Meditation To Expand Your Intuition
“Quiet the mind and the Soul will speak.”
~Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
Ancient shamans, intuitives and healers were once widely revered and highly respected among the indigenous cultures throughout the ages of humanity’s past. These days, despite the cloud of modern skepticism brought on by science and the hierarchy of religion, healing artists and shamans are still being sought out for their soulful guidance and insight.
Perhaps you’ve discovered that such skepticism cannot stop the natural inherent intuitive nature you’re endowed with from operating. If you’ve been thinking about how to deepen your natural intuitive abilities, we’ll be diving into this topic over the next few months. In this article I’ll cover one thing that all ancient intuitives, shamans and healers have in common that you need to know about.
Quieting the Mind to Hear the Soul Speak
Doesn’t it make sense that if there’s too much noise in a restaurant, you can’t hear your date speaking? Or if the music is too loud at a dance venue, you can’t get to know your new dance partner? So it is with developing your intuition, if you make no effort to practice quieting the mind how will you be able to hear the quiet whisperings of the Soul? Thus, meditation is the first step in personally training & enhancing your natural intuitive skills. Jaya Ma Sati Bhagavati said it succinctly, “Quite the mind and the Soul will speak”.
Now, because socio-religio-cultural conditioning tends to sink into the nervous system pretty deeply, I have to address a common myth around the practice of quieting the mind. Meditation as a means to quiet the mind, is not the same as “giving up your free will so that any unseen entity can take it over”. Yes, that’s a common concern I’ve heard, that if a person sits still and allows the mind to be clear, then something “bad” will inhabit their mind and control their actions and choices. Personally, I see this as a means for the religious hierarchy to restrict the normal, human and ethical powers of self-evaluation in order to keep (scare or limit) people “in the fold”. This argument has little to do with you practicing your own human power of free will.
Instead, “meditation” or “quieting the mind” will enhance your degree of “noticings”. What is a “noticing”? It’s a simple observation that serves as a feedback loop for yourself. Noticings are evidence of enhanced intuitive skill. Think of what it means when you miss things and proceed without the right information. Now think of an instance when you had a “noticing” and you paid attention and took action based on that information. It may have helped you save the day. So practicing regularly to quiet your mind through a mediation practice, will enhance your noticing of things and increase your intuitive power.
Now with that myth out of the way, let’s talk about what meditation really is. It isn’t something that you “do” necessarily as much as it’s a state of consciousness that arises within you while sitting in stillness; in silence. It seems easy enough, but when you consider how unruly your mind is, how addicted it is to thinking, judging, worrying, fidgeting, you’ll discover that sitting with a quiet mind isn’t as easy as you thought. Also, I am not recommending the type of guided meditation that keeps your mind occupied in visualizations and music the whole time. All ancient shamans, intuitives and healers (and miracle workers like the Lord Christ) spent time in solitude and silence to contemplate stillness so they could tune into the whisperings of their Soul’s; to be still so they could hear their Soul speak. This involves developing a simple two step process.
The Two Aspects of Practice
There are two aspects to a fruitful meditation practice. The first step is the act of sitting in stillness and gently focusing, which stimulates an automatic sort of expansiveness. This is what Jaya Ma Sati Bhagavati is referring to when she said to “quiet the mind”. The second step is related to mindfulness; it’s a reflective understanding of what you experienced in your stillness session and is a beginning aspect of Jaya Ma’s quote, “and the Soul will speak”. For this reason, I highly recommend getting a meditation journal, to record your personal experiences, noticings and thoughts. You might also record questions that arise because these will lead you to new insights about the process, your own concerns and personal inquiries.
Because I come from an energy healing background my take on meditation includes the consideration of you as an energy-being, so I recommend spending a few minutes moving the body as a means to get the energy within your body circulating. If you’ve been sitting, stand up and do some light bouncing; spinal twists to the right and to the left; hip rotations to the right and to the left; shoulder rotations forward and backward; chin to chest and then looking to the sky; then turning your head back and forth looking to the right and then left repeatedly for 6-12 reps. This is so that the energy (which contains information) can flow more freely through your body, unimpeded. For your own observation and fun experimentation, you might want to check in with your body, to gauge any pain or tenseness you might have and take the opportunity to rate it on a scale of severity, 1-10 with 10 being most severe. Write the number down so you don’t have to keep track of it during your meditation.
The Practice in Stages
Stage 1 (Beginning) You may decide to set a timer at your first few sittings. If you haven’t practiced before, start with five minutes, and work towards longer sessions. Eventually, you’ll be able to sit for an hour as you practice, because it’ll start feeling so good you won’t want to stop. If you don’t set a timer, simply let yourself end the session when it feels right to do so.
- Sit in a comfortable upright position, without leaning on anything. It doesn’t have to be on the floor. Connect your tongue to the top of your palate, because it connects your front meridian to the meridian that runs up along your back over your head to the top of your palate, thereby activating your vibratory frequency. Anything that activates and aligns your frequency, makes you a better receiver of your Soul’s whisperings.
- Close your eyes and verbally or internally affirm gratitude to the All That Is and All Your Guides and Teachers for this communal moment you are allowing yourself. Thank your Higher Soul for all the guidance it’s sending your way. Thankfulness greases the wheel for receiving information and getting hits.
- Now bring your gentle attention to the tip of your nose and let it remain there as you focus and let your attention settle in. As you do so observe what happens to the mind-noise, but do not control or follow any thoughts; instead keep focused on the tip of your nose. Do this until you feel more still internally.
