3 ways to improve your intuition

Several years ago I went to visit the home and healing cave of Emma Kunz. Emma was a famous healer and visionary artist who lived just north of Zürich in Switzerland (1892-1963.)
The thing I found most astonishing about Emma wasn’t so much her healing powers but the fact that she had absolutely no books in her house (except one on healing plants), yet somehow she was incredibly knowledgeable, up-to-date and informed. I thought this could perhaps be explained by the constant stream of visitors she had, but then I heard this:
Once, a couple came to visit Emma and brought a book as a gift. At the end of the visit, Emma turned to the man and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this book you brought me. It’s not me who needs to read it but you, and the information you need is on page 25!!’
How’s that for being connected with inner guidance! We all have gut instinct in extreme danger, but we’re not all tuned in to our own inner voice all the time the way Emma was. Or we are, but we don’t trust it. Perhaps because we are taught from birth that everyone else knows better than we do what we need. So we constantly look for solutions outside of ourselves, instead of accessing or trusting in our own inner knowing.

How can we access our intuition on a minute-by-minute basis?

In order to hear inner wisdom we first need to be fully present.
We can’t be fully present until we bring our spirit back from all the places we have left it (in the past and in the future).

Here are three ways:

1. Bring your spirit/energy back into present time through completion.
Finish what needs finishing, say what needs saying, don’t promise to do more stuff that you don’t have time for any way.

Often we dismiss doing this because the issue seems so petty and such a long time ago.

Here’s an example from my life:

Years ago, when I was a teenager I loaned my mother’s favourite art book to a schoolteacher. I didn’t have the courage to ask for it back (kept meaning to but just didn’t) and I didn’t have the courage to tell my mother where her book was whenever she pondered on where it could have got to. That was 30 years ago!
The teacher is now long dead but my mother isn’t. A small part of me (my energy/spirit) stays stuck here until I make the effort of sitting down and telling my mother what happened to her book all those years ago. (She probably couldn’t care less these days, but that’s not the point!)

So, this is what I’m doing to bring my energy into present time, maybe you’d like to do the same:

Make a list of all the things you should have said in the past but didn’t.
Work through the list and bring completion to as many situations as you can.
Pay attention to where your thoughts go throughout the day and write down everything that needs completion, then act on this.

2. Clear your clutter.
Take a day off and do all the little things around your house that you keep putting off. (The loose door handle etc) These things rob our energy but we never resolve them. Usually the little things we keep putting off (that pile of stuff behind your bedroom door?) take less energy to do than to keep putting off.

3. Heart connection
Recent research done by the Institute of Heartmath indicates that intuitive information is registered first in the heart and then transmitted to the brain.

If you shift your focus to the area around your heart, breathe into this area and re-experience good memories. Or focus on feeling gratitude for anything in your life right now, this shifts your energy, reduces stress and allows you to access intuition more freely.

It’s a simple 3 step process:
heart focus – heart breathing – heart feeling

You can get exercises through Heartmath’s global coherence initiative.

First published on Blogger, June 16, 2007

I’m busy republishing some favorite posts from my older blog that is no longer accessible due to software issues. Thought I’d use the opportunity to add some comments below each time, wisdom in hindsight.

My mother passed away in 2013. I never did tell her what happened to her art book!
And things still pile up undone…
And even though I still agree with everything I wrote above, I’ve learnt that being fully present is way more complex than we ever imagined. It’s a lifelong journey that possibly involves polyvagal theory considerations, and the survival habits of all our ancestors and incarnations but …..
one sure way we can retrain our automatic shut down system is through our breath. Breathing deep into the belly stimulates the vagus nerve which links our 3 brains (gut, heart and head) and puts them into sync.
And even when we forget to breathe and go in circles for decades (by getting distracted, or feeling bored, overwhelmed, shut down, fearful or insufficient…) we can practice self compassion and keep reminding ourselves we can always connect to our intuition, even if only for a millisecond at first, by remembering something about our inner makeup that’s far deeper: that we can come home to our true selves at any moment, like Dorothy clicking her heels together in the Wizard of Oz – by remembering who we really are at core. Pure presence.

For a previous post on this theme: read “The two handed practice”.
See also Deepak Chopra’s meditation program titled the path to empowerment.
For a broader understanding of your purpose as encoded in your fingerprints, and how this relates to all of the above, Or find out more on this here.