What does it mean to listen to your intuition? All of us have intuition. It’s our inner voice, the part of us that “just knows” things. Some of us are highly skilled at listening to it, while others may not be in touch with it at all, and still others know how to listen but fail to heed its wisdom.
Listening to the voice of intuition requires that we slow down and become still and quiet enough to hear it. “But I hear all kinds of thoughts going on inside of me. How do I tell which is intuition and which is fear or anxiety?” I am frequently asked. The voice of intuition is calm and quiet. The voice of fear and anxiety is noisy internal chatter. We can learn to connect more deeply with our intuition through mindfulness meditation practice.
Some of us are accustomed to moving through the chaos of our busy lives and don’t know how to slow down. The noisy chatter in our minds usually vibrates at a level that matches the swirl of our outer lives. If we want a life of listening to our inner wisdom, a life of following what calls to us, and a life of living our full potential, we must create both an internal and external environment that nurtures us and gives our inner wisdom room to speak. Maintaining a chaotic external world usually leads to a lot of internal chaos and makes it impossible to really listen to our inner wisdom amidst all of the resulting internal chatter. Creating a lifestyle in which we manage our time and stress well, we live in congruence with our passions, values, and life purpose, we practice extreme self-care, and we make time for solitude and silence leads to the space and stillness in which the whispers of our intuition can be clearly heard.
Intuition is like an inner compass. It can help us to know when something feels right or when it just simply feels off track. Intuition relates closely with our bodies, and listening to our inner wisdom and making our life decisions based upon its guidance tends to be synonymous with a sense of inner peace and calm in our mind, body, and spirit. Many people relate to it as a gut feeling about something. You may have been told before to “get out of your head and listen to your gut.”
Inner knowing is sometimes an unfolding process, requiring time and patience for a clear answer from inside when you listen to your intuition. It’s tempting in these moments to become impatient with the chatter of anxiety and to make an impulsive decision simply to quiet the inner chatter, but this doesn’t tend to lead us where we ultimately want to go. Often it leads to poor choices that we later regret, some of which are irreversible, which, of course, leads to less of the internal peace and calm that we want and simply creates more anxiety in our lives.
Write down one thing that you can do today to create time and space to listen to your intuition. Are you ready to take the necessary steps to create a life that is more in line with your full potential? You might consider exploring this inquiry in your mindful journaling practice.
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