Our intuition can be a powerful source of information. It holds a higher intelligence that, if we listen to it, can guide our lives towards our highest purpose and highest good. When we tap into our intuition, we make faster, calmer, easier, more aligned decisions about life. It opens us up to divine assistance and we open up more an overall flow. It helps us to avoid unnecessary roadblocks, and have a heart-led, instead of a head-led life, which gives us less overall anxiety.
In order to connect and stay connected with our intuition, we need to work the muscle every day. One of the first steps in doing so is learning to differentiate the voice of intuition from the voice of ego.
The Voice of Intuition Vs The Voice of Ego
First of all, the ego is not a bad thing. They both have a function—your ego mind is there to protect you, and your intuition is there to guide you. But our brains tend to naturally make decisions from our ego (the primitive and sometimes called child-mind) when it’s our intuition that would be our greatest asset at that moment.
For example, your ego will step in and tell you to remember that when you did this in the past you got hurt “don’t do that again!” it will warn. Not bad advice right? But what if that repeated advice is stopping you from experiencing your next level of growth, keeping you small and stuck?
“Don’t touch that fire is hot and you learned from burning yourself when you were 5 not to do that!” is practical advice from the ego.
“Don’t step out on stage and give a keynote because you forgot your lines in the Christmas play as a child and everyone laughed,” can be impractical advice to take. The child-mind really doesn’t mean you any harm, it’s just not a mature reasoning faculty many times.
Conversely, your intuition might lead you to a place, like that keynote opportunity. It may lead you to the contact you need in order to be offered the job. It may also lead you to know exactly what to speak about to increase your presence and business growth, but if we’re too busy listening to the ‘protection’ voice we miss the opportunity to either avoid pain or grow personally.
The best way to differentiate between them is through identifying what comes along with the voice—when it’s your intuition, there’s usually a sense of peace and inner knowing that comes along, this won’t remove the fear or anxiety about doing the thing but you will know that it’s the right direction. When the ego voice is speaking, it has a lot of emotion attached to it, usually, fear and a neurotic kind of calculating of outcomes; what if this, then… is usually what it sounds like.
In short, intuition feels like calm, knowing, openness and aliveness, while the ego feels like: fear, anxiety and indecision.
Once you can learn to differentiate between the voices, it’s time to cultivate a relationship with your intuition.
Here are three things you can do to flex the muscle and strengthen it every day:
Spend 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night with yourself in silence, ‘observing’ your thoughts, like in meditation. Watch your mind think thoughts as if they were clouds just passing by. If you find yourself attaching to any of those thoughts, notice and release them again. This will sharpen your observation muscle.
Ask yourself powerful questions: If you notice that you’re making a decision from fear, ask yourself, “if there were no repercussions/outcome, what decision would I make?”
Ask for help: Invite Spirit or Higher Consciousness or Intelligence into your life. A Course in Miracles says, “Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation” but it needs an invitation! Spirit isn’t a party crasher.
Meditation: cultivate some form of daily meditation. I know you’ve heard this one before! But nothing trains your mind to ‘catch’ the voice of your intuition as meditation does. Allows you to be receptive to the voice within.
After you ask, let go of getting an answer: We have to enter a state of receptivity to receive an answer from our higher knowing or intuition. Let go of the answer, and wanting to know it, and trust that it will come to you in a moment of stillness and usually when you’re distracting doing or thinking of something else!
Chances are your intuition is already speaking to you all the time. If you’re living a distracted life, the likelihood of you hearing the whisper is rare, almost impossible. The answer usually comes by way of a feeling—a calm knowing or if it comes attached to a thought, it’s a small whisper that can easily be drowned out by louder sounds or numbing out on your phone or TV.
Often the outcome is not what we expect—It’s definitely not always the easy answer, sometimes it’s asking us to do something we don’t want to do or that’s inconvenient. And don’t worry about missing things and making mistakes either! No matter how often we ignore guidance, or how often we falter, the universe is self always looking out for our best interest. It is self-correcting and repositioning, just like a GPS system (guidance positioning system… get it?). You’ll be redirected over and over until you get on the right track. Your choice is whether you have a deep enough connection to yourself and Spirit to avoid making the lesson another stressful thing.