Listening To Intuition

Highly Sensitive People (empaths) are nothing if they're not listeners.  We listen to everything and sometimes wish we didn't.  People in general have intuition.  People in general don't seem to listen to their intuition enough.  Dr. Judith Orloff has an article with a test on how much we listen to our intuition (see Dr. Orloff's article).  Do you listen to your intuition?  We get really busy and focused in our daily lives.  It's common for everyone to get tunnel vision and we loose sight of what is going on around us.  When we do that, things may happen that can affect us without us realizing it.  So it's helpful to stop look and listen to intuition.  What I want to do is highlight some things that may prevent us from listening to our intuition.  Through experience, I found out that trusting intuition does not come easy,  interpreting intuition can be hard, and wishful thinking is a hindrance.

In our society we are told not to listen to feelings, hunches, and imaginations.  Well, not in so many words, but over time and the fact that hard cold facts is what gets listened to rather than preference.  So, it's not surprising that we don't trust when thoughts come to us out of the blue and give us information that seemingly has no evidence.   Our overgrown analytical minds want proof.  The reasoning goes nuts without logical steps.  So we blow the information off.  That information is our intuition telling us something.  We must learn to trust it.  It took me some time to understand that my intuition was giving me good information.  Sometimes even now, my mind wants to say that it's just all my imagination.  That's how strong my analytical brain is.  I have strong reasoning abilities and it often clashes with my intuition.  Telling yourself that there could be something to this information and testing the information is one way to start trusting it.

Interpreting the information gleaned from intuition can be hard to do.  Interpretation is a function of the analytical brain.  To interpret intuition, we need to have a "common frame of reference".  Yeah sure, I took that one from Spock in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (see quote).  You do have to have a common frame of reference to have practical information.  I see most of the common reference is learned in life as we associate feelings with situations.  Intuition comes in the form of emotion, and emotion is a language in and of itself.  Some things don't translate.  Some things are hard to put in words.  Some things you can only describe.  Some things are a driving force for action.  I went to a balloon race last weekend, and there was a large crowd with a festival.  There were lots of vendors of food and drink.  There were even some student dancers.  I picked up on the overall intuitive emotion int the area and my mouth relaxed and the ends of my mouth were edging upward.  That told me people were relaxed and were enjoying themselves overall.  Sometimes intuition comes like that.  I interpreted that one based on how I reacted to the emotion.  It's quite an art to interpret intuition. 

Wishful thinking is an enemy to intuition.  It will try to override the intuition information.  What I mean is that if you want something bad enough you may try to wish it into existence.  It's important to distinguish between what you want and what your observing.  I use this word observing in the sense of picking up information from intuition.  I have a hard head, as my wife would say.  That means my will is a strong one.  I blame genetics for that (thank you parents).  So, what I have to do is to get into a meditative state and listen for the intuition.  Sometimes, this takes a while.  I don't think it's because the intuition doesn't come to me.  I think it's there all the time.  It just takes a while to quiet down my analytical hard head.  By the way what I call analytical mind Dr. Orloff calls linear mind.  I use that word because I understand that the brain is very very complex, more than science understands.  So I don't think the work linear quite describes it.  Wishful thinking is a function of the analytical mind and it's made when we establish an intent (wish, desire, manifestation, prayer) we made earlier.

So, trusting intuition, interpreting it, and handling wishful thinking can help you listen to intuition.  As you listen, you come to realize that everything changes.  Then the more they change, the more they stay the same.  Sure, it's a paradox.  I think life itself is a paradox as well, but don't ask me to explain it.  The more you listen, the more you will change, and the more you become yourself  and you shed the facades you have in life.