Your Intuition Matters

Your Intuition Matters

Today we are going to dive into the topic, intuition. I am going to talk about it in three different contexts: physical or body intuition, mental or cognitive intuition, and spiritual intuition. You do not have to be a guru of any sort to practice living more intuitively. I know this topic can seem a little intimidating to a lot of people – We tend to be highly cognitive.  In our heads all the time.   I’d like to address it in practical terms with practical ways to apply living intuitively.

Body Intuition

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about: Let’s get specific, starting with body intuition: I’ve noticed that women lose touch with knowing what to eat because there is so much advice and conflicting information about nutrition and wellness out there – and as we get older and maybe a little dissatisfied with the changes our bodies go through, as our metabolisms change from hormone fluctuations of the normal life cycle of being a female, it is difficult to know how to nurture our bodies in a gentle nutrition kind of way –, what does our body truly need in order to feel deeply satisfied?

If we rely on diets to tell ourselves what to eat and what not to eat, then we have been telling our bodies no.  We have been telling our intuition that you don’t know what’s best for you.

Our bodies will change and recalibrate with every season of the lifespan, or after every baby that we birth, or if we are going through infertility, or menopause.  There are so many stages the female body goes through – and yet we as women can sometimes get stuck in this idea that we need to get our bodies back.  Back to how they were ten years ago – twenty years ago – and our relationship with our bodies become less intuitive.  And can get really out of touch with reality.

So, getting back to an intuitive relationship with our bodies will require us to cut through the noise of any external influences, and get more in tune with what we really want for ourselves: for me, that was mind/body/food peace.

Our bodies are listening to the way we talk to them, to the way we treat them. Is that a strange way to think about yourself and your body – as though there’s this duality to what makes you YOU?

 Intuition, which is tied to the spirit aspect of You, doesn’t love to be spoken to in unkind ways. So when our minds and our thoughts start to do this, our intuition will more often than not, go into hiding.

 My biggest job as a life coach is to help people uncover all the negative thinking that has gotten in the way of accessing intuition.

Example of Body Intuition: 

 Little children know how to eat and what to eat. Toddlers know. When I’m first teaching Intuitive Eating to my clients who want to weight balance, they almost always push back on this idea and cite how their children are picky eaters, or would only eat sweets if they only ate what they wanted to eat, etc., and I point out that that is only because their intuitive eater has been high-jacked by highly concentrated foods, like apple juice, instead of an actual apple. Study after study of toddlers who eat real foods instinctively eat a variety of foods and stop when they are full – they honor their hunger and fullness cues. But they more often than not have these cues trained out of them by the time they are age 5.

And so, it’s no wonder we lose touch with our intuitive eater and with our hunger and fullness cues that are innately in us as little children. The good news is – it’s possible to heal this dynamic and get back in touch with our intuitive eater as adults, it just takes a lot of practice

Cognitive Intuition

 What I’m talking about here is the ability to be a watcher of your thoughts and notice how many of them come from fear, doubt or frustration versus a more loving place.  A tone that is encouraging, nurturing and deeply compassionate.

In order to access our mental or cognitive intuition, we need to develop the skill of being a watcher of our thoughts. The hard part about that can be the awareness of how many thoughts there are that are negative. In the beginning, this can be a little disheartening.

But even so, if we can just notice without judging the negative thoughts and without making them mean that something is wrong with us, then we can start to question where the thinking is coming from.  

Example of Cognitive Intuition:

When I was studying classical piano in college in my early twenties, I also had this desire to learn jazz piano. I loved the pianist Oscar Peterson – he’s the pianist on the jazz Verve record label recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, their timeless and amazing duets they recorded back in the sixties together. The singing is absolute perfection, but oh my goodness, the piano accompaniments are exquisite, they are gold. Gold I say! I’m not being dramatic. They are both elegant and gritty, the pianist, Oscar Peterson, I just remember when I first heard them, and then went back and listened again and again, I kept asking myself, “how did he do that?” As a pianist I was just in awe. and so – this desire inside of me just grew and grew. I wanted to play like that. But I kept telling myself – ‘you can’t do that. You’ve gotta stick with classical. Nobody becomes good at both classical and jazz. Stay in your lane Danielle, etc.’ just all this negative thinking that kind of put that desire to rest and made it go into hiding.

Here’s the thing about doing that to ourselves: A special and beautiful part of ourselves dies a little bit every time we give that kind of thinking any weight. And I learned to stop doing this.  I don’t play jazz piano like Oscar Peterson – nobody does except Oscar Peterson, but I play jazz piano my own little way now, and I have so much fun when I sit at the piano bench and do it and just play.

I don’t think our desires are going to just show up on the doorstep one day – when the time is just right, ring the doorbell, and say, “I’ve been waiting for you. . . I’m here. . . let’s do this!” No. It doesn’t work this way at all. Instead, we must do the knocking, the digging, the listening, the honoring, and find them ourselves. 

 Cognitive intuition is so important. Because as we engage in the work of cleaning up our thinking, there are some big payoffs. That’s where we begin to tap into our deeper wisdom, our inner yearnings, our dreams, and the intuition that has gently been calling to us all along.

 Spiritual Intuition

 Ok. That last form of intuition that I want to speak to; and this one definitely can’t be traced to the any type of scientific proof as existing, which is fine – that’s not my area of expertise – I’m more of an intuitive soul anyway – and I really honor that about myself – I don’t apologize for it at all – is spiritual intuition.

 And this one is deeply gratifying. I’m talking about the ability to access a still, small voice, not small in the sense that it’s unimportant or small in stature, I mean a small voice in that it whispers and is quiet but also profound in wisdom and compassion, and it always speaks with your best interests at heart.

 I know that there are skeptics.  Some people might argue that here’s where Danielle Vaughn is delusional. And that’s fine. I’m not really speaking to the skeptics here. I love skeptical thinking, my husband is kind of a skeptic thinker, we are so opposite in a lot of ways.  My husband is an engineer and computer scientist, and he has a wicked sense of the ridiculous in the world, of the inconsistencies of humanity – he is logical to an aggravation sometimes, and yet I love, love this about him. And then there’s me – who is like, “honey – this baby isn’t completely healthy, I don’t know what it is, I know all the ultra sounds say he is fine, but something isn’t right. . . “ and sure enough, our little guy had serious heart problems.  And five months later after open-heart surgeries and complications, he’s our miracle boy because I listened to my intuition. I have lots of stories of where my intuition has led me in the right direction, and I just don’t have any other explanation than the fact that I hear an inner voice and I listen to it.

 I’m really good at hearing that inner voice. And I’m really good at helping people access their inner light, their inner voice, and listen to THAT voice that is deeply compassionate, that sees the big picture, and that has your best interests always in mind. This spiritual intuition can be accessed in a variety of ways. For some it is stillness and being quiet.  For others it’s being in nature. There is so many ways to drop into a setting where you can access your intuition and your deeper Truth.

I believe in your dreams! 

 I believe our dreams are our true intuition, and that they guide us to our ability to experience true joy.

 What are your true desires? Do you honor them?

 Are you able to access your intuition?

 Whatever it is that your still, small, quiet voice is gently calling you to do, do it.

 It’s time. It’s time to listen. It’s time to dare greatly.

 YOU CAN DO THIS.

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