How to harness Intuition and Why it is a piece to living a meaningful life

I remember once, being scared as hell to ask this girl, that I had been planning to ask to prom for like 2 weeks(Just for the ask). Once I finally mustered up the courage to go throw all my chips on the pot, seemingly, she accepted with gratitude.  I was blown away.  Everyone has felt this feeling more than once and Id like to explain some of the mystery behind these feelings and why they paid off in the end.

That was intuition telling me to go after it, and disregard that fear of rejection because my intuition knew I wanted to do it. “What’s on the other side of fear.” – Jamie Foxx. Ray Charles replied, “Nothing”. Every single highly successful/effective person will tell you, with confidence, that developing and following their intuition has been the most effective tool for building the path in cultivating meaning and happiness in their life.

There’s that saying to “follow your heart no matter what” and it’s pretty cliche, we can all agree. I would also argue that this cliche, in particular, is quite true.  Everyone has that feeling in their chest of an action that they would like to take to better the world, but the logical, frontal cortex, portion of the brain argues with that feeling because of the fight or flight mechanism.That logical portion of the brain slowly burns out that inner desire to better the world, your intuition.

Also its easy to mix up that intuition with the evil pleasure driven voice in your head telling you to do it for all these selfish reasons. The way you can get by this is by asking yourself, “will this be a positive thing for the world to have, or is this an act of selfishness and greed?”

Listed below some techniques found to be very helpful in developing and harnessing that inner compass, called intuition.

  • Consciously working through memories that cloud my judgement and awareness(This is a spinoff of the practice used by Jordan Peterson, a renowned psychology professor at the University of Toronto, and he has created a platform with another psychologist that has done 20 years of study on this subject. You can find more information on it here, selfauthoring.com)
    • I do this by writing and answering the following questions in my journal(Ill explain how these points create a loophole for your mind to skip past the hurtful memories in another post)
      • What happened?
      • What were the effects of this happening?
      • What would you do if thissituation came up again?
      • What did you learn?
    • Meditate on relaxing to pretty much de-clutter my mind and get into my body.
    • Ask myself “if I Must do this, or if I Should do this”
      • I learned this from Elle Luna, a New York Times Bestselling author
      • She uses this practice to see if she Must(She feels a calling towards this action) vs. she should(What others think she should do)
    • Showering and Cold Water helps get you into your body, instead of your head.
    • Many others…

Why intuition is key to living a happy, meaningful life

Tim Ferriss, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs,  Kevin Rose, Chase Jarvis, Joe Rogan, Mark Cuban and many others say that their intuition is their most prized possession because without it , they would not be where they are today.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in concentration camps for 3 years during WW2, explains in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, that any man that had a reason and a will to live survived the death camps. The men that talked about when their next meal was, or when they get out…or how much they hated a guard, none of these men survived.  The ones that said, I will see my family again, and I will get out of this death camp were the ones that survived. There’s another layer of being than just the physical nature of things, when someone truly puts their mind to something, truly amazing things can be accomplished, under any circumstances, given Viktor Frankl’s argument for a reason to live.

Viktor Frankl’s reasoning ties into intuition because the men that chose the right reason to live, “Im going to see my family again”, “I will get out of this death camp”, and actually believed these ideals at heart were the only survivors. Why these men chose this reason to live is because they knew that indulging in the pleasures of conversing about hate for the guards, or the longing for the rare occasion for the beans to be in the bottom of their soup bowl, was not an endeavor in which empowerment would prevail…. They knew this in their soul.

Many people take the easy road, but let us embark on the adventure on what lightens our soul and the souls of others. As Christopher Columbus did, as Lewis and Clarke did, and as The United States of America did, making a difference little by little leads to a wonderful life worth living.

Thank you for reading… Have a damn good day, night or whatever yo.