Trusting Your Intuition: A Mindset of Patience, Abundance & A Practice of Listening Instead of Thinking

One of the most confusing parts of my spiritual unfolding has been learning to trust my intuition. Growing up, I was encouraged to develop exceptional analytical skills through my schooling and engineering career. A strong analytical mind is an extremely powerful tool for understanding the external physical world and designing systems that perform well in it. Analytical thinking focuses on how a given phenomenon's mechanism works and the likelihood of probabilistic events occurring. It puts the locus of truth outside the self. We trust nothing in analytical reasoning and the scientific method: hypothesize, test, and repeat until sufficient proof is amassed. However, there is so much truth beyond that which exists in our measurable, solid, material world: emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal truths cannot be grasped with the same analytical tools that apply to the material world. We must learn to trust our experiences rather than external evidence to expand our consciousness and grow spiritually. We all have first-hand experience of this. For example, you cannot measure how much someone loves you, and crude estimations like counting interactions or time spent together will lead you to absurd conclusions that your closest co-worker loves you more than your mother or spouse. The only thing you can do to evaluate how much someone loves you is to trust your felt experience of that love.

Our society encourages us not to make "emotional decisions." And it's true that reacting from an acute emotionally agitated state can lead to short-sighted decisions that aren't aligned with your higher intentions. Unfortunately, like many others, I got confused by this message warning against emotional decision-making. I internalized a sense that the only valid form of understanding was strictly analytical. This created a narrative that "emotions and feelings are not to be trusted without some consistent logical narrative that explains them." We can think and reason about the material world, but the non-physical world can only be understood by listening to our experiences and the experiences of others and learning to trust these sources. Returning to our example of love: someone loves you a lot because they make you feel really loved. There's no evidence to collect or mechanism to understand. It's truly so much simpler than that. Your feelings directly experience that truth. This chapter will help further break down what times call for analytical thinking vs. those that call for listening to your intuition. We'll also explore how these two kinds of consciousness can support each other gracefully. We'll give you tools for tapping into your intuition and practices to build trust with your intuition. 

The Domain of Intuition: Answering What Questions

Intuition is a bizarre capability of human consciousness to instantaneously grasp some truth. It's sometimes described as an intuitive "hit" or "download," something that is just immediately understood and trusted as truth. It is independent of time, so it does not do well with answering "when" questions. It is not a thinking or rational process of understanding pieces, mechanisms, and relationships, so it doesn't help answer "how" or "why" questions. Do not go into the working world telling your boss that your spirit guides told you how your project works and when it's going to be done; it's frankly just inappropriate. Intuition deals only with what is true. In many ways, intuition exists beyond that which can be subdivided into pieces: space and time. Space and time are the fundamental domains we're trained to think about, so we need to step out of our day-to-day culture to find the tools for intuitive knowing. 

Tools of the Trade: Meditation & Dreaming

Our modern culture provides little incentives or roadmaps for developing your intuition and provides us a cheap distraction from stillness and boredom, which can often be the fodder for listening to intuition. As a result, the muscles of our intuition atrophy. Yogis of old were obsessed with expanding consciousness to better experience truth. As such, they cared deeply about this ability to instantaneously grasp whole truths because procedural, rational, intellectual learning was not bad or wrong, but it was simply too slow to learn enough in a lifetime. The tools these yogis developed were mediation, self-inquiry, surrender to divine guidance, and a curious interest in the dreaming state of consciousness. When we wake up from a dream, often it's possible to distill some essence or truth from the dream by focusing on the experience of it, when the rational mind comes online and tries to make sense of the order of events or explain why certain people showed up it's common to have the experience of the dream just completely slipping away just as we're trying to grasp it. This is a case where we're trying to apply procedural thinking tools to a system of instantaneous knowing. We can also quiet the rational thinking mind through the process of meditation. When we meditate, we seek to slip into the vastness of our experience that exists beyond what can be formed into words and sentences. In this way, we shift into the seat of the observer who can directly observe truth rather than analyze, approximate, and dissect it. 

