Have you gone to look for your handbook to life lately only to find that pages are missing and that the maps in the back of the book are no longer current? They keep saying these are times of rapid and accelerating change. Maybe it’s time to tune up your navigation system and rev up your intuition! What’s involved in getting to know your intuition, intimately? If you want to feed your left brain, try tuning in to a few definitions. This one for intuition comes from Wikipedia.
Intuition (knowledge) – understanding without apparent effort, quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences or empirical knowledge.
My favorite example of intuition? Intuition is that amazing quality that allows me to show up at the right time and meet the right people without having to “think about it”, like when I met our editor, Sara. Tuning up the intuition is like tuning up the equipment before a treasure hunt!
In my quest to find out more about my own intuition, I was first guided to explore what intuition is not. One way to describe what it is not is to say that intuition often works its way through filters. Those filters, says Lisa Hartnett, a therapist in San Rafael, California, can confuse intuition with other qualities like delusion and fantasy.
Try this exercise for an experience of the differences between what intuition is and what it is not:
If you have a meditation practice, on a day when you are especially centered, spend an extra ten minutes asking to feel, see, taste, touch, hear and receive pictures on the nature of delusion. Make sure you are firmly seated in your meditation as the witness or observer and from there, explore as the qualities of delusion arise. Be prepared that the energy associated with delusion will not feel as good as when you do this process asking to feel intuition in its pure state. Notice where the feelings of discomfort associated with delusion are in your body, paying close attention to your belly and solar plexus. It is also recommended to journal about your experience. As you bring the meditation to a close, be certain to use a practice that helps you to ground your energy and complete the experiment with delusion.
You can try the same thing to experience what fantasy is and how it is different from intuition. Make sure to also sit and observe what pure intuition is.
Get to know these distracting filters so you can let your intuitve light shine! And if more and more, you end up at the right place at the right time, enjoy the treasures you find. For a fascinating scientific exploration of the mystery of intuition, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
Image: ana rodriguez