When you’re faced with a difficult decision, are you more likely to ask for advice from another person? Or are you happy to tune into the powerful internal guidance system that exists deep within the fibres of your being? True feminine power is an internally focused energy. Looking outside yourself for answers, especially during challenging times, can lead you off track. Intuition is literally looking ‘in-tu-it’ or looking inwards to find the answer that is best suited to your unique circumstances. Often women feel compelled to over-ride their intuition in order to please others and to keep the peace.
So how do you tune into your intuition to make a difficult decision, especially when that decision affects others? Perhaps more importantly, how do you stand strong in your intuition and honour it when people around you aren’t approving and you’re a people pleaser?
Firstly, understand how intuition works for you.
Intuitive messages come in different ways depending upon which sensory dominance you carry. If you are a visually dominant person, your intuition may come in the form of a visual or symbolic insight. If you are kinaesthetically dominant, it means you’ll feel things in your body in the form of feelings and sensations, usually in the gut. If you’re an auditory dominant person, you may have clairaudience and hear a quiet voice giving you cues. However it works for you, intuition usually appears as a form of quiet ‘knowingness’ through gut feelings, thoughts, images, sensory impressions, emotions, or bodily sensations.
Think back to what it felt like when you followed your intuition in a way that didn’t make sense to you at the time but successfully paid off. Remember the way this played out to help you understand how you personally receive intuitive messages. Once you know what this feels like, it becomes easier to tell the difference between intuition and other messages like wishful imagination or fear-based beliefs. Ask the question, ‘what is the best and worst thing that could happen if I follow my intuition in this situation?’
Intuition can be strengthened to make a difficult decision in the following five ways :
1. Develop an understanding about where intuition resides in your body. The gut-brain in the abdomen has more nerve cells than the whole spinal cord. Your gut-brain intelligence sits right in the centre of your pelvis. Ironically, this is a place of power that many women have abandoned due to their shame around their body consciousness, their sexuality and sensuality, early sexual abuse and trauma. Yet, intuition is a small, quiet voice, which requires you to be comfortable connecting to your belly breath to ensure you are fully inhabiting this place of power in your body. It also requires you to move out of the fight or flight response and shallow breathing pattern that so many women find themselves in in this busy era of overwhelm. When someone challenges you about your decision, breathe into your centre of gravity with a full abdominal breath before responding.
2. consciously slow your life right down and engage in the activities of your life mindfully and purposefully. Spend time immersed in stillness and connect with the body daily. Regularly practice mind-body medicine such as yoga, meditation, tai chi or conscious movement therapy of that nature. Conscious mind-body practices will connect you to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a rest and digest response. This supports blood flow to the abdomen and the abdominal organs plus the organs of fertility, giving you greater awareness to the innate intelligence contained within the body. The answers that surface from this place of calm are usually more aligned with a peaceful outcome.
3. Find time to meditate. As a mother, this may happen in unlikely places. It can be done while walking the pram or while breastfeeding your kids. Where ever you can find a space in between where one thought ends and another thought begins. This helps to take you from a place of reactivity to a place of creativity where you decide upon your intuitive and conscious responding to the world’s pressures and demands. This puts you in the position of self-determination instead of being constantly at the mercy of the demands of life itself. The more comfortable you get with sitting with yourself in the spaces in-between thoughts, the less likely you’ll reach for the distractions of a phone, screen, conversation, substance, sugar, craving etc and the more likely you’ll reach for long term sustainable choices and have true clarity in your decision-making process.
4. Check in and sit with your inner guidance first before consulting the opinions of others. When something is right or true, it will feel lighter in the body. When something is out of alignment, it will feel heavy in the body. Trust that often, your own answers are more accurate and true for you than the opinions of others. Stop running away from yourself and instead, run toward yourself. Trust that you hold the answers. When you feel at home with yourself, you begin to feel safe in the world and you start to listen and pay attention to your intuition, which is just like a muscle. The more it is flexed the more powerful it gets. Ram Dass said – we are all just walking each other home’ Wherever you are is home.
5. Let go of the past – the past contains core beliefs that are formed when you are under the age of seven and inform you of your current circumstances. Identifying core beliefs can be a great way to liberate your self from them. Intuition always acts above and beyond current circumstances. If you believe that intuition is benevolence guiding your life, it makes sense that benevolence would like to assist you to grow and expand and express more of your authentic self in the world. Intuition will often nudge you past your comfort zones to let more life come forth from within you. Allowing opportunity to manifest in your life happens independently of your past conditioning if intuition rules.
In the bustle of motherhood, you are called to make some fairly difficult adult decisions and it can be tough to know how to navigate these pressures. Be honest when you know you are feeling your way into your truth no matter how against the grain or inconvenient it may seem at the time. Be aware that in a benevolent universe, your intuition wants to guide and love and support you. It doesn’t want to see you suffering, for you are so loved.
What’s right for you is right for everyone around you, no matter how much they may challenge your decisions at times.
The more confidence you gain from paying attention to the small, still voice within, the more extraordinary your life becomes.
About our Ausmumpreneur Expert :
Lisa Fitzpatrick is the creator of the popular coaching program and e-course Heart Your Life – simple steps to find your life purpose which is available here.
As the founder of Sacred Women’s Business, a coaching and training business, which serves conscious women in business, Lisa believes that every woman has the right to tap into her unique feminine wisdom to achieve lasting success and leave a legacy. Lisa is a certified coach, writer, yoga teacher, workshop facilitator, speaker, registered physiotherapist and mother. She lives in a subtropical paradise near Byron Bay with her two sons.
Free offer: Pick up Part One of Healing the Heart of Your Business – sustainable success for heart-centred women over here.
