Intuition is that inexplicable inner knowing or gut instinct that many of us rely on for spiritual guidance. However, even the most spiritually aligned can sometimes struggle to access or trust their intuitive wisdom. When our own intuition feels blocked, or like it’s just not working, we may find ourselves disconnected, overthinking, and off-center.
Recognizing what hinders our intuitive abilities is key to unblocking that trusted inner voice. This article explores common obstacles that can cloud intuitive clarity from a spiritual lens – including unresolved emotional issues, limiting beliefs, energetic imbalances, and external influences. Understanding how our intuition can be affected is the first step to removing the blocks and rebuilding a trusting relationship with our sixth sense.
Jump To:
- Spiritually, what is intuition?
- How do we use intuition?
- Why does developing trust with your intuition matter?
- 12 reasons your intuition may not be working to its fullest potential
- How to build trust with your intuition
- Bottom line
Spiritually, what is intuition?
Developing our intuition is a crucial part of having a spiritual awakening; spirituality and intuition are inextricably linked. Our intuition is the innate compass we’re each born with that guides us toward our soul’s unique purpose and connects us to our higher self. When our intuitive guidance is working well, we can rely on it to make better decisions in all aspects of our lives. It’s where flashes of inspiration, creativity, serendipity, and clarity all stem from.
Developing our intuition can deepen our mind-body-spirit connection along with the feeling of “one-ness” we have with the universe. At its most powerful, our “spiritual” intuition may provide information from our past experiences, subconscious beliefs, subtle external cues, and even other people’s knowledge or past life experiences.
How do we use intuition?
When used to its fullest potential, intuition is a powerful tool that can assist us with every decision we ever make. We’re often relying on our intuitive skills without even realizing it. We use our intuition when choosing a romantic partner, interpreting first impressions, making a tough decision, and reading other people.
Sometimes, after years of experience developing your intuition, it may even begin to feel like a psychic power. Good intuition allows you to make better snap decisions, determine people’s intentions, and connect to a deeper part of the people you love. Have you ever picked up your phone to call someone and when you look down at the screen, you already have a text or a missed call from them? This is one of the simple ways our intuition speaks to us: through chance encounters and serendipitous moments.
Why does developing Trust with your intuition matter?
Intuition is like having a second brain or a sixth sense – it provides a unique way of interpreting the world that we can’t get from our rational mind alone. Imagine if one day you woke up and you’d lost your hearing. Or your sight. Eventually, you would learn how to get along in and even enjoy the world again, but you would always be missing that one unique interpretation of your surroundings. This is what happens when our intuition isn’t working and we can’t hear our spiritual guidance anymore. It’s not dire or deathly, it’s just cheating yourself out of a more robust relationship with the external world.
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12 Reasons Your Intuition May Not Be Working To Its Fullest Potential
If you’re having a hard time hearing or heeding your intuition, chances are you are disconnected from your higher self. This can be disconcerting and uncomfortable but it’s nothing to worry about! The good news is, even if you’ve been feeling lost and off-center for a long time, you can always find your way back to your intuitive feelings. After all, your intuition is just your soul nudging you in the right direction for your own version of fulfillment. Let’s take a closer look at why your intuition may not be working to its fullest potential and how you can reconnect with that little voice.
Anxiety is masquerading as intuition
One of the biggest reasons that we may feel like we suddenly can’t trust our intuition or like our intuition is no longer working the way it used to is that we’re in a period of high anxiety. It can be hard to discern a gut feeling from a knee-jerk fear-based reaction. Ideally, we can learn to manage our anxiety so that we can hear the voice of our intuition more clearly. But in the meantime, this blog post can help you discern your intuition from your anxiety and begin rebuilding trust with your power of intuition.
How To Separate Your Intuition From Your Anxiety
Too Many Outside Opinions
The more aware you are of what other people in your life think you should do, the more complicated it becomes to follow your own internal guidance system. I get it. It can feel like a relief to share your challenges with anyone who will listen. The problem is, those people you’re talking to have their own lifetime worth of experiences that influence their opinion. Even if they truly have your best interest at heart, no one but you has access to your subconscious mind where many of the answers you’re looking for can be found.
