How to Recognize Intuitive Guidance
80© Copyright 2009 Patrice Walker All rights reserved
In an age of rapid technological advancement and information overload, we often forget that we have a source of unlimited guidance right under our noses. It goes by many names -- gut instinct, vibes, hunch, impression, insight, psychic intuition, sixth sense. I'm going to call it Intuition. It's an ability that each of us has.
Unfortunately, our scientific-oriented society tends to ignore anything that cannot be explained through one of the five senses. As a result, a huge amount of valuable data is lost, data that could help us in so many ways.
What Is Intuition?
So what exactly is intuition? It is "the act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition." (Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/intuition).
This is an excellent definition because it underscores my point that we often can't explain where the information comes from. One minute it's not there; the next minute it is. The famous example we've all heard is knowing who's on the other end of the line when the phone rings or thinking of that person and receiving a phone call from them.
How often do you follow intuitive guidance you receive?
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Where Does Intuition Come From?
But where does this information come from? We all know that our brains are composed of two hemispheres: the left hemisphere processes information that we receive from the world around us, through our five senses; the right hemisphere processes information that comes from the world inside us.
Yes, there is a world inside us, one that is infinitely vast and unlimited. It's the "other half" of who we are and desperately wants to have a relationship with us. But because we can't touch it or feel it or see it, it doesn't exist for us and we therefore ignore the guidance it sends us that would steer us in the right direction if we would only let it.
How to Recognize Intuition
One of the best books I've read on the subject of intuition is a book called, You Are Psychic, by Pete Sanders, Jr., an MIT-trained scientist who has done extensive work in the field. Don't be thrown off by his use of the term, psychic. We're basically talking about the same thing, that is, receiving information from sources other than our five senses. However, the physical senses do play a role in how intuitive or psychic material comes to us.
Sanders describes four ways to receive intuitive guidance. You can:
- See it, not with the physical eyes, but with your "inner" or mind's eye.
- Feel it, either as a bodily sensation or emotion.
- Know it, when a thought or idea "pops" into your mind.
- Hear it, again, not with your physical ears, but from within your mind or head.
He goes on to explain that we can get intuitive impressions through all four "psychic senses," but that one or two usually predominate. For example, my strongest intuitive impressions come through seeing and feeling.
Intuitive Guidance Received and Followed
A few days ago, I was preparing to go shopping and had to make several stops, one of which I was dreading. I had to go to the bank, and I don't like this bank's parking lot because it's small and hard to maneuver in.
As I picked up my keys to leave the house, an image of a tube of the sunscreen I use flashed before my mind's eye. It was a reminder that I needed to get some because I was running low. But, for the life of me I did not want to make what I thought would be an extra stop and was about to put off getting some for another day. Then I reminded myself that I am supposed to be listening to and following my intuitive guidance and decided to make that my first stop.
As I was driving down the street towards the store to buy sunscreen, I passed a branch of my bank that I never go to. I instantly realized that I could go to this bank branch with its spacious parking lot and not have to go to the other branch. I actually started giggling because this intuitive guidance had eliminated the most disagreeable leg of my trip.
It doesn't seem like
that big a deal, but I was delighted with myself for having followed the guidance I'd received and getting a positive benefit as a result. .
How to Strengthen Your Ability to Receive Intuitive Guidance
Follow these three, simple steps to improve your ability to receive intuitive guidance.
- Pay attention to how ideas and information come to you - whether through seeing, feeling, knowing or hearing.
- Then decide what your one or two predominant modes of receiving guidance are.
- Keep a journal of your experiences. Record the form the guidance took (i.e., image, thought, feeling, hearing); what the guidance was; whether or not your followed it; and the results.
The more attention you pay to the intuitive guidance you receive and the more you follow it, the stronger this ability will become.
