Successful people are often described as having an ability to constantly humble themselves so as to learn to look at things with fresh eyes, to test, evaluate and adapt, to develop new skills. They seemingly surrender what they know for the unknown.

The balance between ‘knowing what you have the power to change’ and ‘what you do not’ is also important, for acceptance of that which we truly ‘don’t have the ability to change’ is a path to seeking and finding what we truly ‘do have the ability to change’; that is, what we may take personal responsibility for. This is the path to empowerment, and intuition plays a major part here.

How Intuition Appears to Work in the Brain

The two halves of your grey matter, your cerebral cortex and the thick network of nerves connecting them, the corpus collusum, are suggested to represent higher thinking portions of your brain. This area of your brain is seen to account for such mental skills as logic and analysis, and for interpreting input from your five physical senses; vision, smell, hearing, touch and taste.

So how then does intuition work? Well, in the millisecond you enter a strange room or situation your brain integrates: (1) the input from all your higher thinking, (2) the input from all five senses, and (3) your entire lifetime of experience. Your whole brain immediately analyzes the situation, compares it to your lived experience and gives you a spontaneous gut level feeling about that environment. Either it’s safe and you feel relaxed and comfortable, or it’s somehow threatening, and you feel nervous or on edge. All of this occurs initially on a non-rational level, as an instant ah-ha feeling or ‘gestalt’.

Intuition

Intuition often leads to powerful creative, personal and relationship insights and breakthroughs.

For most of us, intuition is most active just before sleep or upon awakening from a nap; during a dream; while meditating or contemplating; while doing something we find very relaxing. All of these have something in common – the alpha-state brainwaves often associated with meditation and creative contemplation. So how might we develop our intuitive intelligence? Here are some methods I’ve found useful:

1. A Kung Fu Exercise: Shut your eyes and ask someone to approach you as quietly as possible. Say “stop” when you think they are within an arm’s length. You’ll be surprised how rapidly you’ll increase your skill and accuracy.

1. A Sensory Intuition Exercise: Intuition draws heavily on our sensory intelligence. Strengthen your senses-brain connection, and you’ll strengthen your intuition. Place several aromatic items on your desk. Look at and smell each one. Now close your eyes and by smelling each item, try to get a clear mental vision of what it looks like. Open your eyes to see how detailed your “mental vision” was. Continue this process until you can clearly “see” what the object looks like just from its scent.

2. A ‘Now’ Exercise: Remove yourself from any past or future concerns for a few minutes and let yourself simply experience what is directly in front of, and around – you. Don’t judge or comment, just notice.

3. Find a quiet, undisturbed place. Take a small leaf, freshly plucked from a tree or shrub and place it in the palm of your right hand.  Then, with your eyes open and gaze gently resting on the leaf, visualise, that is become, the leaf.

  Allow whatever thoughts or impressions arise in your mind to come, but  keep your awareness on the leaf.

• With another person;

Have them sit with you and close their eyes and ask them to think of something.

This may be a thought, an object or doing the something and have them hold it in their mind. Ask them to concentrate or think on the one thing alone.

Now with your own eyes closed, open your mind to whatever impressions come. Later during the day, sit with them again and ask them to think of the same thing as before.  Sit opening yourself again to whatever will come. After this second time, write down your impressions and start a conversation exploring your thoughts and feelings to see if they match.

5. Scanning: Two people stand about 1 metre apart from each other but facing. Each person then closes their eyes, takes a moment to breathe, relax and ground, then visualises the other as a ball of light or pure energy. Each looks with their inner eyes into the ball of light and scans the person opposite top to bottom, bottom to top, noticing any words, images, colours, thoughts, sensations in their own body, anything at all that comes up while they’re scanning. After a few moments, when they each come back, they tell each other what they saw, felt, whatever, and describe how what the other experienced might fit in their lives at this time.

The most powerful way to build further connections with your intuitive intelligence is to begin to act on your intuition. Get it? Simply allowing yourself to act on your intuition will gradually build your intuitive intelligence. Building your self awareness in this way will not only increase your intuitive intelligence, it will increase your probability of success and achievement in your personal, business or professional life.

Do any of these apply to you?

• The telephone rings and you know who it is.
• You know what someone is about to say to you before they say the words.
• You get a hunch or knowing about something and it turns out to be correct.
• You get a sudden urge to go somewhere or do something, and when you do that thing, and it turns out to be the right thing that you should have done. And you are pleased.
• You get a sudden urge to go somewhere or do something, and you ignore it or don’t do it, and it turns out that you should have. And you regret it.
• You can understand someone’s true inner feelings even though on the outside they are hiding them.
• You have a feeling that there is a presence or that someone or something behind the scene is helping you.
• When something happens in your life, either good or not so good, and you suddenly understand a higher purpose behind it.
• You sometimes hear a soft inner voice tipping you off about things happening in your life or in the life of someone else.

However, the point of developing intuition is to use it! Otherwise you are developing a muscle that will atrophy, maybe a stronger way for you to recognise your intuition skill level is to recall the times you heard your inner voice and then ignored it…recall how you felt when ignoring this voice, how you felt afterwards

Or

Recall what happens when you do listen…

© neil benbow