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Learn how to tune into yourself.
By Lynne Meredith Golodner — Written on Sep 05, 2021
Don't trust her.
The little voice inside me was loud and clear. It was a woman I'd known for a while and she seemed nice enough, but something deep down nagged at me to pay attention and not trust her completely.
I tried to listen, but the optimist in me wanted to believe she was exactly as she appeared. The benefit of the doubt and all that jazz. In the end, when she betrayed me in a most unseemly way, I knew my intuition had been right, and it was idiotic of me not to listen.
We already have the most powerful tools we need to assess situations and make good decisions. It's called intuition and the more you pay attention to it, the louder and stronger it will get.
When I was a new mother, I'd awaken in the early morning when the house was still and just know that my baby was about to wake and need me. I'd wait, laying on the soft sheets, my head against the pillow, until one, two, three minutes later, the baby cry came from an adjacent room and I'd spring from the bed to go to my little one.
It was weird, but not unfamiliar because intuition has been a big part of my life. We just know things, but often don't trust ourselves enough to pay attention. I've known before a client decides to part ways. I've known when a friend was in need of support. I've gotten so good at listening to my intuition that if I think something, it almost always happens.
In the first year of my first marriage, I got sick with strep throat three times. At 29 years old, I went to the doctor, but rather than load myself with antibiotics, I pulled a book on intuitive medicine off my shelf and thumbed through the pages to find illnesses of the throat.
Lacking a voice. Feeling silenced.
Yep, that was it alright. I got into therapy instead and started working on the issues that I believed led to my physical illness.
When my eldest child was a toddler, he fell ill from ear infections quite frequently. While other parents engaged in tubes and surgeries, my gut told me he was falling sick from the frequent fighting he heard between myself and his father.
While this is all great to hear, I'm sure you're wondering how you can get in on the game. Lots of people say that if you meditate, you'll strengthen your intuition, but I prefer to look at it this way: get quiet. Make sure you build some time into your daily schedule to ponder, to listen, to not do anything. That way, you'll tune in to your inner voice, which is your intuition, and learn to listen to what it has to say.
Here are eight other ways you'll want to tune in so you can develop your intuition:
1. Pay attention to yourself and your feelings.
Intuition is an exercise we perfect with time and effort, which means that tuning into your feelings and noticing details about yourself helps make your intuition laser-sharp. Just like I knew something was off with the woman I mentioned earlier, I would have realized it sooner had I paid attention to the way my stomach knotted up and my chest felt tight.
2. Don't dismiss your inner voice.
When you have a nagging thought that something isn't right, or telling you to go in a different direction, listen. I once took on a client I knew I shouldn't. He was a money-monger who didn't care about his clients — he just wanted to make money off them. While I work in public relations, I'm highly ethical in the clients I will promote. Simply put, I have to believe in them and their vision in order to successfully promote them.
This guy came to me because we'd known each other in childhood, but I remembered after our first meeting that he was the bully in the crowd who threw wood chips at my oldest and dearest childhood friend when we were at summer camp together in the 1970s. This guy later shunned his own mother when his parents divorced, and his mother had always been kind to me.
I didn't listen to the inner voice and took him on to pad the coffers of my growing business, but you can imagine it didn't take long for me to crash and burn on his account. We didn't get him much media attention, because I didn't listen to my intuition.
3. Be creative.
I spend many weekday hours on my butt at my computer screen. While it's a necessity in today's intellectual-corporate world, such a stationary stance does not feed my soul. Nor does it feed intuition. Carving out time to be creative — whether your pleasure is painting, writing in a journal, or spinning clay on a potter's wheel — is essential to developing intuition.
It should be weekly, or even more frequent, to get in the habit of nurturing your creative juices. The intuitive pulse will start to flow.
4. Become observant.
Notice things. Pay attention. Not only to yourself, but to the world around you, people in your life, and the senses. Notice the connection between you and everything in your path.
Recently, I took my youngest son to the zoo. We went to see the new penguin exhibit, but also because we hadn't been in a few years. Once there, I remembered why. While I loved seeing the sleek pelts of the beautiful big bears and the lovely patterns of the giraffes, I was incredibly bothered by the enclosures that the animals are relegated to when they live in zoos.
I know that many zoos are in the business of animal conservation and protection, and even repopulation for some threatened species, but the idea of us humans standing and gawking at these lonely animals as they lay around all day with nothing intuitive to their nature to do hurts. I loved all the details and the possibility of knowing these animals close up, but my heart hurt from their caged existence. It's important to notice.
5. Notice your body.
And while we're at it, pay attention to where in your body you react to things. For me, it's often a knot in my stomach or a tightness in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. To develop your intuition, it's imperative to connect your intellectual awareness to your physical existence.
Often, we feel it in our bodies before we know or understand how we feel about something. Tune in to your sensory experiences to better understand your own awareness.
6. Choose your relationships wisely.
The people we surround ourselves with can hinder or help our intuitive growth. People who are cynical, negative, gossipy, or otherwise nasty thwart any meaningful development of our souls. Choose friends wisely, and even when you're related to someone, it doesn't mean they need to play an important role in your life if their character is questionable.
Surround yourself with truly good people who put their soul existence first, and make time for these relationships in your regular schedule. So many of us get caught up in tasks, to-dos, carpooling kids, and paying bills. Life is not about checking things off an unending list; it's about meaningful experiences and interactions, and the right people play an important role in this.
7. Spend time in nature, and often.
It's amazing how much I want to write and how happy I am when in nature. I try to make time throughout my week for a walk in the woods or a hike along nearby hills. It's restorative for my soul, and frankly, it gets my creative juices flowing. What's more, I often find myself talk-texting into my notes app on my phone as I stroll along the dirt paths, noticing the beauty, the meaning, and the vibrance of the world whenever I am in nature.
My best ideas come to me then, and I've developed great client campaigns, new programs, workshops, and intentions for my family when in nature. And by the way, spending time in nature is great with friends and family, but it's even better alone. Spending time alone is imperative for developing intuition, for it's your voice and your voice alone that needs time to speak if you want to access intuition.
8. Do what you love as much as possible.
It's cliché by now, but we keep saying it because we don't do it nearly enough. When you are in sync with your purpose, your intuition sings. As much as possible, do what you love. For me, it's nature, yes, and physical activity (rowing on the Detroit River, swimming in the dawn in my neighborhood each summer), but it's also finding my unique purpose in the world.
Life is short. We have to make the most of it. And when we are tuned in, we will. I discovered my purpose earlier this year: to share the message, loud and clear, that we are all the same. To build harmony and peace between communities and people by showing the ways in which we live similarly.
Once I discovered this, everything else came into alignment. And now, I have a moral compass that guides me toward making decisions that align with my intuition. Know your purpose, then live it, by doing what you love.
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Lynne Meredith Golodner is a public relations pro, entrepreneur, and author of eight books, including 'The Flavors of Faith: Holy Breads' and 'In The Shadow Of the Tree: A Therapeutic Writing Guide For Children With Cancer'. Follow her on Twitter.