Friday, April 3, 2015

An Exercise for Developing Intuition

Making decisions has been hard for me. I have gotten better at it, but I am still searching for ways to decide  that feel right. I know that too much information can paralyze me, leaving me sorting through options. Is this better? Someone else is doing that. Should I do that as well? What is right for me?

One big piece of this struggling to decide is struggling to listen to the voice inside. It seems like there are too many clamoring voices. How do I know which voice is an intuitive nudge and which one is just wishful thinking? I need to find a way to get to that place of awareness where that answer becomes clear.

So, I have been reading about intuition and how to allow it to surface. One interesting exercise that I have come across is called Open Focus. It has been developed by Dr Lester Fehmi of the Princeton Medical Center. It goes something like this. We need to imagine the space between different points in the body. What we are trying to do is diffusing our attention and letting it cover a larger area, instead of  trying to focus on a single point. This helps reduce anxiety, tension and inhibition . It helps us lose our preoccupation with a sense of time. We feel more expansive, more attuned to the wisdom that gets lost in the chatter.

The questions go like this: Can you imagine the space between your eyes? Can you imagine the space between your ears? Can you imagine the space inside your throat, between your shoulders, between your hips? Can you imagine that the area between your ankles and knees is filled with space? Can you imagine that your spine is filled with space? And so on and so forth.

We are not trying to come up with some answer such as "There are two inches between my eyes." What we are trying to do is imagine and experience that space. If we only have a vague feeling or sense of it in the beginning, that's okay. There is no right way to do this. We are learning to let our attention become expansive and move over a larger area.

When we can do this, we can become more flexible about shifting from narrowly focusing on something to a state in which we lose self-consciousness and where time slows down. This is the kind of state we need to access to tap hidden stores. This is the space from which insights and images will start bubbling up.

Of course, we can't make ourselves have intuitive insights. But we can create a space where they are more likely to happen. This exercise is one way of clearing the way.

Would you be willing to give it a try? It might be that the intention to learn how to tune into intuition might actually make it more likely to happen.

As I work with this, I will keep you updated on how much it worked for me, or not.          

2 comments:

  1. Love it. Would love to hear about your experience here. I feel I let too much of my left brain thinking guide my life, and would love to learn how to tap into my insights.

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    1. Thank you ! I have been trying it, and I definitely feel a difference. I will do this more regularly, and then write down my experiences in a post later on.

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