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Hi PWalker, welcome to Hubpages! And did intuition tell you that you will have a wonderful surprise today? I'm delivering a beautiful news...congrats for being a Hubnugget Wannabe! Woohoo! Surprises are like rainbows on a sunny- cloudy day. The Hubnuggets Team are happy to make this announcement. Do vote and promote your hub. To read more about this exciting event, click here: http://hubpages.com/_143/hub/How-to-Highlight-New-
Fabulous hub. I voted for it in the HubNuggets contest. Very well done and congratulations!
I liked your hub because of the topic that few dare to talk about in a positive way.It was well organized too.Last year I had an experience that a nurse told me was tinnitus. Others blamed it on age.I heard bells tolling in the middle of the day[around 1:00 p.m. my lunchtime.Six weeks later my aunt died.I heard them again. this time a pastor died; and the bell tolled his age.thanks for a well-written hub. You have my vote!
Congratulations on your nomination.....how exciting and deserving! Great piece on intuitive guidance, what I call energy, all of the things we feel but cannot touch. The last tips were the best advising how to get in touch and that it can come from more than one source. Thumbs up..best of luck with the nomination!
What a delightful hub. It is well written, concise, and has some good ideas in it. I expecially like the suggestion of writing about tracking your intuitions in a journal. I am going to start that, as I have had some intuitive experiences and wondered about them. Welcome to HP, and congratulations on your hubnugget nomination. You will do well here.
Very nice Hub. It's got my vote for nugget this week. This is an important subject that I think needs to be talked about and discussed more. I also appreciate your lack of using the word 'psychic.' Following intuitive feelings is something that everyone can benefit from, and words like that carry a stigma that can frighten away many a reader.
I love it! Congratulations on opening people's eyes to the power of intuition.
Thanks for a great hub!
Congratulations on a job well done, and on your nomination! This is a great hub and a good start to HubPages.
I think I will join Doodlelyn and start my own journal and see where it takes me.
Thanks for a great hub and some very good ideas.
Yiippeeee! Congratulations for being one of the top 5 Hubnuggeteers. Check your email to read the latest newsletter. :)
I enjoyed reading this very much. It was not only well written, it was quite informative as well. I use my intuition a lot in life, so I already liked the subject matter before I started reading it. A particular friend and I are very intuitive toward each other and have been for 30 years. Not long ago, I called her (we had not talked in weeks at that time). Later, she thanked me for having called the day before because she particularly need a friend at that time. I asked, "Well, then, are you surprised I called?"
These are some wonderful tips to help us lead a more meaningful life. Congratulations on winning a top spot in the hubnugget wannabes.
well done I really have found in my life that if i had have used intuition first instead of my head i would have made fewer mistakes
Whether or not you call it psychic, intuition is a well known human capacity. The idea isn't to gather more data, overload with more information. It's a right-brained way of looking at the information you already have a lot of times.
I do think there's a sixth sense and that psychic recognition is handled intuitively. I think intuition itself can operate both on information from psychic awareness and on the whole subliminal level of pattern recognition -- of when all the unrelated little facts come together and the intuitive route that led past a branch with a more convenient parking lot became associated with the trip to buy more sunscreen by -- spatial awareness! You've driven around the area a lot.
Only the intuitive faculty cross-connects information from unrelated sources without a linear path of logic. Very often one can be derived afterward showing that if you'd sat there for hours or days sorting out everything you know about where things are in town, you'd plan a better route. These flashes of intuitive cognition are something creative people experience more often.
So one of the ways to strengthen the capacity for intuition is to take up creative activities like drawing, painting, playing music, writing -- everything that's self expression teaches observation of what you're going to depict. It also teaches observing without filtering through social patterns.
When I learned to draw portraits, the first thing I noticed was that beautiful actresses and handsome actors were really goofy looking! They had weird features, bad features, misproportions, facial flaws that in anyone else would be seen as making them ugly -- and the whole came out as gorgeous. Then I looked close at ugly people and began to discover that no one is ugly. That every human face has its own inherent beauty. There's sickness and weariness, there's aging and its lines that show character, but these are all ways of beauty.
