What does intuition mean?
According to Wikipedia, the definition of intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, conscious reasoning, or understanding of how the knowledge was acquired.
To understand the definition of intuition, let's first look at the human body we all reside in. All the spiritual teachings of the world recognise that the energy processing system within a human being consists of both male and female energies regardless of gender. At this point in time, however, we, as a race of humans, are predominantly operating from the masculine part of our psyche.
The easiest way to comprehend it is to see that the mind is the base station of masculine energy and the heart is the source of feminine energy. I'm sure you've heard the term 'female intuition' before, and even though we can most certainly attribute that phrase to women in general, I believe it would be more accurately portrayed as a metaphor for the place that intuition stems from within us all - the feminine energy.
How to follow our intuition?
Because many of us have been educated to live life from our mental sphere, intuition can be utterly alien to normal life. When it does manage to find a way to pierce our awareness, often we dismiss it because we are so used to living in the powerhouse of the educated mind and very afraid of listening to the vastly different language of our intuition.
Recognising that we probably spend a tremendous amount of time with our attention in our mind is all well and good, but how then do we train it to be able to listen to the small voice within that is accurately guiding us to a better reality?
It’s obviously a process that will take a bit of time because most of us really do spend the majority of our time with our attention firmly based on our thinking stuff. The key is to train ourselves to relax so that we can then have our attention on the body. If we're not relaxed, it’s very difficult to be able to bring our attention to our body and then be able to stay present. The quickest and by far most effective way to relax is by learning how to breathe, and you can find more information about that here.
Your body is an intuitive vessel, it is always and in all ways responding to everything that it is related to. It’s responding to the environment you’re in, the food and liquids you ingest, your thinking as well as what you’re feeling, to name a few. Then within your body is both the mind and the unconscious mind, and within the unconscious mind, according to Carl Jung (Link to Wikipedia) the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, we have the collective unconscious, which basically means we have aspects of our unconscious mind that are collectively shared throughout humanity.
What this means is that we have access to infinitely more knowledge, wisdom and intelligence than we currently believe at the conscious level, and our intuition is the doorway to that storehouse of perfect guidance. Knowing now that our intuition is the key to the best form of guidance we could ever attain, it becomes obvious that we must learn how to access it.
But how can we learn to follow our intuition and know the difference between what it has to say and what our mind is relentlessly saying? The art of following our intuition is one of the greatest skills we could ever acquire, but as with all great accomplishments, it’s not that easy, to begin with, but well worth the effort.
If we were to take a moment and look at where we have our attention most of the time, we'll most certainly find that it’s almost always in our thinking. Whenever we have our attention in our mind, then we're not fully aware of what’s going on in our body at both the physical and emotional levels.
We’ve got to learn to get our attention to our body so that we can hear what our body; at this moment: is communicating to us. In the world of business, this would be called our gut feeling.
Our intuition is always guiding us to a better life that is in alignment with our heart's desires and it's always talking to us but as long as we have our attention on our thinking, we'll never be able to hear her guidance.
How to develop our intuition?
The first thing that we must do is to learn how to relax, if we can't relax, it simply means that we are spending all of our time in our mind or in other words, our thinking. Our mind is never satisfied with anything and because it generally follows the material world of commercialism, it consistently bombards us with messages like you're not good enough yet, or life is not good enough yet but if you'd just get, do, become, attain, own, drive, look like this that or the other, then you'll be ok. But as I'm sure you know even if we fulfil some of the relentless desires it brings forward, that will only satisfy the mind for a short period of time before it begins its monotonous drive for more once again.
As long as we keep our attention regularly in the madness of our manic mind, we'll never get close to what our deep intuitive voice is presenting to us, which simply means we will be missing out on a glorious existence that is absolutely in line with all of our heartfelt desires at each of the themes we experience in our life.
The second thing to understand is that we must learn to bring our attention to the moment we find ourselves in. Meditation is a wonderful tool to train our minds to come back to the moment, but we can also keep practising during the day.
Whenever you remember, bring your attention back to the moment and do it a thousand times a day. You use your body to help you come back. Your body is always in the moment so by bringing your attention to it often, you are then pulling your attention from your mind and into the moment.
This moment is where your intuition is always talking to you, so you must get here to be able to hear her. It will talk to you in many ways, from inspired thoughts to seeing a message on a T-shirt of someone walking by or hearing something on the radio or having that deep gut feeling that guides you perfectly.
The main point is that we must learn to be able to bring our attention to the moment as often as possible and to make that much easier we must also learn to relax.