Welcome to Soul Whispers at The Edge
Welcome to the inaugural Soul Whispers column. Your soul has led you here and is thrilled you’re curious about exploring how your soul speaks to you. When opening to soul speak, your first stop is instinct and your second one is intuition. Both instinct and intuition are languages of your soul and are often misinterpreted as the same thing. They are not. Instinct and intuition are 2 different soul languages. Let’s begin by painting a picture of your instinct and intuition.
Instinct and Intuition – Same or Different?
This is a common question and many feel instinct and intuition are the same, but they’re actually not. They’re very different. The difference between intuition and instinct is best pictured as a door is to a home. Your instinct is the door and your intuition is the home.
Therefore, instinct is a subset that acts like a doorway into your intuition. Your instinct gives you only a YES or NO answer and doesn’t develop into anything more than that. Your instinct remains the same no matter how often you use it.
On the other hand, your intuition has a complete conversation with you, develops over time and becomes a confidante or advisor for anything going on in your life and business.
Let’s explore instinct first as it’s the most common for people.
Following Your Instinct
Your instinct is your doorway into intuition. It’s the initial knock and gives you your initial YES or NO reaction.
“Is this person my soul mate?”
“Should I hire this candidate?”
“Can I go in this direction to get to my appointment on time?”
If your answer is a NO, you’ll feel it in your body immediately. This is where the statements, ‘gut instinct’ or the ‘hair on the back of my neck stood up’ come from as your body is giving you feedback about whether something is good for you or not.
The NO answers are stronger as they’re the instinctive fight or flight response. Your YES answers are subtler. In fact, they may not generate any feeling at all. The key is determining how your body communicates instinctively with you.
For many, your instinctive feelings do arise in your belly or your neck, but for others, your body responds differently. The key, therefore, is to figure out how your instinct responds to a YES or NO question. Your body may change temperature, make you shutter, give you goosebumps or even cause a soft flutter on your arms or legs.
Once you determine how your body instinctively gives you nudges, you’ll be able to rely on your instincts as a first response to enter the home of your intuition.
Using Your Intuition
Once you realize what a YES or NO feels like in your body, you can start exploring and entertaining a more in depth conversation. When you do, you’ll be talking with your intuition.
Your intuition begins as a whisper, inking or nudge, but over time involves impressions, stories, images or even paragraphs of conversation with you. Your intuition may even speak in volumes with only one word.
Once you develop your intuition, it becomes your guide, advisor and confidante.
Learning how your intuition speaks with you is also key and ironically, may not have anything to do with how your instinct makes itself known. If your instinct involves your gut, it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll have sensation or feeling conversations with your intuition. So, separate your expectation of how your intuition converses and instead open yourself up to you.
How Your Intuition Speaks to You
The clair’s are a type of indicator on how your intuition speaks with you. There are 4 commonly known ones; clairaudience (hear messages), clairvoyance (see images), clairsentience (feel sensations) and claircognizance (just knowing). The most common clair is clairsentience and this makes sense as it relates to ‘gut instinct’. However, these are not directly tied together. Someone who uses their gut for an initial reaction, for example, may actually be clairvoyant.
Additionally, there are lesser known clairs, including; clairalience (smelling) and clairgustance (tasting), clairempathy (emotions) and clairtangency (touch).
Whatever your intuitive conversation type (clair), you want to give your intuition the space it needs for you to be able to hear it, initially, and converse with it, ultimately.
Why?
Your Intuition Shut Down
Although everyone is intuitive, your intuition most likely hasn’t been given a chance in your life. For most people, your intuition doesn’t automatically just start speaking to you the minute you decide you want to use it.
You’ve probably systematically shut your intuition down so many times it’s gone quiet.
There are layers to the intuition shutdown. Usually it begins at a young age, with your instinct, when you’re told to eat when you’re not hungry, sleep when you’re not tired or you’re put on a schedule that defies the body’s natural inclination.
The next layer involves shutting down your intuition by ignoring your imagination or negating your creativity if it doesn’t fit in with the expectations of other’s definition of creativity.
The further shutdown layer may involve you being chastised for ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’ or ‘knowing’ something that made the adults around you feel uncomfortable.
The final shutdown layer comes from you when you gas light yourself into putting other’s wants, needs and expectations above your own. Then your mind kicks in further to nail your intuition into a coffin as your mind rationalizes, tells stories and basically reaffirms the external view points and ignores your internal cues.
How to Get Your Intuition Back
You can bring your intuition back into your life when you reestablish your body connection with your instinct. Remember, your instinct is an excellent doorway into your intuition.
Next, determine how your intuition likes to converse (which clair are you?).
Finally, create time and space to be able to converse with your intuition. For many, breathing, yoga, walking in nature, working out, getting creative and meditating are excellent ways to reconnect. For others, these don’t work, so you can get out magical tools, such as pendulums or oracle cards. Or you can give yourself ways to observe and perceive what’s happening around you by noticing numbers, animals and dreams, giving you symbols and signs.
Developing and following your intuition is as natural as breathing once you’ve gotten back into the habit of speaking with your soul. Let’s review your instinct and intuition as a starting point.
Snapshot of Instinct and Intuition
Your instinct is:
- Subset of your intuition.
- Connection with your body.
- Gives you a Yes or No answer.
- Doorway into opening your intuition.
Your intuition is:
- A conversation.
- Develops as you follow it.
- Becomes an excellent advisor and guide.
- Is the home you want to live in forever.
Ultimately, your soul speaks to you in a variety of ways. Your soul speak is as unique as you are and is worth discovering. Your soul wants you to live the life of your dreams. Your instinct and intuition are here, so open the door and enter. Your soul awaits.
Listen to her new podcast, Your Star Path to Success, on your favorite channel or join the 22K+ others who’ve taken her 12-question Star Map Signature quiz to see how you’re living your soul mission.
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