So in learning to draw people realistically I learned to look at faces the way they are, not the way society says they are. This big nosed bulging-eyed scrawny woman that society labels "beautiful" is thin and strained, this fat woman with a sweet smile and gorgeous twinkling eyes is beautiful, the old woman with wrinkles carved by a lifetime of smiling and caring is beautiful. But go by social filters and only the skinny anxious "beauty" is seen as pretty. A face that is absolute classic perfection will tend to seem bland or insipid compared to the wild variations of features on someone with a strong personality.
Intuition isn't always accurate though.
Some things are not what intuition says they are. The observation of a writer or artist can turn some things inside out if they are unexamined assumptions -- like the idea that fat women aren't pretty or that women who look like children are more beautiful than ones that look grown-up. Ideas that have never been examined can affect perception.
So it's important to both think and feel, to have intuition and test it with deduction, and most of all to apply common sense to how you handle things in life. The wisest people I've known weren't always the high IQ ones.
This is an awesome hub, I never actually thought of intition in that sense until now. Keep it up! I hope to see more of this from an expert such as yourself.
Your hub immediately spoke to me in regards to my thoughts and frustrations on clinical reasoning skills in the medical world. (I am a non-physician provider.) One of the latest greatest crazes is “evidence based practice.” Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, but all things in moderation. I think (hope) one day (soon) our medical and health related specialties will look back and realized they carried things too far and actually inhibited and discouraged clinicians from using their experience and intuition.
Thank you, mcrayne. It sounds as if regulations are hanging up common sense and factors that if you took weeks to analyze them would prove to have been there -- but were at the time apparently unrelated symptoms. This happens a lot of time tn medicine.
I've had a lifetime of medical mistakes, some of them causing severe problems in my life and permanent damage. I have multiple disabilities and the symptoms of some of them would get misinterpreted, especially by general practitioners, for side effects of drugs I've never taken or conditions I don't have because those conditions are more common. What all of the situations had in common was that doctors didn't pay attention to the people who actually listened to what I said, or that no one in the medical situation listened to what I reported.
Some of my disabilities aren't even listed as such on the medical history form. Where's "one leg shorter than the other by 3cm" fall on that list? I'm not sure the doctors look at the history form anyway, because if they did they'd have noticed "allergies: penicillin" -- I would think that'd be a red flag. But every time I've been in a hospital for pneumonia I've had at least one, sometimes up to three or four MDs trying to inject me with penicillin. One of them literally threw up at how close he came to killing a patient.
I didn't know I was physically disabled till I was 45 because of all the misdiagnoses and runarounds from doctors and clinics whenever anything went wrong. I stumbled along through life with what seems in retrospect to be really obvious physical problems -- a lurching gait like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, posture of an Igor, falling over, shakes, twitches, glitches and a movement rate of about a quarter any other human my height. Yet no one noticed.
I think sometimes your intuition can lead you to see past what's labeled to what's real. I look at what didn't get noticed about me and it's pretty darn obvious once you know what to look for. I even reported some of these problems, describing them -- and it'd get blown off as something else. Usually something I don't have.
I know that perception is socially filtered to a great degree. It may even be intuitive sometimes when I got some of those misdiagnoses. I was in a homeless shelter for several years while trying to get Social Security Disability without accurate diagnoses of my disabilities. Because I was poor and sick, and smelled sick including sick with fear (from all the medical mistakes that had threatened my life) a lot of people assumed I must be an addict or alcoholic with the jitters. A lot of people assumed I must be lying about my alcohol intake too because a lot of alcoholics do lie and alcoholics wind up crashing their lives in lies.
Thing is, sometimes it's something weirder than that. I could only drink a few times a year because chronic fatigue took the fun out of it unless I was having a really good day and a good reason to celebrate. I need the high of the occasion and excitement to counter it or alcohol just knocks me out. But it's a weird pattern, "Only drink on new year's and special celebrations but enjoy it when I do." It's not normal. I don't even think that's common for non-alcoholics because most of them have the body energy to celebrate once or twice a month or drink occasionally on weekends, sort that out to when parties are held, etc.
