It can be hard to decipher exactly where your ideas and motivations are stemming from. Are they from your mind, your ego, or your intuition? Are they feelings you picked up from others that don’t even belong to you?
How can you begin to learn to trust your intuition to help you make decisions when you can’t even tell how it’s speaking to you?
It’s so important to learn how to decipher the ways in which your intuition communicates its messages to you, and to learn how to discern and get clear on the messages it’s sending.
When you do this, it can help you in every single relationship you have, even the one you have with the world at large, to know how to interpret and trust the information you’re receiving from your intuition and let it steer your way through life like a compass always guiding you to your true north.
So here are some simple steps to make your intuition more real and visceral, so you can see all the different ways you’re already utilizing it in your life, and how to bring that into more consciousness so you can benefit from your intuitive intelligence in every decision you make.
3 Steps to Making Intuitively Guided Decisions
- Instinct
The first clue your intuition sends you is through your root chakra. You’ll receive this information through your body, your legs, your feet. This is an instinctual knowing, a primordial sense of safety vs. danger and it’s often your first innate reaction to a situation.
You’ll feel your intuition speak here either through a sense of insecurity and fear, or a sense of safety and ease. This is your reaction, your trigger, your fight, flight, or freeze mode. This intuitive information is what will move you out of the way of oncoming traffic, but it’s not always reliable in everyday stressful situations and relationships.
Unless you’re in immediate danger, notice these initial reactions that you have in a given situation but then let them settle and see how you feel about things after the triggered feeling has been released. - Gut feeling
The next bodily clue you’ll receive from your intuition is a gut feeling, which can be described differently by many people but often causes a literal tingling or fluttering sensation in the belly.
This feeling is felt in the sacral and solar plexus chakras. It is either a yes or a no. It either pulls your energy back, hindering you from moving forward, or spurs you towards something. This happens naturally, energetically, and can become a reliable tool to help you make decisions once you know how to use it.
To play with this consciously, stand up with your feet flat on the ground and take a deep breath. Place your hands on your lower belly. Then ask yourself a few questions you know the answers to and see what “yes” feels like in your body, and what “no” feels like in your body.
Then you can start to play with asking yourself questions that you don’t know the answer to, and see if you feel a yes or a no. You can put supplements or food up to your lower belly, and see if you feel a yes or no towards them. You can think of certain people or situations and see if they pull you forward or push you back, do they make you feel light or heavy?
This can be a great way to start to get a sense of how your body is giving you intuitive information all the time, and how you can start to use it and rely on it to help you make decisions. - Mind’s Eye
The prior two, lower chakra forms of intuitive information can help us learn when to act and when to pull back, but they often need to be paired with the wisdom of the mental forms of intuition to get a clear view of the way forward, especially when it comes to making big life decisions.
There is a lot here in the mind that can fool you and make you think you’re hearing the voice of your intuition, so it’s very important to spend some time getting clear and practicing working with your mind in different ways to discern where all the information is coming from, which thoughts you need to be listening to, and which thoughts you can ignore!
The first step in using your mind to discern intuitive wisdom is to go through your mental shelves of self-knowledge and experience and see how the current situation stacks up to your past. Is there knowledge you’ve already gained that you’re ignoring? Is there a pattern going on that you find yourself in, but didn’t realize?
When you’re being told something, offered something, pushed into something and you’re not sure if it’s right for you, you can use the mind to discern what the truth is but it doesn’t happen through rational thought.
Say you have an opportunity for a new job and your first two bodily intuitive cues felt fear and like you want to hold back and protect yourself, but your mind is telling you how perfect it seems and how much money it would be and to go for it. What choice would you make?
This is when you need to move out of the rational mind and into the intuitive mind and think about the opportunity or decision up ahead, and ask yourself does it feel simple and straightforward, or convoluted? Does it make you feel clearer and brighter, or muddier in your mind? When you close your eyes and envision yourself at this new job, do you see yourself uplifted and happy or stressed out and overworked?
This is also when you can ask your guides for wisdom, signs, messages, or clarity. This is the time to get still, to listen, and pay attention to the signs and guidance all around you.
Test these steps out on daily small decisions, like what to eat, what to wear, where to go shopping, or which avocado to buy. Then once you build up trust in your ability to discern which way your intuition is guiding clearly, you can use these steps as a process to help you work through the big decisions in life.
When it comes to those bigger decisions, sleep on it first, always. Allow your subconscious to weigh in by way of dreams and messages in your sleep. Let all the options settle and all the dust clear and see how you feel about things in the morning.
Your intuitive guidance will always be simple, clear, and direct. A yes, a no. A nudge, a spur, a push, a pull. And once you learn how to know what it’s telling you, you’ll bring so much more clarity, ease, and joy into your life!