How to get in touch with your intuition?

One way that helped me was to get in touch with my body and its signals. It sounds counterintuitive, but your body will let you know when something is off. A history of trauma trains your brain to shut down and ignore your body's signals. This is so we can survive the trauma while it is happening, but it doesn't serve us well day to day.

So, I would set an alarm 2x per day, pause and ask myself: "How am I feeling? Am I hungry, do I need to go to the bathroom, do I have pain anywhere in my body? Am I warm or cold? And what should I do to fix it." Every single time for a while I'd realize I was sitting in a really uncomfortable position, or I'd have to go to the bathroom and was ignoring it, or I was hungry or thirsty. It was crazy how much I had been ignoring my own body's signals!

Once you're in tune with your body, and you begin honoring yourself by responding to your body's signals, it's only a short leap to begin noticing your gut reactions to circumstances in your life. You can then progress to stop and ask yourself: "How am I feeling? Am I lonely, tired, anxious? Or am I happy, hopeful or something else? What should I do about it?"

I hope this helps. It really helped me.

I can highly recommend Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy with a female psychologists. I have done a lot of therapy and this type is absolutely the most life changing. Intuition is trusting how you feel. To trust how you feel you need to know what you feel. Are you angry or sad? Is it anxiety or genuine fear?

Ooo this is a juicy one. Ok first of all congrats on this, it’s a really big step towards a happier and more boundary-led life. I think the best way to get in touch with your feelings is by recognizing your “realness”. To get into detail, I personally realized that the reason why I always second guessed myself is because I always saw myself and my thoughts as second place, not important, not serious, and not as “real” as the input of others. In so many words, I gave everyone else final say and gave myself nothing. Once I became conscious of the fact that I’m “just as real as everyone else” (yes, I literally repeat that in my head sometimes as a reminder), I realized that I didn’t need to back down or minimize what I felt. If someone says something I disagree with, I say something back. Someone says I can’t? I say I can and don’t take no for an answer, because I respect my thoughts. If someone says something I don’t like, I make up my face or stare blankly. When my gut says something, I listen, even if it makes me a “bitch” or feels uncomfortable in the moment. The key to trusting your gut is to realize that your feelings and words and self are just as valid as everyone else. You have to practice this, everyday, even in the little things, and over time, it will become automatic. For me trusting your gut is just another way of saying “putting yourself first”. Put yourself first, put your needs first, put your opinions first, and never feel guilty about it. If you’re just as real as anyone else and their opinions, why would you? The more you practice this, the more natural feelings deserving of the best things (even the right to your own emotions) will be.

Have you read The Gift of Fear? It has some great examples of people using their intuition. I'll post one of stories down below.

Over past few years i have been doing alternatives to traditional therapy, which i personally never got much out of. Intention setting, EFT tapping, somatic inquiry, kundalini yoga and breath work and meditation. Being present is a big key to overcoming anxiety and learning to listen to your body. Your body gives you the answer before your brain. I have become much more in touch with my intuition and inner knowing since i began cultivating these things.

If you’re interested in tapping, there is an app that can guide you through sessions. I would suggest working on being present and calming the mind to clear out the anxiety to start!

I’ve heard that intuition (gut instinct) is information your brain is picking up on before your frontal cortex can process it. I think one way to fine tune your sense of intuition is learning how to trust yourself. You will always second guess your intuition when you have no faith in your thoughts and emotion. If you’ve spent a good chunk of your life living in self doubt, it isn’t going to be easy to learn to trust yourself and in your abilities. Kicking losers out of your life is a good place to start. Reading very good books, listening to people who have wisdom and kindness within them, and therapy when possible too. Knocking off goals you’ve put off can help too. It feels good and restores faith in yourself when you achieve difficult things in your life, on your own. Support and help is fine, but I mean when you set out and commit to going for your goals and you give it your all.

My experience: Listening to the FDS podcasts and reading the posts have been more helpful to my intuition building than any therapy I've ever done. My social anxiety was actually my intuition telling me something that I didn't have the words for. FDS gave me the words.

Our culture, and sometimes our families (mine did), socializes girls/women to ignore our intuition, to ignore our needs, to ignore our worth. We end up feeling terrible and anxious and depressed because of it.

If you really want to get in tune with yourself, start unpacking the root causes of your anxieties without pathologising yourself. There is always an underlying reason to why people feel anxious or depressed without medicalising it. Don’t write it here as it is a deeply personal journey, but start mapping out where it all started, as well as when you notice it flare up. Journal this all for yourself. Once you start understanding the root causes (without criticism or judgment) you can work on accepting it and learning to live with it. This helped me immensely in working through past traumas, and I still do it when I notice odd behaviours or reactions in myself. As a result of this, I am deeply in tune with my intuition because instead suppressing my feelings and thoughts, I seek to understand them.

If you have the tiniest sense that something is off, don’t ignore or suppress that feeling, lean into it. Four example, it’s really often that I experience the intuition tingling regarding others’ lack of care towards me. Even though I feel it often, it’s spot-on.

It sounds like it would be helpful to get a mental health check in to get that barometer back in order. Once you feel confident in your own boundaries and feel secure, its a lot easier to make those judgement calls. I used to struggle with a lot of anxiety as well. Good luck on your journey 😊