How to Develop Your Intuition and Lead a Soul-Led Life

I've always felt called to be of service to the World in a deep and spiritual way, but for many years I did not know how to be confident in my intuition and path. While I knew that I was intuitive and often saw that my nudges were correct, I would ignore my inner knowing and find myself frustrated when I could have avoided a situation by trusting my intuition.

I can't really blame myself for ignoring these intuitive nudges though. Living and surviving in a society that requires us to constantly be on and available forces us to shut down our intuition, especially for sensitive people—but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Intuition is defined as the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. Many of us know that we are highly intuitive and want to develop our intuitive gifts, but we might not see how developing our intuition can support us in practical ways. But if we want to live a soul-led life and be of service to the world then it is absolutely essential to listen to and trust our intuition. 

For most of our lives we have been told that intuition isn’t real or worth listening to. We believe there is no way to “prove” intuition—although many of us who are highly intuitive have seen the proof of how powerful our intuition is. Even so, many of us have been raised and conditioned to only prioritize conscious reasoning or data that we can prove in a material and tangible way. Rather than trusting our own intuition we look outside of ourselves to validate our inner knowing. 

We might continuously seek the answers outside of ourselves for external validation: from books, websites, energy workers, and even astrologers. This can be really useful, but at the same time you might find yourself relying on the same tools you use for conscious reasoning rather than developing your own set of intuitive tools. 

If you’ve relied more heavily on conscious reasoning than your intuition, you might be amazing at validating your conclusions through books, research, or even experimentation. When it comes to listening to your intuition though, you don’t have a framework to process the information through. 

In reality both intuition and conscious reasoning are essential to life, creativity, innovation, and survival. We need to learn how to value intuition alongside other ways of knowing and understanding the world. 

So where can we find a framework that allows us to develop our intuitive abilities and reconnect to our inner guidance as we adopt new beliefs about our intuition? We need to begin by examine the existing program. 

Listening to our intuition and ourselves

We’ve received conditioning from many places that have influenced our beliefs. I like to think of this as the Land of Should and the Land of Supposed To. When we are living in the Land of Should we are listening to other people more than we are listening to ourselves. We might not prioritize things that are important to us because we think they are not worth spending time on or less important than the things we "Should" be doing. We might not express certain feelings because we think they are not “good” feelings. We also might ignore our own needs and the signals of our bodies.

If you’ve been ignoring your own wants and needs for a long time you are likely not using your intuitive gifts to their fullest potential. Your core unconscious beliefs and values are shaped by the conditioning you’ve received from society/parents/guardians/school/capitalism/etcetcetc. These are not necessarily the beliefs and values you hold. While you consciously might know you hold different beliefs and values, these conditioned beliefs and values still influence how you choose to use your energy and time and the risks you are willing to take to live a life that is different from others. 

From a survival perspective this makes sense because we are hardwired to seek safety with other people. If we are highly sensitive and empathic, we might have what others view as “loner tendencies.” This can be true even if we are extroverted people. Because we have evolved to survive in community we might view these loner tendencies as negative or even dangerous. As empathic people, we also tend to have people-pleasing tendencies and hate the feeling of letting other people down. This sometimes leads us to use our energy to execute more on other people’s wants and needs than our own. 

When we think about intuition we often think about having premonitions or just knowing things, but we don’t always think about the role intuition plays in decision making and energy management.  

Our physical bodies communicate important information about our capacity and what feels good and what doesn’t all of the time. We can use the signals and messages from our body as a core language for understanding our intuition. However this information might lead us in a different direction than we think we should go, effectively moving us from “The Land of Should” to “The Land of Sustainability.” In this instance, sustainability means what we can maintain throughout our lives as we move through different seasons. Our Soul will guide us in the most sustainable direction for us, but we need to listen to and trust the sensations we receive physically as valid sources of information. 