You’ve been second-guessing gut feelings
If you’ve trained yourself to ignore your gut, aka your intuition, it becomes hard to hear the gentle nudges after a while. Many of us have learned to ignore our gut for the sake of fitting in, getting ahead, or conforming to expectations. If you haven’t been heeding the advice of your higher self for a while, you may need to learn how to tune-in to that voice again and connect with yourself on a deeper level to determine your true soul purpose and the direction your spiritual compass is pointing.
You Need To Meditate
Mindfulness meditation is one of the most powerful ways you can reconnect with your intuition. Since our intuition is part of our spiritual guidance system, a consistent spiritual practice is the best way to ensure that it’s working optimally. When you meditate and clear your mind of outside noise, all that’s left is a conscious awareness of the present moment. This allows you to feel, in real-time, the gentle nudge of your authentic self guiding you in the right direction. Without meditation, we can lost track of what is ours vs what is noise from the external world.
Your Third Eye Chakra Is Blocked
When your third eye chakra is blocked, your connection with “Source” or “Spirit” is interrupted. This disconnection can result in both physical symptoms and emotional ones like feeling anxious, lost, or purposeless. We need all seven of our energy systems to be in alignment to feel like our most fulfilled selves. If your Third Eye, or Anja, chakra, is blocked, your intuition may feel cloudy. You can open this chakra through meditation, breathwork, yoga, and other practices.
For a full Guide to the Third Eye Chakra including how to tell if it’s blocked and how to heal it, check out this article: 18 Signs Your Third Eye Chakra Is Blocked And How To Heal It
18 Signs Your Third Eye Chakra Is Blocked And How To Heal It
Too Much Screen Time
It’s no secret that we spend more time than ever before in front of little blue screens. Unfortunately, technology distracts us from our inner worlds, makes us impatient, increases our anxiety, and keeps us in our heads. In other words, technology is interfering with our intuitive abilities. One of the best decisions you can make for honing your intuitive skills is to spend less time in front of screens and make sure that you’re finding a way to ground yourself after you do use them.
You’ve been busy people-pleasing
There’s a big difference between the voice in your head that reminds you of outside expectations, and the inner voice that points you in the direction of what’s authentic to yourself. It’s important to learn who’s talking in there. Are you making choices based on your conditioning to fit in and make other people happy? If your default mode is to push your personal needs aside to keep everyone else happy, chances are you’ve turned down the volume on your inner guidance. Try to ask yourself more often, “what do I want?”
You Need To Spend Time In Nature
I’m not saying you have to go camping in the middle of the forest if that’s too far outside your comfort zone. But every single human is deeply connected to the natural world we live in. When we don’t spend enough time in nature, we can feel ungrounded and disconnected – clouding our intuitive minds. It’s proven that the sounds of trees in the winds and waves in the ocean have a therapeutic effect, triggering serotonin and dopamine release. It’s from this place that you’ll find your intuition easier to hear and explore.
Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol interferes with our intuition in two ways. First, when we’re drinking, the volume of our connection to our higher selves is turned way down. And second, after we’ve had a few drinks, the volume of our anxiety is turned way up! And as we covered above, anxiety sometimes likes to masquerade as intuition – making it tough to discern which voice is talking to us. To maintain a strong connection with your intuition, you need to be able to hear your inner guidance at full volume which is much easier with a clear and calm mind. Sorry Happy Hour!
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Sugar Consumption
Sugar completely derails our normal ebbs and flows in energy. When we consume more sugar than our bodies really need (which is basically none) we feel both overly anxious/stressed and overly exhausted throughout the day. These spikes and crashes in blood sugar are stressful to our bodies and our psyches! We’re not meant to experience such drastic peaks and valleys in our blood sugar and the resulting anxiety and exhaustion make connecting to your intuition more challenging. When you eat too much sugar, it becomes difficult to sift through the loud signals your body is producing and determine which are chemical alarms and which are intuition alarms. To harness your full spiritual power, you may want to consider cutting back on sugar consumption.
Processed Food Consumption
I’m a big fan of cliches, and this happens to be one of my favorites: You Are What You Eat. Your body is working all the time to convert what you eat into usable energy for you to walk, think, work, play, and exist. Your body is VERY good at its job. But do you believe you’re functioning optimally when you’re made out of cheap, smelly fast food? Doesn’t it make intuitive sense (see what I did there) that you’re a more well-oiled machine when you’re fueled by life-giving, fresh, healthy, vibrant, natural foods? To develop your intuition, start by developing your relationship with food.