- Then become gently aware of the air passing in and out of the nostrils without controlling your breathing; simply be aware. Observe as the stillness increases and expands. You might notice your body relaxing or your mind getting more and more quiet, but keep focused on the air passing on the nostrils. You will likely find your experience of stillness deepening or intensifying. Stay here as long as it takes to experience more quiet. You don’t have to rush to the next step and doing so will defeat the purpose of your practice. When you feel ready for more quiet, move to the next step.
- When next you notice the air going into your nostrils, follow that breath all the way down to your heart chakra (chest area) and allow your lungs to expand fully to take in a deep breath and hold it in at the top for 3 seconds before you release it and exhale letting it rest at the bottom for 3 seconds. Maintain your awareness at the tip of the nose and your chest area. The cultivation of the love energy in your heart space is needed to open up your intuitional skills; clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, claircognizance. Let your awareness deepen by either visualizing a radiant pinkish orange sunrise in your heart space and or by sending love to your heart chakra by expressing words of appreciation and heartfelt gratitude. Feel the activation of your chest area and let yourself enjoy the love energy flowing through you.
- Since the heart chakra dissolves all lower vibrational energies that make up the mind-noise let yourself see the rays from the sunrise in your heart transmuting any thought forms of doubt, self-deprecation, self-judgment or resentment. With every breath feel the negative mind noise being transmuted into pinkish golden light that fills your entire body. Let yourself enjoy the radiance of the light within you, for any length of time that feels right.
- When you are ready to emerge, deepen your breath and feel your whole body; move your hands and feet and end your session with words of gratitude for the energy, the stillness and the forthcoming intuitive skills you are cultivating. Then open your eyes and begin to journal.
Logging Your Experiences
Stage 2 (The Hearing) Next is taking the opportunity to create a relationship with your Intuitional Self, through journaling after each session. You’ll begin to notice that there are parts of you that exist in your consciousness that are not the Real You. You’ll begin to notice that the feeling of quiet you experience feels more like the Real You than all the other thoughts you tend to identify with during the busy day. Mindfulness is the both the act and quality of discriminating between the voices or thoughts of judgment, fear or worry (which are all related to past parts of yourself) and the voices or thoughts or noticings of the Real You which constitute your Intuitional Self. This voice has the quality of open acceptance, consideration and love.
It’s not uncommon to have experienced only a smidget of quiet, but that is valuable information, because remember, hearing through the mind noise is a process that requires practice and even practicing deserves some degree of recognition. If your psyche has doubts about your practice you can journal about that as well as any judgments you might have on yourself for not having a more “fruitful” session. Trust that any and all sessions are important and useful. Clamping down on yourself with judgmental thoughts and feelings, blocks your natural intuition, so that’s a worthwhile “noticing” to have. You can spend time writing about all the choices you have besides self-judgment and commit to living from a more kind & loving consciousness within yourself, as that will speed up your intuitive attainments.
In your journal, include how your body feels physically after the session noting if there were any changes in your pain or tenseness. Record the new number of intensity your body experiences after the session so you can compare it to the number you listed before. You might be surprised at the changes. If your pain or tenseness has increased, it’s likely that the energy is stuck and needs some help to get evenly flowing again, so make sure to do gentle movements to release excess energy that might be blocked in the joints and tissues.
Why The Heart Chakra First?
Why start at the heart chakra and not at the third eye? Because the heart chakra tends to contract when we are stressed out, and in order for your clairvoyance and other psychic skills to awaken, the body and mind need to be very, very relaxed and the heart chakra expanded. Focusing on the heart chakra, sets the tone for a natural kind of calm and relaxation to be at your fingertips when needed, and it also sets you up for having intuitional experiences faster, at a pace you can easily control. It quiets the mind faster than any other technique I know.
Another reason for starting at the heart chakra is that love is the most potent and powerful healing force, so focusing on this chakra first, spreads healing energy throughout your body. This heart based energy serves both for physical and emotional healing making you more available to hear your intuitive self speaking without so much of the mind-noise of stress and pain. When the heart has healing energy that it’s conducting your Soul will often speak to you through the heart.
Finally I recommend focusing on the dominant positive characteristics of the heart chakra: loving kindness and non-injuriousness throughout the month. This means striving to have zero injurious thoughts, words or actions, and pursuing loving kindness in all we think, say and do. This also means practicing forgiveness and non-judgment with ourselves and others, despite feeling any tensions or anger in the process of evolving. Remember that all feelings are valid, but they are not the Ultimate Truth of Who You Are. You can always return back to the experience of Who You Truly Are via meditation on the heart chakra. This represents a very effective purposeful means of channeling the voice of your Soul via the heart chakra.
What Things To Avoid
Things that will slow down your progress are impatience, longing, blaming, anger, and resentment, so be easy with yourself. Remember that when we are impatient it actually slows down the thing we are impatient to have. The most powerful thing you can do, is to forgive yourself for any impatience and continue in your practice to sense the love that you are, for it’s the realization of yourself as THAT, which will bring you the skills of intuition you're practicing for.
Next month we’ll be discussing the crown chakra! By then I think you’ll have a journal full of experiences and questions. Centering in the crown chakra, is the perfect way to cultivate the inflow of answers from the voice of your Higher Soul. If you are a bit ahead of that schedule and you want some clarification on what you’ve seen or experienced in your meditation sessions, feel free to book an online session with me through the online reader’s portal. I’m always happy to help you expand into the who of who you are constantly and beautifully becoming!