In chapter 7, we dove deep into yoga nidra, a particular form of meditation designed to take you to a near dream-like state. Our dreams can cue us to the suffering that our emotional, existential self is dealing with, free of the burden to explain that suffering as having some cause from this week. This could be trauma hidden away in corners of the body that our waking conscious mind avoids looking at or feeling. The yogis even believe this suffering can be inherited across generations and even from past lives. They describe this suffering as our karmic load. Whether you believe in many incarnations or not, most of us can acknowledge there is so much of our experience we don't quite understand. Taking time to sit for meditation or studying a dream journal can be useful tools in gaining a little more understanding of what you are dealing with if you accept that you might never know why. You can continue to disregard these cues to that which lies beneath your conscious mind, and in fact, most people don't bother until they go through some period of darkness. Typically triggered by a dramatic event like the loss of a loved one, job, or relationship, an individual finds themselves suffering "more than makes sense," and in this pain, they get more curious. It takes getting a little broken to give up on needing to understand the how and why and be content with tools to illuminate what exactly they are even experiencing. Understanding exactly what you are experiencing is harder than it sounds and is often enough to direct the next steps on a path of awakening into a world of less suffering. As they say in the addiction world, "admitting you have a problem is the first step," not "understanding why you have a problem is the first step." I'll echo for maybe the third time in this book Caley's timeless quote: "You can just take out the trash without sifting through it."

In the spiritual teachings of Lana Del Rey in Kintsugi (a track named after the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold), she says:  

"It's just that I don't trust myself with my heart. 

But I've had to let it break a little more

'Cause they say that's what it'

That's how the light shines in."

When an individual in our modern society goes through some spiritual awakening, they can often behave in ways that "don't make sense" through the rational lens: taking a pay cut for more value-aligned work, leaving a social circle that is no longer serving them, letting go of an obsession with grooming themselves to look as people expect. The process of trusting your intuition is one of believing you can understand things you cannot explain. The goal here is to abandon or transcend rational thinking altogether, which would leave you ungrounded in reality and likely lead to behaviors not conducive to your health and survival. The goal here is to accompany your rational mind with your intuitive mind so you can grasp more truth. Sifting through the difference between intuition and illusion is a wisdom developed over an entire lifetime. If you are afraid of being wrong or changing your mind, the limits of the world you can understand will be very small. Developing your intuition involves a decent amount of humility. We don't use intuition to invalidate what we can reason about with facts and rules. We use intuition to consider that which we cannot reason about, those truths that exist beyond the scope of information available to us or that exist beyond the space and time domain where our rational tools work really well. Intuition is a process of surrendering to some divine guidance from something greater than yourself, call it the universe, your higher self, spirit guides, God, or whatever poetry meets you with the least resistance. And ultimately, these higher callings want you to be free of suffering and lead a life of joy and love. Your rational mind can help you understand if a job pays enough to keep you fed and sheltered; intuition helps you understand if this job is aligned with your purpose, providing a sense of joy and authenticity. This quickly touches on another Japanese philosophy concept of Ikigai, a model for creating a life at the intersection of what you love, what your strengths are, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. The purpose of this chapter isn't to dive deep into finding your purpose or workshop Ikigai. However, this does put in context the importance of intuition as seeking to understand your strengths and what you love are intuitive endeavors. 

Opportunity: The Cost of Yes, The Leverage of No. Being Patient Enough to Listen to Your Intuition.

At its core, an opportunity is a choice: something you say yes or no to. Generally, saying yes to an opportunity has the consequence of costing an unknown amount of your time and energy to exercise that one singular opportunity in the material world and the opportunity cost of how else you could have spent those non-renewable resources of time and energy. Saying no to something costs no time or energy. This unspent time and energy remain available for an infinite array of other potential opportunities, which we'll call opportunity leverage. Of course, it's also not guaranteed this time or energy will be better spent than the opportunity at hand. If you take this to the extreme and just say no to everything, you'll waste all your time and energy on nothing. Alas, there's a yes-no balance to be found. As we said, your intuition does not answer "when" questions well, so there is patience and surrender to intuitively rejecting or engaging with an opportunity.

