Strengthen Your Intuition With Visualization

Your intuition can be a powerful guide in any situation, helping you to avoid dangerous and detrimental experiences – or even leading you to the best opportunities to improve your life. However, as with any skill, the strength and intensity of your intuition will fade with disuse. If you are not accustomed to consulting your intuition, you’ll need to work on strengthening it before you can use it as a reliable guide. Intuition can be defined in different ways, but for the purposes of this article we’ll refer to it as the ability to perceive subtle clues from your environment that help you determine the best course of action in any situation. Visualization is the process of seeing specific images in your mind – or in other words, imagination. That may not seem to have anything to do with your intuition, but a regular visualization practice can help you strengthen your mental focus, which will help you to more easily tune into your intuitive insights. When you first get started, you’ll want to set aside a minimum of 15 minutes a day to visualize. It’s best if you can stick with the same time each day because you’ll train your mind to quiet down at that time. When you’re ready to begin your first session, take a few minutes to first get very relaxed and calm. You might do some deep breathing to let go of tension and scattered thoughts, then turn your attention inward and focus on how your body feels. Pay particular attention to your solar plexus area, your chest, shoulders, and the center of your forehead. Do you feel any sensations of tightness or tension in these places? At first you probably won’t feel anything at all; it will just feel neutral. Make a mental note about that feeling of neutrality because it’s the “default” state that you’ll experience when your intuition is not sending signals. Then, call up a mental image of yourself feeling confident, centered, and completely in tune with your inner guidance. There are various ways you can picture this; you can see yourself in a turbulent situation feeling very connected and stable within; you can imagine that you’re a sponge, soaking up clues and insights from your surrounding environment; or you can even see yourself connected by a rope of light to the universe and imagine that intuitive insights travel down this rope and into your consciousness. Any way you choose to imagine it, be sure your mental vision includes an image of yourself feeling balanced, connected and tuned in. Once you’ve got that image firmly embedded in your mind, be sure to carry it with you when you return to your normal routine. When you need to make a decision about something or find yourself in an uncertain situation, simply close your eyes and recall that mental image again. Focus on it until you once again feel in tune with your inner guidance, and pay attention to the areas mentioned earlier: solar plexus, chest, shoulders and the center of your forehead. How do these areas feel? When you’re receiving an intuitive insight, you’ll usually experience sensations such as tension, tightness, queasiness, tingling, or even temperature changes. Along with these physical sensations you’ll usually experience a hunch that lets you know whether a certain decision or situation would be beneficial or detrimental and you can act on that insight. It will likely take time and practice to get used to listening to your intuition and learning to trust it, but it can be such a powerful tool that you’ll never want to be without it once you learn how to work effectively with it.