Often, Clients look up to me to offer advice, give answers, help them with the negotiations of “right” or “wrong” choices in their lives. I’d say that my main guidance “approach” in conducting Psychotherapy is supporting clients access their intuition. Why? I’ve seen it do wonders, over and over. When intuition becomes polished and begins to direct the Life of the person, drastic shifts occur. When we develop, trust, and play with our intuition, we reinforce the sense that we are in charge and in flow with life. When we trust our intuition, we grow the capacity to be with what presents itself in our lives. We make space for all of it. Intuition looks and feels like this: you have entertained various ideas about a particular decision you want to make, let’s say where to move to. You’ve done your research, accumulated facts, and while you feel you have much information, you can’t reach a decision because your mind jumps from one choice to another. Time to engage intuition. Engage your felt sense of awareness of the moment, also known as Mindfulness. Relax the mind, move away from its hoops and jumps. Then conjure up the possibilities, and allow for your awareness to “travel” with the information, and follow the inner tidings and movement until you reach the experience of inner “YES”! Intuition is this inner sense of knowingness. It fills up the inner landscape rather than the freeze or chaotic experience we have when the mind is trying to make a decision. Get it?
Most people seem to desire to attain freedom from burdens most often perceived and constructed in the mind. What it comes down to is that people want freedom from their own thoughts! The “what if” thoughts, especially. While it appears that the causes of distress lay outside themselves, often, it is the thoughts about such situations, the meaning ascribed, that keep a person in endless cycles of negative thinking. We must digress here. Let’s be very clear that some people experience substantial adversarial circumstances in their lives, making it very difficult to feel “free”. In most places around the world, there are systems of oppression built into the fabrics of societies that thrive on oppressing and abusing others. We can name racism, misogyny, labor oppression, slavery, etc. Trauma and adversarial relational circumstances impact people’s neurology in such a way that it greatly impedes the experience of well-being, and sense of spaciousness and freedom in one’s mind. I must mention this in order to give this topic of intuition, a well-rounded approach.
When we reach circumstances in our lives where intuition is recognized, and “used” we shift our existence into increasing our experience of manifesting destiny; having “a choice” into our experience becomes more of a possibility. Intuition is Self knowing, it is an agent of discernment we are capable of, however, as mentioned above, our life circumstances do interact with our capacity to access, and develop intuition. While some cognitive processes are impacted by stress hormones such as focus and memory, intuition remains accessible; a sort of jewel in the murky waters of a stressed mind. Clients experiencing adversarial circumstances will share that they have the experience of intuition, often amidst pronounced periods of stress, leading to a sense of hope, a manifestation of a turn around into a new direction.
When we access our intuition, and we get to develop our inner compass that way, we can make choices that are more in line with our well-being, rather than adhering to a set of thoughts and standards that often have been programmed as a result of learning by association, social learning, and therefore status quo learning. I like supporting people access their own seeds of knowing amidst their respective circumstances, and in such rise into their own brilliance, whatever that means for them… There will be much more I want to explore on this topic…I leave you with an article on Intuition. Enjoy.