Scarcity: A Dangerous Bias Towards Low-Quality Yes

In the quest to find a proper balance of yeses and noes, one must develop an awareness of the biases one's mindset brings to each opportunity. If you bring a mindset of scarcity to opportunity, you will say yes to everything that has any logical upside, even if this upside doesn't justify the cost. This is because scarcity believes, "I'll never get an opportunity like this again. Who cares if it seems like it will be draining or if I don't trust the individuals involved? Plus, I'm doomed to fail a lot, so saying yes to more increases my chances of a fluke success." A mindset of scarcity fills your schedule with commitments to whatever low-quality opportunities happen to show up first. Paradoxically, this scarcity mindset of the "yes-man" leaves him over-committed robbing him of all his time. This mindset of the scarcity of opportunities coming your way manifests a scarcity of the time and energy to say yes to those perfectly aligned opportunities when they do arrive. Even when things pan out, an over-booked schedule doesn't allow you the space to feel that sense of completion or nourishment for the win of exercising a good opportunity. Scarcity has either already over-scheduled you onto the next thing or convinces you that this good thing was a fluke and time spent celebrating is wasted. By not valuing the space for gratitude or feeling a sense of accomplishment, a scarcity mindset leaves you in an insatiable loop chasing some elusive sense of "enough." Scarcity is not satisfied by anything less than unattainable goals like "infinite" and "forever." 

Abundance: The Patient Audacity of No and Waiting for Only the Highest-quality Yes 

Instead, bringing a mindset of abundance to opportunity will ironically result in saying no to more. Abundance believes, "I get lots of great opportunities, and I often succeed at what I say yes to. I can afford to conserve my time and energy by being patient enough for an opportunity that seems aligned, energizing, and connects me with trustworthy individuals." Abundance only says yes to an offer that's too good to refuse. Abundance knows the value of space, the leverage of no. Paradoxically, by not filling your cup to the limit, you are able to reap more rewards. Keeping that space allows you to feel a sense of completion and satisfaction with the fruits of your labor rather than rushing to the next thing you said yes to. This very feeling of a sense of completion is a positive feedback loop. It cultivates a deeper and more natural mindset of abundance. Let's be honest: saying no to good but not great opportunities takes bravery. You must embrace the audacity of patience. Sometimes we'll have logical reasons for saying no, but often we won't. It's a felt sense of "something's not quite right about this opportunity." This is the voice of your intuition. Listen to it. Pay attention to what happens with the ensuing space created in your life. 

But what happens when we say no and that time and energy aren't immediately invested in another better opportunity? A mindset of abundance is perfectly aligned with an idea we explored in Chapter 7 about the value of rest. We discussed how the only reason we work is in order to rest more effectively, not the other way around. Saying creates an abundance of time and space for rest, self-study, healing, and growth. This healing, growth, and self-understanding are as worthy of your time as opportunities leading to more immediately measurable material gain. While a mindset of abundance can and will yield you much material and external reward, it does not deal with the external world. A mindset of abundance at its core is a belief in your inner divinity and perfection in a way that demands the external world present you with divine opportunities that match this level of perfection. A mindset of abundance is a belief in your internal magnetism for attracting positive things into your life. 

Am I good enough for this opportunity? → Yes. 

Is the opportunity good enough for me? → No.

There's a way that one can inappropriately use this idea of "saying no from a place of abundance because something about an opportunity feels uncomfortable" as a rationalization for avoiding it. Just because something feels uncomfortable doesn't mean it's your intuition telling you not to do it. The most prototypical example of this is imposter syndrome: "saying no to something because you don't think you're qualified or believe you're doomed to fail." This is not a mindset of abundance at all! It's a mindset of fear and lack of confidence in how internally well-resourced you are. When encountering an uncomfortable feeling around an opportunity, there's a very simple question to ask: is your feeling of discomfort about yourself (internal) or about the opportunity (external)? If the feeling is about yourself or your limits or "I'm not good enough for this opportunity," then it is a feeling of scarcity. This feeling comes from a limiting belief steeped in your ego's small, limited concept of self. When you encounter this sort of thinking, you should lean into the challenge and grow through the discomfort. On the other hand, if the feeling of discomfort is about the opportunity not being right for you, then this is your intuition signaling not to engage this discomfort. This intuition is acting from a place of abundance, knowing this opportunity is not worth your time and energy. 

