Head vs Heart: 5 Ways to Connect With Your Intuition and Trust Your Gut

If you learn to listen to your gut, your life will get easier. Here are 5 easy steps you can take to heighten your intuition.

Intuition is a skill, and skills can be taught. We are all born with this quality and we can all strengthen the ability to feel and follow our gut feelings.

Here are five simple steps to heighten your awareness of what you’re feeling deep inside.

One — Be Open-Minded

Sometimes we shut our intuition down because we’re not open to feeling the emotions around it. Once we become open to feeling, we develop a level of self-awareness.

Intuition is a form of self-awareness, where we can recognise deep-seated feelings.

The more open-minded to gut feelings we become, the closer we get to living an intuitive life.

We start to embrace our intuition, paying attention to what matters. Gradually it becomes easier to make decisions based on our gut, instead of logic. We stop focussing on what seems like the ‘sensible’ thing to do and follow our heart.

One way to start sensing what’s going on inside your heart is to journal. Let yourself free-write for as long as you can, for as long as the words flow. It doesn’t matter what you journal about. You will find that you start ‘discussing’ on the page the things that are highest in your mind.

I’ve discovered my feelings about life decisions by letting myself free write.

It doesn’t matter if what you write doesn’t make sense to you in the here and now. Your heart and mind are putting things out there. You may remember them later, or perhaps they’ll sit a little closer to your conscious than before. It may also be that you need to clear out those thoughts. This is like emptying the garbage before you can start to dig into your subconscious.

Be open-minded about everything you write. Allow yourself to become self-aware, and develop a relationship with your subconscious.

Two — Ask Questions

How quickly do we ask others about whether we should do something, or not?

How speedy are we to share sordid details of a date, and ask friends if they think we should see that person again?

We like to ask questions — of others. What if we started asking these questions of ourselves?

We are fast to judge others as having better answers to our life dilemmas, than us. That’s not true: we owe it to our heart and soul to listen to them above anyone else.

Instead of asking what someone else would do, I ask myself what feelings are coming up for me. It felt uncomfortable at first, but the more I did it, the more I trusted myself.

The way to master this ability is to regularly check in with yourself. Ask yourself out loud about what you’re feeling. This will help you to remember that you take priority and that your thoughts and emotions matter.

At first, it may feel so uncomfortable that when you ask a question of yourself, you stop listening. That’s normal — we are all somewhat afraid of our deepest thoughts when we have spent so long pushing them down.

Remember that it is safe to listen to your deepest thoughts, and no one is making you act on your gut feelings. The first step is seeking them and acknowledging them.

Three — Find Quiet Time

We cannot hear anything when the world is full of chaos and crazy. It’s impossible to expect to be able to follow our hearts if we don’t find time to be quiet and simply listen.

We’re always being pulled in one direction or the other when sometimes we need to sit with ourselves and listen. It’s easy to stop listening to our gut feelings with so much going on around us.

I regularly take time out to sit quietly and listen. I reassure my subconscious that I hear her, just as I would to a friend. Why do we find it so easy to be a listener to our friends, and yet not to our own heart?

Taking a few minutes a day to listen will change the relationship you have with yourself.

Four — Listen to ‘Off’ Feelings

How often do you get an uncomfortable feeling about doing something, or about a person you’re meeting? The goosebumps? The chill down your spine? The butterfly in your stomach?

The heart is so keen that we listen to it that it produces physical sensations within the body. Even if we don’t follow its ‘advice,’ we should at least acknowledge it and question why it’s coming up for us.

If we always dismiss these feelings, we will miss some incredibly powerful messages.

I’ve learned this the hard way. I spent my life crushing these internal alerts. I fell for the wrong people, made poor decisions, and got myself into messy situations. If only I’d listened to those feelings that something was ‘off,’ I’d have far fewer regrets!

Five — Be Aware of Influencers

Who — or what — are the influencers in your life?

Social media is one of the biggest influences in my life. I scroll, despite knowing that it is unhealthy for mental wellbeing! I’m trying hard to get better at avoiding the constant scrolling.

The problem with any external influences is that they have the power to do two things:

• Stop us from being able to hear our gut speaking to us; and
• Cause us to make the wrong decisions because we place more trust in their opinions than our own.

If we look at what we are listening to, instead of listening to our gut, we will find a lot of noise that we don’t need. Awareness is key here, and we don’t necessarily need to take sudden action. We can consciously make more room for positive influences, including our own thoughts.

In conclusion, understandably, we fear going deep inside ourselves. We never know quite what we’re going to discover.

If we learn to listen more, we’d have more of an idea of what we might find and thus be less scared of it. I would have far more of an idea of what my intuition might say if I was connecting with it regularly.

Something else I’ve found is that there are occasions when we get the literal ‘gut punch’ to alert us to something. For me, I felt bowled over by gut feeling when I met my husband the first time, for example. However, the subconscious does not always work that hard. Sometimes it needs us to go deep, listen, and extrapolate all the strands of its message.

By working with our gut, our heart, our subconscious, or whatever you see it as, we become aware of what’s right for us.

Power is in hearing both sides: the logic AND the heart-driven desire.

Originally published at https://wildeaboutwellbeing.com on July 16, 2020.