You’ve been trying to force it
When you’re feeling disconnected from your intuition, it can start to feel like a desperate matter that you heal your sixth sense. Unfortunately, f you try to wrestle your mind to the ground to give you what you want, you’ll get nothing in return but resistance and deeper confusion.
Try to use your meditation to continually bring your focus back to your internal world rather than your chaotic thoughts. Don’t try to force an answer to come to you on any specific topic. The best thing you can do is let go. Your inner being, your spiritual guidance, knows the answers you’re looking for and will present them to you in the form of intuition as soon as you make the space to receive them.
How to Build trust With your intuition
If you feel like your intuition has not been working lately, it’s time to rebuild your self-trust and remember how to hear and heed that little voice in your head. Building trust with your intuition is a huge step in personal growth that can change your life. Here are a few ways that you can learn to trust your intuition again.
Discern intuition from anxiety
As stated above, anxiety loves to masquerade as intuition. Anxiety often leads to knee-jerk reactions based on fear which can be easy to mistake for intuitive decisions. We are biologically programmed to avoid “dangerous” situations and anxiety leads us to believe we’re in danger all the time.
Check out this article, How To Separate Your Intuition From Your Anxiety, for an in-depth look at how to make this distinction.
Listen to your body
Our bodies give us a lot of feedback about our emotions – we just have to be listening. True intuition feels calm, secure, and confident in the body. When you have an intuitive idea come to you and you’re not sure if you should trust it, listen to your body. If you feel shaky, sweaty, disoriented, panicked, etc., you might be right to hold off on making any big decisions. These can be warning signs that you’re acting from a place of fear or scarcity, rather than the deep knowing of your higher self.
Think back on times your intuition has been right
One of the best ways to begin rebuilding trust with your intuition is to think back to times when your gut feeling was right and you made a better choice because of it. All of us have times that we look back on and say, “Somehow I just knew.” It’s easy to write these times off as chance or coincidence but the fact is, we’ve all relied on an intuitive feeling for snap decisions in the past and have been amazed at how well it turned out.
Meditate
Meditation is a valuable tool to reconnect with your inner being. Oftentimes, when it feels like our intuition isn’t working, it’s because we’re getting distracted by outside noise and opinions. It can be very hard to hear the quiet nudge of your intuition over the outside world. Try committing to a short meditation practice every day to clear your mind and realign with your soul path. This will remind you what it feels like to have answers come from within rather than outside of yourself.
Start with small decisions
If you’re just starting to build trust with your intuition again, you don’t need to start with the life-changing decisions right away. Don’t make decisions with potentially big losses that could interfere with the bigger picture of your life. Start by listening to your intuition on small, inconsequential things like what to have for lunch or which coffee shop to go to. As you become more used to turning inwards and listening for your intuition with little things, it will naturally get easier to hear that little inkling for bigger decisions as well.
Keep your values in mind
At the end of the day, your intuition is an extension of you. If your intuition isn’t working to its fullest potential right now, that’s okay! The right answer is still inside of you. Reflect on your morals, values, and common sense. Oftentimes, intuitive thinking is just the obvious answer. What decision is best for you, your future, and the people you care about? Will you be proud you made this decision in the future? Next time your intuition feels hard to reach, fall back on your values – they stem from the same place.
Bottom Line
Developing and trusting our intuition is a vital part of living an authentic, spiritually-aligned life. While many potential obstacles can cloud our intuitive wisdom, from unresolved emotional issues to energetic imbalances and unhealthy habits, the good news is that we can always find our way back to that deep inner knowing. By being mindful of the factors that interfere with intuition, practicing meditation and spending time in nature, discerning intuition from anxiety, reflecting on past times our gut instinct was right, and starting small by trusting our intuition on minor decisions, we can rebuild trust with our sixth sense and get back on the right path with our spiritual guidance.
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Mary Christina
Hey, I'm Mary! My background is in Psychology and I'm a certified Health Coach and Meditation Teacher. I'm also a mental health advocate and believer in personal development as medicine. I write because I'm hopeful that my experiences and learnings as a human are helpful to you--wherever you are.