Putting together those apparently unrelated facts -- movement rate 1/4 anyone my height, looks substantially thinner than the scale indicates (25-30 pounds of socliotic bone density affecting the scale), low yet existing alcohol intake, no preachiness about or against alcohol, that could have sent up a red flag to someone observant.
Yet for 45 years of my life, including school situations where gym teachers especially should've noticed me lurching around the "running" part at the speed of a slow walk and unable to lift as much weight with my right arm as my left, no one got it. I was in some denial because of how I was raised but the physical evidence was there.
It just wasn't common or obvious. That's where someone's intuition really gets tested. From your comment I know that you've often been right in your intuitive observations. I'm reaffirming that you were probably observing real things all the time and understood when docs were heading down blind alleys with patients.
Part of the problem with "evidence based practice" is that any mistake is going to get treated as evidence once it's down on paper. What's on paper gets taken much more seriously than anything the patient says. So if one doctor makes a mistake, all the successive ones that get the records will go in with that label and perpetuate the mistake. Anyone actually spending time with the patient and observing in real time may start seeing how it doesn't add up to what the paperwork says it is.
I've come to the conclusion that medical care is a lot safer for people who have no chronic conditions or disabilities, for people who are physically standard and have something acute, only one thing wrong with them at that time. Anything permanent is going to screw up procedure and not fit the system. I am lucky that I never wound up in a hospital unconscious with breathing trouble or I'd die of it.
You can practice medicine quickly or you can practice it well. You cannot practice it well quickly. Intuitive clinical thinking takes time and evaluation of all the pieces, but your 5 minutes is up. Healthcare reform? WHere would we even start?!
My intuition is telling me you are the one to pick.
I am curious though what your intuition tells you about our president and his honesty.My intuition tells me he is a manipulator who seeks approval and is upset when he doesn't get it by demanding the public name names etc.Although I didn't just come to this conclusion without some facts to back it up.
I have to admit that I did vote for him,but given the choices we we limited to,that was more of a choice between a rock and a hard place.Not much of a choice.
I loved your article I am well some say psychic I have always found it to be a curse but anyway you are right everyone has it to some degree whether its intuition or something else
It's interesting, I've never put much stock in this type of thing but I recently began reading a book called The Intention Experiment that attempts to prove scientifically how these things work. The first section of the book covers some experiments in Quantum Physics that show how a photon exists in all places at once until something views it. The point being that thought influences the physical world. This concept was covered exceptionally in a film called What the Bleep do we know. I am also reading a book called Sway that is about how we make decisions, and in particular factors that lead to irrational choices. There in the middle of this book it has a section on how an individuals view on aging actually impacts the aging process. So then in a completely unrelated event I find your hub on duplicate material and Hubapages policies. I liked the article and decided to read more when I came across your article on intuition. I don't know. I'm still studying this area but I am certainly intrigued. Thanks for writing this and keep up the good work!
Thank you for this, I appreciate it very much!
Well written.
This was another awesome hub. I see that others thought so too :-) Peace
Very inspiring and affirming hub, thanks PWalker281!
Memorable for me were the instances when my insights prevented me from figuring in a traffic accident. These came in by feeling/sense. I was saved this way more than thrice! Driving inevitably made me learn to really on my intuition.
It's good to know that many people are now seeing the benefits of following their intuition: about 78% from the results of your voting survey.
Wow, it seems I am so not alone in this. It's great to see so many people connect to these feelings. Thanks for a great hub!
This is fascinating - I voted 'I don't know when I get intuitive guidance' but read on and found that perhaps I do. Often when my right brain is working as I'm busy doing something else - it's like a whisper over my shoulder. Great hub - thanks for sharing it.
I couldn't agree more that it is important to be able to recognize intuitive guidance and act on it. A great spiritual teacher of mine, George Kavassilas, once taught me that it is better to feel with your intuition than to think with your head. How right he was. When we think thoughts with our head, we over analyze things and can only base our decisions on what we have been taught since we were young. However, when we FEEL with our intuition, everything becomes clearer. I've been privileged enough to be able to completely open myself to my intuition. I can just feel what decisions I need to make in my life and which things to do and not to do. You have a lot of great strategies for recognizing intuitive guidance in this article. Rated up and marked as useful.
i believe that intuition is discernment a gift from God.The more you develop it the sharper it gets. You have to be in tune to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit that gives you the knowledge of discernment or intuition as you call it.
