Intuition can be a powerful guidance system in your life.
It can lead you to the things that are good for you and away from things that aren’t. It can tell you if someone should be trusted or not. It can tell you if an environment isn’t safe.
It can also tell you when it’s time to change careers, end a relationship, start a relationship, or even which direction you should turn when faced with a fork in the road.
Unfortunately, we often don’t give our intuition enough credit. We dismiss it or overthink it and find ourselves in situations that aren’t meant for us as a result.
If you’re looking to develop your connection with your intuition, trust me I get it! I’ve been there. (If you want to read my whole story, which includes my intuitive journey, you can find that here.)
This post is going to cover what your intuition is, and 5 things you can do to strengthen your trust in your intuition.
What is intuition?
Intuition is typically what’s call your “gut feeling.” It’s the feeling you get when you just know something. This could apply to something you should do, if you can trust someone or not, etc.
People tend to be dismissive of their intuition because it doesn’t seem to be based in fact. You can’t usually point to how you know something intuitively, you just know.
But there actually is some science behind intuition. According to this Psychology Today article, “Gut feelings are the result of many channels of information processing, and provide a road map that integrates our emotions and physical sensations with a given environment.”
Basically, it’s when your brain is processing information about a given situation or person faster than you can reasonably keep up with.
So, your intuition isn’t “just a feeling,” it’s actually a feeling based on how you’re subconsciously processing information. And it can be a powerful tool to hone and trust.
Additionally, I do believe or intuition connects us to our higher selves, spirit guides, and whatever higher power you believe in. It’s a part of us that some how knows better than our conscious mind and we would do well to trust it as much as possible.
5 Ways You can Learn to Trust Your Intuition
These five techniques are what I’ve found most helpful to me, and it’s my hope that they’ll help you too! They’re also not the only ways to develop your intuition, so don’t feel like you should limit yourself to these techniques.
Start by recognizing your intuition
You can’t trust something you’re not aware of. So, before you do anything, it’s important to recognize what you’re intuition feels like.
Intuition is typically called a “gut feeling” because or most people (myself included), feel their intuitive nudges in their gut.
For me, it’s different from worry or anxiety because those emotions have a scattered and uncertainty to them. But my intuition is a steady urging. There’s also usually an undercurrent of calm, even if it’s telling me something bad.
This calm comes from the certainty of deep knowing in these intuitive hit.
Consider meditating, yoga, walking, and/or time in nature
If you’re having a hard time recognizing your intuition, or have a habit of overthinking your intuition, try activities that take you out of your mind and help you better connect with yourself and your body.
My go-tos are meditation, yoga, walking, and time in nature.
All of these activities have the potential to help you quite your mind and become more aware of your experience, which can help you pick up your intuition more easily.
They can also calm anxiety and worry, which can cloud your intuition, and therefore make it easier for you to hear your intuitive nudges.
Pick some low-stake practice points
Once you’re able to identify your intuition, it’s time to start using it.
Personally, I’ve actually always had an easier time listening to my intuition for really big things, and less so for the smaller, day-to-day stuff. (As in, if my intuition told me to make a major career change, I’d make it in a heart beat. But if it told me to turn left not right, I’d second guess.)
I don’t think starting big is the easiest place for most people to start. So instead, if you feel an intuitive nudge in a low-stakes situation, try trusting it and see what happens.
This could be if your intuition tells you to get off the highway an exit early during your commute, or to skip your regular coffee place and make it at home.
If you learn of an accident on the highway that might have made you late, or see that your regular coffee place ended up being closed when you drive by, you’ll know your intuition came through for you.
If you find you’re intuitive nudges didn’t end up having a benefit, then it’s likely more worry, anxiety or something else. In that case, you might want to revisit the previous two points or try some of the next two techniques until you find success in low-stakes situations.
Take time to reflect when you don’t trust your intuition
This one was massive for me.
If you’re not used to trusting your intuition, you may be very familiar with the regret that comes after. The frustrated, “I had a feeling I couldn’t trust that person, I should have listened to myself!”
It’s the feeling that comes when you ignore your intuition and it turns out to be right.
For me, my defining moment was my junior prom. I was not big on dances of this nature, but I felt like this was a dance I needed to go to because it’s prom and these experiences only happen once.
So I went, despite the fact that my intuition was begging me not to. There was actual dread in my stomach telling me I was going to hate it. I dismissed this feeling as the uncertainty that comes with a new experience, and foraged ahead.
As I’m sure you can guess, I had a miserable time. Nothing bad happened, but I’m someone who doesn’t like crowds, dancing with large groups of people, or loud music. So by the time dinner was over, I was wishing I trusted my intuition and just stayed home.
I learned to trust my intuition in these types of situations because of the regret I felt for being so dismissive.
If you can recognize how bad it feels to ignore your intuition, it can be come a powerful motivator to start trusting it in similar situations in the future.
Consider a Tarot practice or reading
I got into tarot purely because a friend of mine told me she’d recently learned it was a good tool to strengthen your intuitive connection and she wasn’t wrong!
At the time, I thought Tarot was mostly about fortune telling, which wasn’t really an experience I was after.
I’ve since learned it’s actually a powerful tool to help connect you with your own inner guidance, wisdom, and intuition.
For me, Tarot isn’t really about anyone telling you want will or won’t happen to you. Instead, it’s about offering insights and allowing your own intuition to connect with what’s come up to give your experience meaning and clarity.
If this sounds like something you might like to try out, I have some reading options that may be a good fit!
If you’d like guidance on your intuitive journey, you may find the Guidance for Highly Sensitive People Reading most helpful to you.
Or if you’d like use your intuition to guide you in other areas of your life, you might enjoy the Soul Alignment Reading or the Life Guidance Reading.
I have a post that digs into 7 ways Tarot can help Highly Sensitive People, if you want to learn more.
For more on my Tarot philosophy, you can can check out the About page.
If you’d like to know even more about me and how Tarot played a role in my own intuitive journey, you can read my story here.
How as your intuition helped guide you? In what ways have you struggled to trust it? Tell me about it in the comments!