Let's use this sort of strategy. Consider this in the context of your yoga practice: a teacher presents you with the opportunity to hold a 5-minute plank in the middle of class, an opportunity to get stronger. There's no one who thinks, "That 5-minute plank isn't good enough for me!" the thoughts sound more like, "Oh, there's no way I could hold a plank so long; why would I try?". This also implies success is only holding a perfect plank for 5 whole minutes, but if you were to last 3 minutes, 2 minutes, or even 1 minute, you're going to get stronger, which is a win. Better yet, if you hold 3 1-minute planks with some breaks in between? But you have to start in order to grow. Now, there's a confusing in-between thought of resistance to the teacher who's presenting the opportunity: "Oh, jeez! She's out of her gourd; how could she expect that of us?!". I'd argue that, in this case, the teacher isn't asking you to trust her to hold you through a 5-minute plank, so her sanity or trustworthiness is actually irrelevant to the opportunity at hand. Instead, she's inviting you to trust yourself that if your plank becomes compromised to the point that it becomes more destructive than productive. Now, if the teacher was saying, "Kick up to handstand, I'll catch you" while she's sitting in the opposite corner of the room, then your trust in her ability to catch you is relevant to the opportunity. Maybe you sit this one out unless, of course, you trust yourself to catch yourself! Really, it always comes back to developing this deep trust of self: trusting yourself not to be reckless and balancing that with a trust in yourself not to cut yourself short out of fear. As we mentioned at the end of the last chapter, trust is developed by consistently showing up as your best. Show up in each moment over and over again as your bravest and most caring self, and you'll learn to trust that balance.

Where is my Intuition? Gut, Heart, Head & Beyond

Unlike our analytical mind, which resides mostly between our ears, our emotional intelligence is distributed throughout the body. The analytical mind is very loud. It presents itself as thoughts spelled out as words. The emotional mind is more cryptic. It speaks in sensations that must be listened to. Yoga tradition tells us that we have main centers of intuition throughout the body, namely the gut, heart, third eye, and source. We can use this as a map to direct our instruments for listening to our intuition.

Gut Feelings

Our stomach is a massive center of intuition in the body that we don't always listen to. Discomfort in the stomach could be a purely physical reaction to some food ingested. However, there are many times we have an uneasy feeling in our stomach that is not an acute food reaction but an intuitive signal.

We can now apply some analytical thinking to the goal of better listening to our intuition rather than viewing these forms of intelligence as diametrically opposed. In any process of listening, it's really important to set up the conditions for a good signal-to-noise ratio. In order to clearly listen to the intuition of your gut, it's best to cultivate a deep understanding of your body's reactions to the food, drink, and drugs that you ingest. We can analytically study the physical sensitivities and reactions we have to various foods and choose not to ingest foods that upset our stomach, clouding our ability to listen to the intuitive signals of the gut. On the other hand, when life happens, and we do choose to ingest things that we know upset our stomachs, our self-awareness will allow us not to confuse the bloating from a food sensitivity for an intuitive hit.

The Manipura chakra is your energy center of autonomy. It is a defender of your experience as legitimate and acts to defend your freedom to pursue a life that suits you. When something threatens our autonomy or ability to make decisions freely, our gut can get cranky. Sometimes, our gut can tell us when someone is not trustworthy (lying or withholding information hampers your freedom to act in an informed way) or a situation is demanding too much of us, not leaving enough capacity for choice. Our gut sends intuitive signals about external instances of injustice.

