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Improve Your Intuition and Instinct
Intuition is often referred to as “gut instinct,” that physical sense we get when we know if a choice is right or wrong or if a person is trustworthy or not. All of us have experienced such knowing — an inspiration, a revealed truth, a moment of brilliance — that brought a fresh sense of creativity to our lives. Such awareness is not triggered by linear thinking but by direct knowing through a nonlinear process.
Peter Senge, a noted management futurist, has said that personal mastery is intuition integrated with reason. The Sufis describe intuition as a direct knowing without the conscious use of learning. This creative, intuitive process requires a state of consciousness that is very different from our everyday awareness.
Those who can readily access this source of inner perception have highly attuned whole-body intelligence. They are able to receive and process information from a variety of sources and at a variety of levels, e.g., not just through sight or sound, but through absorbing textures and patterns. By accessing this larger “field” of information and acting on what they learn, they make better choices about their personal and professional lives. Those without this ability end up drawing from a much narrower band of “data” when making such decisions, and are thus more vulnerable to less-than-optimal choices.
Developing Your Intuitive Skills
We’ve all had psychic experiences in our lives. These can manifest as the inexplicable feeling we get when we visit a place for the first time and know we’ve been there before, or when we’re engaged in conversation and suddenly feel as if we’ve already had this same conversation with this same individual. That’s right — a déjà vu experience is a psychic event!
When the telephone rings, do you sometimes know who it is before picking up the phone? Have you ever been in a situation where you suddenly felt you were in danger and decided to take another path? Have you sensed that something was wrong with a relative or friend and called to check up on them — and discovered you were right? How about some of the following:
- Can you tell if someone is lying?
- Do you make decisions easily?
- Do you sense things before they happen?
- Do you revise your plans if you get a bad feeling?
- Do you see solutions to problems easily?
- Do you trust yourself to make decisions?
- Are there lots of coincidences in your life?
If you answered yes to five or more of the previous questions, you have highly developed intuitive skills. These experiences happen to all of us, and more frequently when we accept them as a natural part of life, and more frequently still when all of our intelligences are activated. The Hindu, Tibetan, and Egyptian cultures refer to the “third eye” — located behind the pineal gland in the center of the forehead — as the center of psychic awareness.
Individuals with highly developed third-eye vision have the capacity to see and predict events in the future. For me it’s like having a small computer monitor in my head that I can scroll forward to the future or backward to the past. The ability to see into the future is sometimes called “second sight.” And despite what you may believe, most self-proclaimed psychics are no better at predicting the future than “ordinary” people like you and me. We all have different types and degrees of psychic abilities, depending on the extent to which we’ve trusted and developed them. Self-trust plays an important part in intuition.
The first step in developing and refining these intuitive skills is learning the art of observation. In an environment of acceleration and change, it becomes ever more important to “pause and consider” even as it becomes more difficult to do so. And yet the demands of each day, with our commitments to career, family, friends, and community, often leave little room for reflection. The result is people pursuing objectives that are inappropriate to their true needs or unlikely to happen, and precious time and energy are wasted. When we tell ourselves “There’s no time for reflection,” we’re forgetting to consider the time and money that may be wasted by acting before we’ve observed and reflected.
Making time for contemplation leads to new realizations and important discoveries that can easily slip through the cracks of our busyness. When we slow down and take a step back, the next appropriate action becomes more apparent. One of the keys to establishing power and control over your life is to spend part of each day alone and to use that time to reflect on your current feelings and challenges.
Developing such a practice is additionally important because one of the ways we receive information is through our subconscious minds. Our minds work like computers, processing thousands of bits of data every day. Some of it we’re aware of, but much passes through unnoticed. In our hyperactive, fast-paced lives, we prevent ourselves from tapping into that subconscious stream, which contains knowledge and impressions that might be very valuable, for example, a subtle connection between two seemingly unrelated events that sheds new light on a situation.