Give Your Mind a Rest & Tap Into Your Intuition

Give your mind a rest &

Tap into your intuition

Your thinking mind, the one we use to analyze problems, store information and remember it later is not the end all be all of our intelligence.  It is not even half of it in fact.  Our thinking mind is only one of many senses such as sight, hearing and feeling, yet we overuse it, over prioritize our thoughts about things and ignore the other senses and feelings.  In this way we have no access to our intuition or the integration of all the intelligence our mind and body has to offer.  It’s as if our thinking mind is an aggressive older sibling that bullies the rest of our body and mind into thinking it’s the only sense that really matters and the only way we can try to understand life and the external world.  “Without my thoughts I’ll be nothing, I’ll do everything wrong,” but if we stop and inspect our experience deeply we can see that this is not the case at all, in fact we often have our most creative and impactful ideas when we are relaxed.  When we calm our thinking mind we allow the wisdom allowed our wisdom and intuition to bubble up.  In the shower, on a nature hike, chatting with friends, etc.  These non-rushed, non-stressful, un-biased moments are when we are able to access our intuition and really make progress and decisions.

The thinking mind is an amazing tool, but we only need to look at our own experiences to realize that it is often times wrong, uncontrolled and overwhelming. 

How many times have you analyzed something thoroughly in your head and determined the correct answer or outcome, to later realize the answer you came up with is totally false. Or maybe you over analyzed something and cannot come up with any answer.  How many times have you had reoccurring thoughts that you consciously couldn’t seem to stop and worked yourself up into anxiety or anger?  If we rely too much on our thinking mind and believe every thought we get ourselves into trouble and get unhappy.  We just need to tune in and pay attention to learn this for ourselves.

The thinking mind isn’t always the best thing to trust when it comes to deciphering all of the various external inputs from things like our bodily senses, thoughts, and feelings.  It can take them all in, remember them, judge them, or add meaning, but it is really just writing its biased thoughts on top of the others, because it has no ability to feel, to sense. Without that ability it is like a robot trying to be human, it can come close but never really understand fully.  That is not to say you should only trust your feelings, turning your thinking mind off.  We want to strike a balance between the thinking mind and our feelings. It is when we combine these two forces that we are able to experience inspiration, creativity, and make sound decisions.  This is what we experience as intuition. There is not a name or location of where this intuition or wisdom comes from or resides, but we all know that it is real. 

 

There are a few things to look out for as we train our intuition, red flags if you will. When our thoughts start to have a speedy, insecure edge to them and leave our bodies with upset or anxiety, we may be out of synch. That’s when it’s time to pull up on the reigns, give the mind a rest, and take up a meditative activity. As our mind and body slow down we will be able to tap into our intuition instead. We might not always be right, but there is a peaceful, knowing and confident quality about intuition throughout our mind and body that is generally onto something.  We need to remember to pay attention when we use our intuition as the results that come and allow for our happiness will reinforce the practice.  The more we take care of and use all of our mind and body intelligence, the sharper our intuition will become the fewer mistakes we will make.  We will experience more success and happiness overall.