Intuition is the feeling of relative certainty without proof or evidence.
Does this mean that it’s another way of saying that you’re jumping to conclusions?
Maybe, but “jumping to conclusions” connotes more of a knee-jerk response. Intuition, on the other hand, describes an inspired judgement.
If you’ve ever recovered information from a dream you’ve not had any other way of knowing, you’ve had an intuitive experience.
If you’ve ever felt a warning or got a sense from someone else where they made your skin crawl or thought you were in danger, you’ve had an intuitive experience.
If you’ve sensed something about someone you’ve had no other way of knowing, you’ve had an intuitive experience.
Even better is to figure out how you know what you’ve found out.
While intuition is good, knowing is better. That means being able to correctly label what it you know and what it is that you’re guessing about.
Yet intuition is a big deal. The U.S. Army recognizes intuition can save lives.
Studies of people in various occupations note how it can help them do their jobs better.
You can become more intuitive by practicing. That’s the short answer.
Reading this article is the shortcut to learning what it can and cannot do, yet it’s a long answer.
Jumping to conclusions is not good. You’ve got to be careful about that. You’ve got to keep in mind the information’s epistemology. You’ve got to realize that you’ve got biases and think in bets.
You’ve also got to remember that just because you feel certain about something without proof doesn’t mean that you’re right—although you could be. Intuition can present many problems.
Intuition’s bad name
Intuition gets a bad name when it’s misapplied.
You can try using it to guess the winning lottery numbers.
You can try, but you probably won’t be successful. Intuition doesn’t work that way. If it did, it would be impossible to have gambling in any form. It’s not. Gambling is a big business that’s getting bigger every year.
That’s not a graph suggesting psychics and intuitives will bring down the lottery business for states any time soon.
A variety of emotions, feelings, and hunches are in the domain of intuition. This can be positive and negative emotions. It doesn’t produce exact numbers precisely enough. People need to stop trying to make it do so.
What follows are three ways to build your intuitive ability. You’ll learn to use it the right way, what it can and cannot do, and in the process, become a stronger intuitive.
1. Practice
The first step is to try using your intuition. Like so many other things, you’re bound to improve with regular practice.
Practice means setting up a feedback loop of some sort. Were you right? Were you wrong? You need to find out, not just make guesses.
Learn from experience.
An easy way to do this is to sense first and then look for physical confirmation of what you felt.
The second step is to pray or imagine yourself surrounded by a protective white light. You can also ask your guardian angel for protection.
Whether you are surrounding yourself with white light doesn’t matter. It’s a safety-first attitude, meaning you’re going to do this activity safely. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you. String theory proposes we live in a multiverse. Religious faith and science intersect in a lot of ways when you consider broad truths and not specifics. The specifics can’t be verified with experiments.
Yet that’s a discussion for another time and place. The point here is when it comes to any activity, one of the first things to do when you’re training is to ensure you’re going to have a safe experience.
Your plan should be to practice a total of 15 minutes a day for at least a week. Depending on your circumstances, it can be hard to time your practice. You’re better off when you divide your time rather than doing it all at once. Alternatively, you can set a practice goal by the number of encounters you have with others.
The goal should be to try sensing information on one to five new people every day. Try when you’re turned away from them. They might become alarmed if they see you looking at them in a way they perceive as strange. Try to intuit what kind of feeling you get from them. How can you describe it? Try.
After you pass the first week, keep your intuitive skills sharp by practicing at least once a week afterward.
Another way to practice is to sit with your eyes closed in a place with a moderate amount of activity. Don’t do this in an area with a lot of people passing through, however. All of the different energy will be confusing. It’s best to do it in a place where the people you’re trying to sense information from will be there for a bit. Good places to do this are doctor’s offices, standing in line at the post office or the bank.
If you’re in a position to evaluate many people from different backgrounds, all the better.
