Five less common ways to build your intuition
I often share the common ways you can build your intuition: meditation, journaling, oracle cards, automatic writing, developing a guidance practice.
One of the reasons that I frequently recommend these aforementioned activities is that they help you move from your head and into your heart or into your body, that it starts to move energy in different ways.
When we create enough stillness, space and silence to hear the inner voice that's underneath, your own little sage.
If you’ve tried these common tips, here are another five less common tips I recommend when you’re starting to trust your intuition.
Surprising ways to build your intuition
Build your intuition by moving your body.
What would happen if you allowed your body to move freely, without judgement or censorship?
Well, one of the things that would happen is you would start to hear your inner voice, your little sage and inner voice, far more clearly.
Simple movement like intuitive dance, movement and stretching is what I suggest here as opposed to high intensity movement at the gym, or following a specific routine or guide.
This suggestion is about removing any rigidity or pre-determined planned or organised movement. Instead, intuitively move your body.
In my book, Follow Your Heart, I share an exercise where you set a timer on your phone and allow your body to move until the timer stops. You can use music, but it’s even more powerful without the prompt.
The idea here is, for the length of the timer, not to dance in a particular way or to dance the way that you habitually dance. Instead, connect with your body, close your eyes, place your hand on your heart or on your hips. Then ask your body how it wants to move.
A lot can come up in this process. Journal on your observations. You’ll start an inner journey guided by intuition and spirit where you’ll start clearing through all of the stuff that's there in our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual or energetic bodies. This is what I teach in The Little Sage Intuitive Living —but you can get immediate steps through this exercise as your blocks will reveal themselves to you.
This is actually a great way for our bodies to process what it needs to process without us having to mentally interpret what our intuition is telling us.
Build your intuition by recording your dreams
Our nightly dreams help us process what has been in our awareness over maybe the last 24 to 48 hours, sometimes more. Simply recording anything that you recall upon waking is a really powerful way of connecting with your guidance. Even if you only are left with an emotion upon waking, jot it down. It’s intuitive information about what's happening underneath the surface and you can then call on a tool or technique to process that.
If you don't normally remember your dream, ask for guidance as you fall asleep. Then, take a couple of minutes upon waking and just putting pen to paper. You may like to use the dream interpretation index in the Head & Heart Digital Planner and you can explore dream symbolism through sites like dreammoods.com.
By making a note of the simplest thing, even if you’re not recalling the dream itself and it’s just a few bullet points in your journal, you allow other awarenesses to drop in.
Build your intuition by knowing your rhythms and charting your cycles
Knowing the rhythms of your body, or the way other rhythms affect you/your body is a great way to start tuning into your inner guidance.
If you menstruate, tracking your cycle is a great place to start (and I include this in the Head & Heart Digital Planner and Journal). This isn’t for fertitly purposes, but to understand yourself better in each phase of your cycle. THere are naturally times when you’ll be more intuitive than others.
If you're not currently menstruating, try charting the lunar cycle. The patterns are very similar, and often sync up. Again, I have a lunar cycle tracker in the Head & Heart Digital Planner and Journal.
In any cycle, there are times that are more outward, productive and giving while in other times we are more inward, reflective and receiving. This is a great place to know when to receive your intuition and when might be the right time to act on it.
There are other cycles, too, of course that we can work with. The seasons, a life phase, and even the Guidance Cycle, which is a process we will be guided along by our intuition and Spiritual Support Team and which I teach in The Little Sage Intuitive Living.
Build your intuition by recording yourself
Usually I mention the benefits in journaling to build your intuition, but this time I mean to record yourself speaking, perhaps on a voice memo app or similar.
Rather than reading a script, or even thinking about what you want to say, try just speaking through everything that’s on your mind and heart.
For example, let's say that I was processing a decision I needed to make. I could sit with my voice memo app and just talk about the choices, how I'm feeling about the choices, how I'm thinking about the choices.
I must admit I don’t like hearing my own voice on recordings (yes, I do host a podcast!), so if you can resist the cringe, I then suggest you listen to what you just recorded.
In doing so, you’ll likely hear yourself in a different way and begin to identify things you weren’t aware of prior.
If this really is beyond your comfort zone, first ask yourself why and process it. But if you still aren't willing or able to record yourself and listen back, consider asking a trusted friend or a skilled practitioner to reflect back to you what you are actually saying.
The language we use provides many clues about what's happening underneath the surface. If we can actually capture that language, we can capture information we weren’t privy to before—that has been there all along, trying to get our attention.
There is opportunity for, when we listen to ourself, for us to hear these little nuggets of wisdom that come out.
Imagine catching yourself saying something like, “Oh, this deadline is such a pain in the neck.”
There is symbolism in that statement: the pain in our neck. Then we can interpret it (check out this article on interpreting messages).
We may also find ourselves using language like, “I feel”, “I think” “I've realised”, “I believe” etc. This language may show us where we have underlying beliefs to work through. . And so naturally we start to say, Oh my gosh, I've got these beliefs for me to work through.
Build your intuition by pausing before you respond
How often do you accept an invitation or sign up to participate in something only to regret it a minute or two later? This can happen for a few reasons, of course, but one is that we haven’t given our hearts enough time to be heard before our head jumps in to answer.
This tip is about giving yourself a brief moment before responding to connect with what's bubbling underneath the surface.
When in a discussion with someone, face-to-face, it may feel a little harder to pause before you respond than say when you’re replying to a text or email. But you can practise saying something like “May I come back to you on that?” or “Let me have a minute before I come back to you.”
Simply by creating enough of a pause, or time and space, to figure out what is a yes in our body and what is a no in our body, we can be better placed to act in a way that is in alignment with our true self.
Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of time. So this is where starting small and keeping a regular guidance practice helps. It builds up your intuitive muscle so it’s easier to stretch when required in moments such as these.
Creating a pause, even if a small one, allows our Four Bodies (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) time to respond, before our mind —with its fears, beliefs and expectations— does.
What is the best way for you to build your intuition?
Which of these five less common tips stand out to you? Or perhaps which do you have the most resistance to? Your intuition will lead you to the best place to start, if you listen.