Let's explore some common gut sensations and what intuitive meaning they might hold:

• Butterflies in the stomach: This sensation is often associated with excitement or nervousness about a forthcoming event or decision. It can signal that something significant is about to happen and may warrant further attention or consideration. This one is interesting because it's just saying, "Pay attention; this is important to you." It's not really directional, either positive or negative. You don't get butterflies around situations that aren't important to you.

• A sinking feeling: Sometimes, when faced with a decision or situation that doesn't align with our values or intuition, we may experience a sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach. This sensation can serve as a warning sign that something isn't right and may prompt us to reassess our choices.

• A sense of clarity or calm: On the other hand, when we're on the right path or about to make a decision that aligns with our true selves, we may experience a sense of calm or clarity in our gut. This sensation can affirm that we're moving in the right direction and can give us the confidence to proceed.

• Feeling physically ill: In some cases, our gut may react strongly to situations or people that are harmful or toxic to us. This can manifest as feelings of nausea or discomfort in the stomach, indicating that we should distance ourselves from the source of the negativity.

Heart Feelings

Similarly, the heart sometimes responds to physical demands, increasing its heart rate based on physical activity or threats, and the heart also has intuition and predictive capacity. Our Anahata chakra is our center of compassion, love, and harmony. It gives us intuitive information about the people and situations in our life and their harmony, resonance, and alignment with our purpose and values. The most obvious signals of the heart can be really tricky to make sense of. Does a racing heart indicate enthusiasm and passion or a sense that a situation is unsafe? Is the elevated heart rate preparing to chase or run away from? However, less physiologically measurable sensations in this area of the body have a slightly better signal-to-noise ratio:

• Tightness or Constriction: A tight or constricted feeling in the chest area may indicate that something isn't in alignment with your heart's wisdom. It could suggest that a decision or situation is causing you stress, discomfort, or emotional turmoil, prompting you to reconsider your choices.

• Broad Expansiveness: A postural sense of being broad across the chest, as if the breast bone was lightly floating off the heart, indicates a sense of embodied confidence. This posture causes you to take up space and a desire to be seen. Generally, this posture makes it easy to look up and out at the world, indicating that the internal world feels grounded.

• Collapse: A postural sense of the chest caving in, putting a heaviness on the heart, indicates a lack of confidence, generally making the body smaller, indicating a desire to disappear. This also naturally brings the gaze down towards the body, which suggests that something about the internal world needs examination.

The wisdom of the heart is all too easy to ignore and override with the reason of the thinking mind. In closing this section on the intuition of the heart, I'll leave you with two quotes that say it better than I could: 

"Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out." ― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

"There have been many terrible situations that came as a result of ignoring that one small, quiet voice telling me to let them go. I could hear it, and I didn't listen. I could hear it, and I pushed forward anyway. I could hear my heart saying no, and my mind created 1,000 reasons to stay." - Audra Carmine (a fellow Portland Yoga Teacher here on Substack!)  Unsolicited and Inexpert Dating Advice

Perceptive Intuition

Your intuition is most commonly associated with your 6th chakra, the third eye, the energy center of perception. The upper chakras are all concerned more with our place in relationships with other beings and the universe and truth at large. In this way, your third-eye intuition is concerned with seeing things out there as they are more so than understanding yourself (which is more the focus of the lower chakras). This includes the intellectual ability to identify pieces and reason about the patterns of how those pieces connect. However, that process is largely one of thinking. Intuition is more about instantaneously understanding a truth rather than thinking about how the pieces fit together. We can get some clues from our visual system, which is one of our key senses of perception. Based on years of evolution, a lifetime of experience, and cultural conditioning, we have these baked-in instantaneous pattern recognition tools built into our visual perception that allow us to filter what's important from what's irrelevant and what is a threat from what is safe. This perceptual intuition is almost so automatic, so subconscious, that it's not really a choice to trust it or not. Wielding this perceptive intuition responsibly means developing a constant curiosity and awareness of your perceptual biases and a system of checks and balances for overcoming these biases to get closer to seeing things as they are. Having open-minded conversations with others who may have different perceptions from your own is one of the best ways to keep these biases in check. 

