Let’s talk about how to build your intuition. Specifically, how do I know when I’m really trusting my inner voice versus the thinking mind (plus a straight forward secret weapon to really boosting your intuition through your body).
Having great intuition is an excellent way to increase your success in life, to waste less time and energy following down roads and opportunities and relationships with people that aren’t for you.
If you have great intuition, you have a better internal guidance system.
The problem is that it can be hard to trust your intuition. You need to know that you’re actually building your intuition and flexing it like a muscle in the right way.
And when I talk about intuition, I’m not talking about some woo psychic thing that only certain people have.
Intuition is a natural ability to tap into the more subtler aspects of life that are just as real as the other ones. We’re just not trained by mainstream society and education to factor those in.
In fact, I think some people are using intuition and might not even know that it’s intuition at all.
The important thing is to also build our discernment along with the intuition so we can actually learn to trust it and make sure it’s not just some passing thought.
We’re going to go over the three major things that are important for doing just that.
Understand The Mind
Point number one, it’s important to understand the Mind.
Now, the Mind, or what we call the mind, can mean a lot of things.
If you’re like me and sort of have been a long time healer and you’re into the sort of nerdy spiritual aspects of the Mind and the different layers, you can go really deep in that in a resource that I really like from the tradition of Vedanta that’s very helpful is the Tattvabodha, which is a traditional text by Sri Adi Sankaracarya that goes through all of the nitty-gritty points of what’s the Mind and what’s the Subtle Body and how those things are putting together. That’s a pretty easy read. It’s still pretty dense.
What I want you to think about for this point number one of understanding the Mind is that to make it very simple or basic, we’re going to dissect two aspects of the Mind that you need to know about.
Thinking Mind vs. Inner Voice
For this purpose we’re going to call the Thinking Mind and the Inner Voice.
We’re going to go through how to differentiate between these two inner voices, which is key in building your intuition.
Now the Thinking Mind is the Mind that you’re most familiar with. This is the Mind that has the running commentary of thoughts in your daily life. It’s the things that you think. It’s the things that maybe you might think are you. It’s not actually you. It’s just your thinking mind.
The thinking mind is our conscious mind. It tends to be very forward in our sense of our thoughts.
On the other hand, the Inner Voice is more this quiet sort of background presence. You’ll hear it sometimes, but it’s not upfront in your face like the Thinking Mind. It’s a little bit of quieter towards the back and it’s conscious, but it’s a little bit more of what we could call our higher mind or the part of our mind that is a little closer to or in touch with the deeper parts of ourselves.
Whether we call that our soul or our higher mind. These are all kind of names for concepts that have very similar overlap.
Whereas the Thinking Mind tends to be more aggressive, more interrupting, the Inner Voice Mind has a little bit more stillness. It often requires asking and listening for it to really speak.
Whereas the thinking mind is going to like interrupt your conversation.
Another differentiation of what voice is talking is that the Thinking Mind can be a little bit more snarky, a little bit be more judgmental. It sends out more like warnings but usually warnings in sort of a negative kind of sarcastic way like,
“You don’t want to do that.”
“We don’t want to go there.”
“What are people gonna think?”
“Remember what happened last time.”
Those are all Thinking Mind commentary.
Whereas, the Inner Voice, you’ll notice that when it’s happening, it is more objective. It’s much less emotional. It doesn’t usually come across as sarcastic. It’s not condemning. It’s just more objective.
In that way, you can tell if you’re hearing the inner voice. It has this more abiding sort of sense, this presence of like,
“There’s no rush. I’m here over time.”
“These are the things that we know.”
In a way when we’re listening to our Inner Voice, we’re listening to more of this knowing sense.
Whereas the Thinking Mind tends to have more of a constant change. One day it says this and the other day it says this.
It may still say the same, but it’s going to have that more aggressive quality.
The Thinking Mind, to understand a little about, is part of what I call our Protector System. The protector system’s job is to keep us safe, which is good, but the problem is that it’s a little bit misguided. In the thinking mind’s effort to protect us, it often shuts us down and tells us stories in ways that are not intuition. It’s just really the Protector System doing its kind of mind thing.
Ask Your Body
The third part, which I think is the most powerful for really building your intuition and having a positive feedback loop is to ask your Body. This is something I teach all the time in my Subtle Body Certification and Self-Mastery classes—to be able to really use your Body is your best sense of intuition because your Body actually has a more direct connection to your soul and your unconscious than your Thinking Mind.
The problem is that the Thinking Mind is very strong and very sneaky. So if you’re only relying on the Mind thoughts to help build your intuition, it’s likely that you’re missing things or you’re getting thrown off because of the sneakiness of the mind.
However, the Body does not lie.
I teach a whole simple process that you can learn to start to ask your Body about intuitive kinds of questions and use that as a guidance.
What you can use in the meantime is just this question of,
“If there’s something that’s coming up, notice how does it feel in my Body?”
Very simply you can lean towards two different things.
When I think about this question or when I’m asking for guidance or looking for intuition, I notice in my body when I’m thinking about that thing, do I get a more “expansive feeling”? which could be lightness, which could be opening. It has this sort of motion to it or that’s usually more of a yes expansive…
…or do I get a sort of “Ugh, no!”—contracting pit in my stomach kind of feeling. It has more of a curling in, moving back gut type of feeling. This is generally a no.
We often even use this expression, “trust the gut” or “Ooh, I just had a gut feeling about it”. That’s because your Body has better intuition than your mind.
Integrating the Body is one of the biggest things in order to build your intuition.
We’ve covered the three major things that you need to really build your intuition and your discernment. In Sanskrit, your Viveka, your ability to discern what’s true and what’s not and very in a microcosmic way, “What’s my thinking mind, which I don’t really want to trust”, which is based on protection and usually fear, versus my Inner Voice, which is a closer connection to my knowing. This abiding sense of my truer, deeper self.
By knowing number two, the qualities of what each of those voices sounds like, you can start to identify them and boost the conversation with your Inner Voice and turn down the volume on your Thinking Mind. To double-check and create even better discernment and intuition.
You run it past your Body, which really has a strong sense, which knows better than your mind, the unconscious, and the desires of your soul.
I hope these guidance things have helped you. You are a soul with a body. You deserve great things in life and your personal spiritual growth is important.
Disclaimer: This program is not intended to be a substitute for professional mental health or counseling services. No practitioner-patient relationship is established and the training content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA and nothing here is intended to diagnose, cure or treat any disorders.
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