My first day in a new city, I was groggy, maybe a little jet-lagged. The strong equatorial sun shone a little too early through the beige hotel curtains. I moved them away to look outside and wasn’t sure what to make of the metal bars over the window and broken glass bottles crowning the top of the cinder-block fence surrounding the hotel.
I gathered downstairs with the other exchange students I was meeting for the first time. After breakfast, our small group ventured out into the narrow stone streets, picking our way through the old city, surely looking out of place. None of us had been there before, although many had traveled abroad.
After several hours agog with the new sights, sounds, and smells, we looked around and it dawned on us that we had no idea where we were or how to get back to our hotel. What was the name of it again?
Years before smartphones, we were on our own.
There was discussion. Personalities emerged. I simply took a minute, squinted and zoned out a little. Then I turned and pointed, “We should go this way.”
“Why?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” I offered simply. “But I think we should.”
Lacking any better ideas, the group followed, winding our way back through the city until miraculously facing the hotel entrance. Tired, hot, and hungry, the group entered without comment. I’ll admit I was surprised we made it so seamlessly.
I didn’t think much of it myself until years later, when I saw a pattern: the cat-like GPS that I took for granted didn’t seem all that common.
I noticed when people regularly pointed in random directions when referencing locations nearby: “The coffee shop down the road…” while pointing askew. Or when others wound up inconsolably lost while traveling a slightly different route in their home city without Siri.
Now, I’ve been properly lost before. But the idea of, you know…just kinda settling in a bit and then knowing which way to go is a little odd, it turns out. You could chalk this up to brain differences, a heightened spatial awareness, an unconscious noting of the sun’s angle or other visual cues, or perhaps slightly more active place and grid cells in the brain. I have no idea.
To me, it feels like intuition feels: it’s a clear signal or knowing. There is no good reason that justifies the message – it’s just there.
The magic of intuition isn’t exclusive.
People often refer to intuition as an almost magical knowing. It seems elusive and reserved for the clairvoyant – something that other people have, but probably not me.
But everyone has intuition. We often just forgot how to sense it. Or we blow it off. It doesn’t make sense, after all. Why listen?
Perhaps it’s easier to recognize our intuition when we think about the times when we didn’t listen to it, but later realized we should have.
To take an extreme example, it didn’t make sense to have a sudden, peaceful urge to jump out of a moving cab in the middle of Managua, Nicaragua, one evening. But if I hadn’t overridden that impulse (which I did), I wouldn’t have been there as two men later hopped in, looking for valuables, and held a knife to my throat as we drove through the city.
Although, the feeling of gratitude for being alive afterwards almost made the experience worth it.
Being fully aware of your aliveness is truly magical.
It didn’t make sense for me to feel a pull to throw out a delicious salad I had just bought at a cafe right before I took a bite. But if I had listened and gotten rid of it instead of telling myself not to be weird in front of the cafe owner, I wouldn’t have spent the next day intermittently holding a garbage can to my face while sitting on the toilet and downing gallons of electrolyte drinks. (Although, it really was a delicious salad and my digestive system did feel oddly reset afterward.)
Jumping out of cabs and throwing fresh, tasty food out doesn’t make any sense.
Except, it does. And there was no way to explain why at the time.
This is intuition.
In yogic traditions, the third eye energy center (ajna chakra) is the center of intuition and the portal to the subconscious and superconscious minds. Some say that you can’t truly access it until the lower chakras are balanced – but that creates an unnecessary barrier laced with judgment. Only once your 1st through 5th chakras are perfectly aligned…. That hasn’t been my experience.
You – everyone – can experience intuition, even while being imperfectly human.
It helps to experience your subconscious, so you get used to identifying and sensing when and how your intuition communicates, because everyone is different. Yours could be a gut feeling, a vision, a voice, or any other sensation.
It also helps to actually listen and act on what your intuition tells you, even for little things. Should I drink this tea or that one? Should I take route A or B? Constant dismissal doesn’t encourage the process. Trust and allow yourself to stop demanding reasons when there are none.
Tuning Inwards
“Intuition” isn’t permission to blow up your life. This is encouragement to listen to the calm, clear and subtle voice of knowing – not the urgent, panicked voice of fear or unhelpful emotional patterns.
Especially in new places, with new people, there can be many messages inside that come more from your past experiences stored in your subconscious than from your intuition. Often these messages feel anxious or fearful.
Messages from a deeper knowing have a calmness and open-hearted feel. Always.
Try slowing down to hear to that confident, if quiet, voice inside you gently guiding you through your experiences, knowing that it may not be a voice at all. Your intuition may communicate through nudges, flutters, sights, dreams, or other ways. Just start to notice what comes up when you slow down and tune in.
If you’re at an impasse and curious about developing your intuition, try guided meditation or hypnotherapy to kick start the process. The more you tune inwards, the more you notice these subtle intuitive hits.
This meditation is a 5-minute dedication to just that: connecting with your third eye, the energetic center of your intuition.
Do you have any examples of when you had an intuitive hit? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Image credits all on Unspash, in order: Andres Medina, Zeki Benici, Natalie Sierra, Jonathan Borba, and Eniko Kis. Thank you.
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