Blog
I used to pride myself on being pretty smart. I could argue my way out of most things, bang out a 10 page paper in college in a night or figure out how to build a website. I was a talker, a thinker, an executor.
When I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition I started to meet a bunch of “hippies” who wore a lot of hemp, took wheatgrass shots and had their cards read. I was judgemental to say the least, and felt completely separate from that way of life.
But part of me was super jealous.
They were so relaxed! They were “go with the flow” women and seemed to have life handed to them on a silver platter. I wanted some of their secret sauce.
So I started rubbing elbows with the granola girls and studying what made them different. When they spoke about “divine alignment”, “fate”, “being guided” I was fascinated. How? As I continued to dig, I realized that all of this “magic” came from one place, their intuition. They all swore by following their intuition, that it never let them down.
I was bummed. I didn’t have an intuition. I wasn’t at all psychic and I didn’t receive divine guidance. I was a thinker.
But my new friends assured me that every woman has intuition, it’s built into us. Over the years we’re just taught that ‘reason’ is more reliable than our intuition, and we slowly lose the ability to hear that still, quiet voice.
So I set out to build my intuition. Here’s what I learned:
1. Your intuition lives in your belly.
This made sense to me. My reason lived in my head, and my intuition, literally my gut instinct, lives in my belly. My issue was that I was completely disconnected from my body, so I started a practice of putting my attention in my belly during a meditation, massaging my body with body wash in the shower, and talking to her nicely during the day. Once I created a relationship with my body and my belly, I could start to hear her (my intuition) a little bit.
2. Your intuition has a specific way of talking.
Once I had enough stillness in my life and was connected to my body I could start to hear a small internal voice. Whenever I was trying to make a decision about something, let’s say whether or not I should take on a client that I was on the fence about this is how it went in my head:
‘Reason’ said in a loud, bossy slightly panicky voice, “Of course you should take her on, you need the money, you can handle her, you can handle anything, even if she’s a pain, it’s only a few hours a month. Just do it, don’t be lazy.”
‘Intuition’ said in a soft, quiet voice, “It’s not right.”
That’s it. Simple, calm. No back up.
3. Just because she’s quiet doesn’t mean she doesn’t know her sh*t.
Even though I could start to identify the voice, it seemed like an idiotic idea to take her advice. She has no back up, no reasons and was not based in reality. It seemed so wishy washy, so unreliable. But I was committed to developing this part of me so I decided to just experiment.
I decided that for a month I would base all of my decisions off of my intuition, even when it seemed like the worst decision in the world. I figured even if I made horrible mistakes for a month, nothing in that time frame was unfixable.
So if my head said “go to the party’”, and my intuition said “stay home” I stayed home. When my head said “take that job” and my intuition said “don’t take it” I said no. When my head said “it’s too much money” and my intuition said “it’s worth it” I made the investment.
Everytime I followed my intuition I wrote down the scenario, the gut instinct and what happened as a result. I wrote things down like I had a great night at home and my friends said that party sucked anyways, I passed on the job and my dream job popped up two weeks later, I invested in this program and made four times the money this month.
My intuition was consistently helpful and always lead to more opportunity, even though the decisions I made rarely made sense at the time. These examples became my proof and my reality. I could now clearly see a pattern and I was able to trust that quiet voice.
At the same time I thought back to the times I chose reason and recalled outcomes of exhaustion, disappointment and a feeling like I had wasted my time.
So if you’re craving more clarity, more magic, more intuition I hope you can see that it’s simple to cultivate and I swear, it is by far the best tool in my box.
In the comments below, I’d love to know about a time that you’ve followed your intuition and what the outcome was.
Love,
Sarah
Simple actions to take your life back, know your worth & feel alive no matter how drained, overwhelmed and far gone you feel.