Try to sense what kinds of feelings and emotions are in the background. Can you describe them? Try to discern what other factors may be playing into your feelings about the area you’re in. Do you notice any smells or any tone in the voices? If you do, those other triggers can help you match those feelings you’re sensing with your physical senses.
It’s essential not to look directly at the people you’re sensing information from. If you do, don’t look in detail at them until after you’re finished sensing.
And, as always, keep dream journaling, keep meditating. These activities feed in on each other and build third-eye eyesight, intuition, sixth sense, or whatever else you want to call it.
2. Check on the veracity of your intuition
Try to verify the information you’ve sensed.
This is so important to this skill it deserves to be mentioned twice.
Many times you’re not going to be able to do this.
Sometimes, if you’ve got an intense danger feeling from someone, you don’t want to verify this. It’s good enough to sense this. You don’t want to put yourself in any danger testing something.
Say you sense someone is sad. Try to see if this is true by talking to them. Validate and verify as much of the information you can.
You can do that same thing if you sense they’re happy.
Other emotions that are relatively easy to sense are anger, impatience, wistfulness, envy, and lust.
The most critical aspect of building an accurate sixth sense is objectivity. You won’t get a feeling of danger all the time, even when interacting with someone who’s a verified murderer or has become a verified murderer. The reason is an awful lot of people have huge problems controlling their impulses. Everyone does to some degree, but it’s so bad they end up killing someone in some cases.
This isn’t an argument that they need to be excused from serving their time in prison. Absolutely not. They’re a proven danger to others.
3. Try projecting a different emotion from the one you feel
When you’re tempted to feel one way about something, decide you’re going to project another feeling. The goal here is to increase your emotional mastery.
If you’re in public, you don’t want to send an odd vibe, however. For example, you don’t want to be in a situation that would typically make someone feel angry and then project that you find humorous. People would sense there is something off about you.
Instead, try to project a tangential emotion. You could try, for example, projecting you feel sadness. Try not to go overboard with your body language.
Then try to understand how others perceive your feelings.
This is work on emotional intelligence. With this exercise, you’re controlling and shaping emotions and understanding how others go about perceiving you. You’re controlling emotion from an objective part of your mind.
It’s helpful in any situation where you’ve got to sell others on your ideas, a product, or to make a connection.
An actor’s job is empathy, actress and filmmaker Natalie Portman said. If you’re in a field where you’ve got to be objective and fact-based and don’t do much acting, this skill may be underdeveloped.
Why try to develop an accurate intuition?
It can save your life, get you in some interesting conversations, and help your career. It’s a handy ability.
The best reason, however, is regular practice helps you not to misuse it. You’re not going to foresee the next card in the card game. That’s out of your hands.
It was even out of the hands of Nostradamus. With the way the interpretation has bent through the centuries, they can mean anything.
You can do divination like that. Anyone can. You don’t need to read this article.
You want your intuition to be as accurate as your other senses. If you’re driving and you see an object on the road, you avoid the object. If you’re in a room and someone says something to you, you understand what they say perfectly. If you sense the sadness in someone you love, you want to find out what’s the matter.
However, one of the most important reasons is it helps you understand what comes from within you and what comes from outside of you. If you’re trying to reach out of yourself and develop this better sense of intuitive perception, that’s you. On the other hand, if it’s a message coming from an unseen spirit of some kind, that’s coming outside of you.
As always, be objective and keep being skeptical. It helps you act reliably.
You’re never going to be able to pin down exactly where the source is with 100 percent certainty. It could even be your subconscious. If you’re dedicated to the truth and facing up to what may or may not be in the world, it’s interesting.
A good guide is to ask yourself whether there is any way you can know what you’re perceiving. For example, are you having a dream referencing things you didn’t know? Could it be a repressed memory? Could it be something you did know but have forgotten? By figuring out what comes from within and what might come from without, you can get closer to perceiving the world a little more accurately with your sixth sense, your intuition, or whatever you want to call it.
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James Cobb RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. His goal is to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.
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