Waking Up Your Heart Intuition

What is intuition? Wikipedia says; Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. 

Trust your gut. Follow your heart. “I just feel it’s true.” “I wish I had followed my instinct” These are ways that we acknowledge this mysterious part of our being. I like to call it my soul voice.

 The first thing that you need as you embark on the journey of discovering your soul voice is a desire to know this part of yourself fully and completely. This desire will propel you to expand your awareness and trust your process. Being pregnant and giving birth often ignites the spark of your intuition. How do we develop and cultivate that spark into a reliable flame?

 The ability to cultivate your intuition begins at birth and possibly before. It is not relegated to a select gifted few. Intuition is part of who we are, it is a human gift and a valuable one.

We often live demanding lives with little time for reflection or connection and few of us had good cultural models for nurturing our intuition. We have systematically lost the connection with our inner voice, our natural intuition that has served us well throughout time.

Notice what happens when you don’t let the insistent external voices drown out the subtle message of your soul voice, your intuition. This is especially true for parenting. Rarely do we receive the gift of someone trusting us to listen to what we need from the depths of our being. To listen to our own bodies, babies and children from a place of curiosity and silence. There is so much doing as a parent, and not enough pure being.

 To cultivate your intuition is to quiet down the other voices. Even your own fears and worries. Through the discipline of your mind and by tuning into your body and your heart vibrations, you begin to tap into the great well of knowledge already in you. Notice when you feel sensations in your body, tingling, tightness, your heart rate climbing for no apparent reason. These are some symptoms that can give you a lot of information. Our bodies are amazing conductors of energy, intuition is simply an exchange of energy, when we tap into our own personal body language and start to decipher it’s meaning, a wealth of wisdom becomes available to us.

 Through your intuition you can listen to your children’s underlying needs. Under the surface you can feel what the soul needs, I like to call this soul listening. When we switch our awareness to an intuitive focus it looks something like this; your higher consciousness listens to your soul, your soul relays the information to your mind which allows you to act on it if needed. Your mind is no longer fully in charge, but linked with the intuitive voice of your soul. We live in the pervasive cultural narrative that we can not trust ourselves, that experts and authority know what we need and we do not. To develop your intuition is to take back your autonomy and empower yourself.

 Intuition is an amazing practice to bring to your life. As a parent it is especially valuable because infants can not tell us what they need. It is through trial and error that you figure out what your baby needs. When your baby cries and you become increasingly agitated, scrambling to fix the problem, you grow farther away from the communication that is being given. If you have children, do you remember a time when you inexplicably “knew” what your child needed? All of us have had an experience like this, it’s not serendipity, its soul listening and the benefits last throughout you and your child’s lifetime.

When my son was born I remember being afraid that I wouldn’t be able to meet his needs and that I would fail as a mother. I knew this was not rational, but it was a real fear for me at the time. I noticed that when he became upset I would become upset myself and scramble to fix things for him. I would do a mental check list of all the physical needs, food, diaper, sleep, comfort, etc. When I had attended to all of those things and he was still upset I would find myself becoming anxious and the fear of failure would over take me. My son would continue to cry. Both of us would be miserable.

One day I noticed a pattern. When I was calm and simply rocked and held him, singing a Sanskrit mantra sweetly to him, he would calm down quickly and harmony would resume. But if I went into fear and agitation while trying to make it all better, he would cry louder and our misery would go on longer. I had to bring myself into a peaceful state in order for my son to feel safe and calm. It was entirely my responsibility. I knew that I had to give up my fear of failure and trust myself. I began a personal campaign to learn to trust myself. I began to listen to his crying from my heart, not my mind. I would talk to him about what I noticed, ask him if I had perceived his needs correctly. It may sound strange, but even as a non-verbal infant it’s as if he would answer me, I would just know what to do. Not from the place of fixing, but from the place of being an advocate in his process of being a baby new to this world.

 There are three tools that I used to reconnect with my intuition. The first tool is patience. I knew it would take time and practice to cultivate self trust. The second; meditation. The only way to truly quiet the mind is through meditation. I used Sanskrit Mantra Meditation to support the practice of re-connecting to my intuition. The third; cultivating awareness. I trained my mind to focus on certain messages from my body. Through repetition and perseverance I began to understand the messages more and more quickly and I found that they were consistently giving me valuable information. It was then just a question of how I would choose to act or not act on the information.

I am convinced that the work we do to open our intuition and re-connect with this deep and wise part of ourselves is infinitely beneficial not only for ourselves, our families and our children, but for all of our relationships.

Connection is not just being in the presence of other people it is being present with other people. It is listening as well as talking, it is opening our minds and hearts to the shared condition of our humanity and our inherent interconnectedness. Being connected within oneself deeply and fearlessly allows for our connections with others to flourish throughout our lives.

Soul Listening

I know you.

You are the one who speaks within me.

Your voice, no louder then the whisper of a butterfly, softly sings the truth of me.

I strain to hear you.

Most days

I only hear the noises of eternity.

But in a moment comes,

your soft subtle voice

catching my relaxed listening,

and I see beyond my eyes,

the deep calling of our mystery.

If you would like to learn a Sanskrit Mantra Meditation for quieting the mind and increasing your intuitive powers, don't hesitate to get in touch with Anasuya at www.anasuyahealer.com