How to Distinguish Your Impulses From Your Intuition
By Kathleen Daniel

Ever wonder if that “intuitive flash” you just experienced was in fact the most brilliant insight you’ve ever had, or perhaps the most foolish? You’re not alone, of course. Learning to distinguish intuition from wishful thinking, or impulse can be challenging. But it is a skill that can be learned. According to Christina Baldwin in Life’s Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, the problem is that intuition lives on a party line, with lots of voices and impulses and desires crowding around it. Often we throw out the intuition with the rest of the clutter.

Here are five criteria to help distinguish the wheat from the chaff:

1. Intuition is quiet and calm. It’s never pushy grandiose, obsessive, or manipulative. It does not advise us on what other people ought to do, but on what we ought to do.

2. Intuition is supportive and directive, never judgmental, critical, shaming, or blaming. It sees the world as cause and effect. A voice that loads its sentences with appeals to the ego, to the personality, or to stature in the world is not coming from intuition.

3. Intuition is a complete thought, a statement. Intuition does not lecture, explain, elaborate. The direction is always simple. It is we who throw up the arguments, discussion, reasons why we can’t do what’s been suggested.

4. Intuition comes to you and through you, without your feeling as though you are generating it. You may experience it as a relationship with an “other.”

5. Intuition always has our best interests at heart. Its messages may challenge and divert us from a path we had intended to follow, but they are never misleading. Intuition is a form of spiritual communication. If we believe the sacred is benevolent, intuition should also be regarded as benevolent. The challenge to the rational mind is to accept intuition and to use it as though you’ve been given a gift.

In order to become more intuitive, slow down, ask, wait, and look for a response that fits the above description. If you’re writing in a personal journal, look for intuitive phrases such as “I know it’s time to…,” or “I know I need to…” Take time for a visualization exercise in which you request a guide or messenger and notice how it comes. Then write about the image you’ve been given and develop a relationship with it in any way that works for you: describe it, dialog with it, you can even draw it. Practice listening, affirming, and trusting your inner voice.

Kathleen Daniel, MS, L.Ac. is a Conscious Living Coach who inspires people to live their best lives of balance, meaning and purpose. She writes about change, transition and personal leadership from the inside out, combining insights and experience from a life lived internationally, with a lifelong yoga practice and work as an acupuncturist, organizational consultant and educator. She is an alumni of Johns Hopkins Women’s Leadership program, and the creator of the Wellness for Women, Pausing at Midlife and other retreats for self-renewal.

Website: http://www.aheadofthecurveatmidlife.com

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Intuition