Crown Chakra: Spirit Guides and "Downloads" from Source

The final source of intuition is engaging with divine guidance through the crown chakra. This is a process of trusting epiphanies, intuitive hits, or "downloads" from the source. This can be a tricky one to explain. I believe that we all have spirit guides, entities larger than ourselves whose purpose is to protect us, free us from suffering, and lead us to a meaningful, rewarding path. Besides the existing tools we've mentioned of meditation and dream journaling, I can think of only one other actionable method for increasing your ability to listen to your spirit guides. This advice is so simple: If you want to listen, have quiet, singular-focus time in your life, especially on the mundane. Our modern world has implanted boredom evasion devices in our pockets and earbuds in our heads for dissociating and tuning out. This creates a constant need to be stimulated on top of the simplest parts of our lives. Instead, intentionally choose to make a point to engage with boredom: eating without watching TV, using the bathroom without scrolling, washing dishes without listening to a podcast, or driving without music. This is not a sure-fire way to have an epiphany. It just increases the surface area of your consciousness for being receptive to such signals from above. The yoga sutras talk a lot about the value of developing this singular focus or ekagrata in Sanskrit. One can do this with formal meditation practice like candle gazing or breath focus. But this ekagrata can be integrated as a meditative layer to the mundane tasks of your life, to similar benefit. This sort of thing is impossible to do all the time. Our culture is problematically obsessed with multi-tasking and avoiding boredom at all costs. The highest-paid engineers in the world are tasked with the problem of hi-jacking your attention. To think you will have the strength to resist these systems is futile and an attachment in and of itself. The idea here is to convince yourself it's good to be singly focused and even bored sometimes. Boredom and a profound sense of peace can look and feel quite similar, and it is in moments of profound peace that we are closest to the heavens, most likely to catch a whisper from one of our spirit guides. Don't miss the opportunity!

Catalyzing Your Intuition Through Communication and Tools: Astrology, Tarot, Psychics, etc.

Intuition is an experiential process. Communicating with intuitive beings (such as psychics or energy readers) or engaging with frameworks like tarot, astrology, or archetypes can help stimulate your intuition, but they don't provide direct intuitive truths. I like to think of these things like tuning forks. You play with them to see what resonates in your own experience and ignore anything that does not resonate. This resonance doesn't mean only taking in what you want to hear from these intuitive sources. It's quite obvious when you hear something that really excites and affirms you, and there's certainly value in this pleasant resonance. Other times, the resonance manifests as a strong resistance that should be studied. If someone tells you something you know right away has no bit of truth in it, you'd like just kind of laugh it off and write it off as a silly thing of no importance. If they tell you something you don't want to hear but is of little importance, you'll quickly forget it. However, If someone says something that really pisses you off, there's some resonance there. If nothing else, this resistance is telling you that whatever they just said brushes up on some core beliefs of yours that, if disturbed, might really change how you organize your worldview. The same words can resonate very differently with different people. For example, the reaction to a dramatic line like "Your husband doesn't love you anymore" is easily dismissed by a wife who truly feels secure in that relationship, makes a wife concerned about that relationship very angry or upset (high emotional resonance) and is hardly noticed by the wife who doesn't really care about her husband anymore either. At face value, all of these reactions have everything to do with the state of the wife and nothing to do with the truth of the statement itself. This is really important: you engage with these sorts of intuitive resources to study your reaction and gain some information about what's important to you and some self-awareness about what blind spots you might have around those important things. 

Do not go to a psychic or an astrology app seeking literal truths. Instead, treat them as a partner in your own self-study: they probe you with different stimuli to get out your typical grooves of thinking and provide a container for you to study your reactions to those stimuli. Never defer your intuition to external sources; rather, you can seek to augment your intuition with external sources. You always have to pay attention and sort through your experience autonomously. In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance of not blindly trusting medical professionals. This is really just the same sentiment for intuitive types and new-age healers. These people are valuable people to work with but can't be trusted to do all the work for you. Trust yourself above all else to integrate the advice that serves you and leave the rest.