Living a Soul Led Life

Learning to live a Soul led life is not an overnight change. It can often feel like learning a new language—the language of intuition and your Soul! Your Soul has a purpose and mission in life and communicates the path you are meant to follow physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. When you ignore and bypass your intuitive nudges, you are also bypassing the wisdom of your Soul. You might not (and likely don’t) do this intentionally but because you aren’t fluent in the language yet. 

You might have a sense that something is off but not be able to quite put your finger on what it is. This might partially stem from years of bypassing the wisdom of your intuition in order to execute the same programs or choices as the people around you. 

Listening to your intuition can sometimes be the hardest thing for highly intuitive people to do! In software development, platforms are called “intuitive” when they are easy to use and require little to no instruction—but in our own lives listening to our intuition can often seem far from automatic. Let’s dig a little deeper into the software program analogy to see why this might be the case. 

Software is a set of instructions that execute tasks. The software executes the instructions when the user activates the command, so in order for the program to be executed it is essential that the user can easily understand how to activate the command. 

If the user is unsure how to activate the command then the software does not execute the instructions because they are not engaging in the process. Similarly if we are not engaging our intuition then it is unable to execute our inner program at the highest level. 

If the user goes to another software program they are more familiar with they will know how to activate the command and the program will be executed. In our lives we might continuously activate commands that we know—commands that are approved by the overculture—which will execute the approved programs we are most familiar with. 

When we begin to listen to our intuition more deeply we might find that there is a program that makes more sense to us but it isn’t the same program everyone else is using. Consider that intuition alone is often considered to be less reliable or frowned upon, even though it plays a significant role in our decision making every day. So while we intuitively or instinctively know which program will work best for us, we might have learned to override that intuition and execute the program everyone else is more familiar with. While we might prefer an open source, niche word processing software we probably still have to learn how to use Microsoft Word in order to “keep up.” 

This is a very intentional way of living in the world and usually not “the easy choice.” However, being guided by your Soul and living your life in service of your Soul is also not about sacrifice in the way I think we are often led to believe. In fact we often sacrifice more by living our lives through other people's programs and ignoring our own natural cycles. We can see this clearly on our own planet Earth, where the natural flow of energy has been frequently interrupted with different programs. 

Surrender Control

When we begin relying more on our intuition and less on “rational” ways of coming to conclusions there is often resistance because we feel we are giving up control. Even if we do not like the program we are operating under or we know that something feels unaligned we often continue executing the same program because we know the instructions and the outcomes that we will see. We might not like those outcomes but we at least know what to expect and feel a sense of control. 

When we rely on our intuition we have to surrender our desire to "know" everything. We can’t always be certain why our intuition is telling us something that we think should be different. For example, you might have had an experience where you were offered an opportunity that everyone else thought was amazing. The people around you might have been very positive about the opportunity you were given and felt that it would be something no one would pass up. You might have had a deeper feeling that this opportunity was not good for you, but bypassed that based on the information you were receiving from the people around you. You might have felt silly to say, “I don't want to do that,” because you didn’t feel you could back up your reasoning. Or you might have said you didn’t want to take the opportunity but came up with a reason you thought other people would see as valid even if it wasn’t something that was important to you. 

Either way, through time it might become clear why you felt the opportunity wasn’t right for you and your intuition might be validated after the fact. 

When we begin to listen to our intuition in the deepest ways we are able to trust our senses and make choices that don’t necessarily make sense on paper to others but make absolute sense to us. Here lies the sacrifice—the sacrifice is not giving up our pleasure but giving up our sense of control and external validation. In fact, listening to pleasure is also an essential part of listening to our intuition and living a Soul-led life. 

The biggest thing that helped me develop my intuition and fully commit to a Soul-led life was learning the language of astrology. This gave me an amazing framework for aligning with my natural energy cycles, getting super crystal clear on my Soul purpose, and surrendering my desire for control to the wisdom of the Cosmos.

Do you want to develop your intuition and align with your Soul led life using the language of astrology? Join Cosmic Cycles.