This week I want you to grow your intuitive toolkit. As I have shared, there is a menagerie of ways to open your heart intuition. If you haven’t mastered an art or have any hobbies that wake up your right brain, picking one up and practicing it will help develop your intuitive intelligence. Martial arts, movement arts, musical arts, vocal arts, visual arts, literary arts, language arts—these are all effective ways to unlock the intuitive areas of your heart-mind-gut. You’ll access more genius during practice and performance as you refine your skills.
Another way to expand your heart and deepen your intuitive neural pathways is through sensory awareness training and sensory deprivation training.
With sensory deprivation training, you deliberately shut off all your senses, like in a sensory deprivation chamber. You’re in complete silence, floating in the water and immersed in Epsom salt. It’s dark. You feel weightless. With no other signals, you can focus all your attention on your inner world: your thoughts and sensations. You’ll become more sensitive to the signals your heart, brain, gut, or other parts of your body give you in the form of an image or a direct knowingness.
But don’t get carried away with this if you decide to try it! Sitcoms such as The Simpsons, Modern Family, and The Big Bang Theory all did episodes poking fun at deprivation chambers. Though hilarious, once the humor fizzled out, the characters in the chambers discovered a truth about themselves that was buried beneath their conscious mind.
If none of these is your thing, you can master your intuitional mountain through good, old-fashioned meditative practices. Now let’s look at what I call Intuitive Interconnectedness. As you practice connecting at a deeper level with your heart, you’ll experience more presence with others. You’ll feel their feelings and be able to ask better questions. You’ll be upping your intuitional awareness to levels on par with intuitive empaths—but without all the baggage! You will be outside yourself and feeling into others at will. When you’re in a day-to-day situation, you’ll enter each environment with a deep state of awareness of the patterns around you, how people are behaving, and to individual and group moods and attitudes. Approaching life in this way, you’ll notice anything that seems off and recognize it well before your peers (another empathic quality) because you will be attuned to your transrational and inferential intuition.
If you go into a room and feel something’s off in your heart and belly, you won’t barrel into problem-solving mode. You’ll take your time. Then you’ll move into authentic listening mode. You’ll develop a much deeper heart-level connection with that (those) individual(s), and you’ll be a conduit for clearing the air. You’ll also have much more effective interactions with coworkers. You’ll find yourself and your team identifying and solving problems at a much deeper level than before and a much quicker pace. You’ll deepen relationships with family members. (And who doesn’t need to do that with at least one member of their nuclear family?). If you have a partner in life, you won’t believe what this skill will do to transform your relationship to euphoric levels of happiness and harmony. This week layer your regular activities with this bonus practice and watch your intuition ignite.
Mindfulness Meditation and Journaling Practice:
Journaling strengthens pattern recognition. Let’s combine this with mindfulness meditation.
Start with a concentration practice, such as box breathing, and drop into your witness.
Then, after five or so minutes, let’s begin a mindfulness meditation practice.
Breathe deeply and imagine your consciousness dropping into and expanding the heart region. Surrender to the experience.
After you become the mountain watching the thought clouds, pass by, start journaling what comes up. Do this for the next ten to twenty minutes. This will help you become more sensitive to what’s happening in your inner mind and emotions.
So, what came up? What patterns did you notice? How do some thoughts you wrote down make you feel as you revisit them? Pay attention to how your gut feels when you answer these questions.
Once you become comfortable with this practice, you can get even more specific, as I did when I studied with Nakamura.
- If there’s an issue, reach out to your inferential intuition in the form of a question and free your mind, preparing yourself for whatever sensation or answer arises.
- If you’re interested in receiving transrational information, set a positive intention, ask your question or ask for guidance, and settle into silence to free your mind and become the mountain.
The more you practice, the more information you will receive from your consciousness. This will start to feel like a structure of support under your feet. One message supports and complements the other, and so on. Before long (even as little as eight weeks into this regular practice), you will feel the new and improved you, the authentic you, dusting off the dirt and moving beyond the surface of your subconscious.
And then, on emergence, you will begin to understand and finetune your powers of intuition in an exponential fashion.
The Japanese word for this level of mastery is Shibumi. That means effortless perfection. It flows out of the deep patterning (the new neural pathways you’ve built) and allows you to have razor-sharp intuition without active thought. You surrender into the awareness that your body-mind knows how to do this. You trust it. And you act out of it. You have cultivated wisdom. I would love to read about your experiences from doing this practice. If you are inspired to do so, please share how your intuition developed through this practice. You can share with the community on any social media outlets. Hooyah!