust me. Or they got tired of the discussions 😉
While it was always easy for me to listen to my intuition in the business part of my life, the private one was a whole nother story, and I had some hard lessons to learn.