I can see why you were a finalist for the hubnugget with this. Well written and informative. I'll be watching for more on this topic. Afraid can't help to much on the crochet ones.
this is an interesting topic that needs more attention. we all have heard that little voice in our heads and we try to ignore it at times. i have to say that my intuition has saved me a couple of times from less desireable situations..good hub thanks for shedding light on the subject.
Jokes are often made of the so called "little small voice," but now you've given it some credibility. Very good hub. I must come back for more. Voted up, useful, interesting, bookmarked.
First of all if I'm going to read some one else's inane dribble I reserve the right to comment, fortunately for you I found this article neither inane or dribbleish and voted it up and beautiful.
Because I completely agree and have learned to not only listen to my God given instinct, but also trust it I no longer require proof for those difficult question we all run into.
For instance did the two airplanes cause both buildings to collapse, I knew it was BS watching it happen and now suspect I know the answer. All from listening with an open mind to what that little voice has been screaming at me all of my life.
No longer requiring proof, keeping an open mind on all subjects (especially the ones you 'think' you know) and using critical thinking has taken me so far down the rabbit hole, I'm now climbing the Mountain of Truth and what a view!
I would like permission to link this Hub to some of mine that require the Sheeple to use their intuition to decide on the truth?
Everything happens for a reason, however what we do with this wisdom is the key!
I'm thinking my next hub should be my favorite top twenty female vocalist . . . any suggestions Chaka Khan will be in the top five to give you a clue!
Anyway awesome hub, I go to hub forth!
This is a topic that has always fascinated me. I absolutely believe that our best guidance comes from within, but unfortunately I've always struggled with hearing it.
What is intuitive guidance, as opposed to a mere whim that was triggered by something you've seen or heard, even at a subconscious or subliminal level? We all get urges or impulses to do something from time to time. I think that sometimes these impulsive moves are just the kind of internal guidance you are talking about, but other times they are just impulses that can be ignored, like those times when you see something in a store that you suddenly just "have to have", so you buy it, take it home, and then never use it.
Learning to actually recognize and follow my intuitive guidance has long been one of my greatest wishes. I think it would make a big difference in my life. I'm still working on it. : )
Love your articles! Very informative!
Being aware of your intuition can be difficult to achieve. I continually try to be more "present in the moment" so that I can be more aware of what intuition my be trying to say. Thank you for such an informative article.
Although I have strong intuition, I don't always listen to it. Result: I find myself in situations in which I start questioning my own identity. Painful thing! Thanks for reminding me that listening to my intuition is much smarter than going through a wall like a blind dog in a meat market.
Yes, it's something you simply have to learn and make it a habit. Hope to accomplish that.
I'm glad you like my new avatar. My husband and I thought it looks just like me LOL I don't wear glasses, but my nose is always in the computer screen or books whenever I'm not at work. He usually asks me: Have you got square eyes now, honey?
This is so true, and a great piece! I find that all the decisions I make by instinct are always right. The ones where I think it through and try to be logical, are always wrong for me. I got in several "wrong" jobs like that. Now I listen harder to myself!
Thank you for the perceptive article :)
I like the example you used, about the bank and the sunscreen. Something similar happened to me the other day.
I needed a dress to wear to a masquerade. Not having much time to spare, I decided to go to the closest thrift shop, when I would have ordinarily gone to the Goodwill a couple of miles over.
I didn't find a dress, but did bump into a friend I hadn't seen in five years. Very serendipitous!
Intuition can't be dismissed.









































CandyL 2 years ago
I love your article! I've been doing this for so long, and it's nice to know that you and I have have this in common!