How to Connect to Your Intuition: 3 Practices to Awaken Your Inner Guidance

TLDR: Connecting to your intuition is not about developing a special ability you don't already have. It is about creating the inner conditions that allow what is already present to be heard. These three practices, drawn from over two decades of personal spiritual work, are the foundation of everything I teach. They are simple. They are practical. And they work.

Table of Contents

• What Does It Mean to Connect to Your Intuition?

• Why Most People Struggle to Hear Their Intuition

• Practice One: The Soul Force Field Meditation

• Practice Two: The Body Tuning Exercise

• Practice Three: Automatic Writing

• A Note on Patience and the Long Game

What Does It Mean to Connect to Your Intuition?

There came a point in my own journey where I stopped asking if our intuition was real and started asking something more honest: how can I hear it speak more clearly?

I had been meditating twice a day for years, doing chakra work, keeping a dream journal, spending time in nature. I had developed a disciplined, sincere spiritual practice that I committed myself to every single day. Yet there were moments, especially when I found myself triggered or emotionally aroused, when it felt a bit challenging to see the forest for the trees.

What I eventually came to understand is this: intuition is not something that comes and goes. It is something we must learn to soften and attune to. Our intuition has been working with us and through us long before we noticed or develop language for it. The question has never been whether we have access to it. The question is whether we have created the inner conditions in which our intuition can finally be heard clearly.

That is what these three practices are for.

Why Most People Struggle to Hear Their Intuition

Our culture is extraordinarily good at being noisy. We are trained from a very young age to value productivity over presence, doing over being, external validation over inner knowing. We learn to outsource our authority to experts, institutions, other people's opinions, and today we often subject ourselves to a relentless scroll of information that follows us everywhere we go.

None of that is inherently bad. However, it does make it challenging to hear the subtle signals loving awareness is often sending to us. What we need are some tools for settling in, quieting the noise and finding some stillness. Stillness of both our body and mind, so that we can access something deep within that has something to say about where we are and where we’re going. These tools aren’t complicated. They don’t require any special equipment or background or belief system. They really just require your sincere commitment and your time.

Take what serves you here, and leave what does not.

Practice One: Conscious Breathing Meditation

Everything in my practice begins here.

The conscious breathing meditation is a practice of intentional stillness, a way of consciously dropping out of the noise of the day and into the quiet center of our own loving awareness by tuning into our breath. It is, in my experience, the single most effective thing we can do to begin opening up to our intuition, because it creates the conditions that intuitive guidance requires above all others: intention and space.

Think of it this way. Intuitive information is always present, the way radio signals are always present in the air around you. But if there is too much static, too much mental chatter, too much noise, you cannot receive the signal clearly. Meditation clears the static. It does not create the signal. It simply allows us to hear what was already there.

Here’s how to begin.

Find a quiet place, sit comfortably or lay down, close your eyes, and take three deep, intentional breaths— I call these energy clearing breaths. Inhale fully, drawing the breath all the way to the crown of the head. Exhale completely, releasing not just the air but the energy of the day, the mental to-do lists, the unfinished conversations, the background hum of worry, send it all down through your feet and your body, and into the ground. Do this three times until you feel genuinely present.

Then simply turn your awareness to the breath in your chest. Allow your mind to be focused on the breath as an anchor. Allow it to be still and focused. When thoughts arise, and they will, acknowledge them gently, let them pass and return your focus to your breath. You are not trying to stop thinking. You are practicing the art of not surfing every wave the mind sends you. Return, again and again, to the breath, to the heartbeat in your chest, to the present moment.

As you settle into a focused stillness, try asking one sincere question and then waiting in open, receptive silence. "What do I need to know today for my highest spiritual good?" That question has been the foundation of my practice for over fifteen years. It is the question that began to change everything.

You may not receive a dramatic answer the first time, or the tenth. That is completely fine. What you are building, through consistent practice, is a relationship. The same way any meaningful relationship deepens with time and attention and honest showing up, your relationship with your own intuition deepens through the same process.

Start with five minutes a day. Do it at the same time each day if you can. And do not underestimate what is happening in those quiet minutes, even when nothing seems to be happening at all. The practice and capacity builds brick by brick, breath by breath, one day at a time.

Practice Two: The Body Tuning Exercise

Your body is one of the most reliable intuitive instruments you have. It knows things before your mind catches up. It speaks in the language of sensation, contraction and expansion, tightness and openness, unease and ease. Learning to read that language is one of the most practical intuitive skills I have come to rely on.

I call this practice body tuning, and it is exactly what it sounds like.

Begin by sitting quietly and taking three of those energy clearing breaths. Then ask yourself a question you already know the answer to. Something simple and verifiable. Am I sitting down right now? Is my name Jeff? Did I eat breakfast this morning? As you ask each question, turn your attention to the physical response in your body. Is there a sense of expansion, a quiet opening, a gentle warmth? Or is there a sense of contraction, a subtle closing, a heaviness?

Very often expansion is your body's yes and contraction is your body's no. Play with this in your own way.

Spend some time calibrating. Try several questions you know the answers to and notice how your body responds. This is not about getting dramatic physical sensations. It is about learning to attend to the subtle signals your body is already sending you, the ones you have been receiving your whole life without necessarily knowing how to interpret them.

Once you begin to trust this calibration, you can bring the practice into the real questions of your life. You can sit with a decision and ask your body how it responds. You can check in with a relationship, a direction, a creative choice, and let your body's wisdom inform what your mind has not yet resolved.

To be clear, this is not some fail-proof way to bypass our rational intelligence. It does though add a layer of intelligence that the rational mind alone cannot access. Remember, our body has been in conversation with the energetic reality around us for our entire lives. There’s a lot of information it has processed! The body tuning exercise simply teaches us how to listen to what the body might be trying to say to us.

Practice Three: Automatic Writing

This is the practice that has anchored me the most over the years, both in its simplicity and in the depth of what comes through when I practice.

Automatic writing is the practice of entering a meditative state and then channeling what comes through without editing whatever wants to come in. We’re not writing what we think we should write. Not what makes logical sense. Just what comes in. It’s an opportunity to get our analytical mind out of the way and allow the deeper intelligence within us, what I call the soul force, the voice of loving awareness, to speak through the pen.

Here is how I practice it.

Begin with a soul force field meditation. When you feel settled and open, pick up your pen, and ask one of these questions: What do I need to know today for my highest spiritual good? What action can I take to express my highest spiritual good in the world? What is the spiritual lesson I am working on right now?

Then put your pen to the page and write. Do not think about what you are writing. Do not edit. Do not pause to re-read. Just let the words come, even if they feel strange or simple or incomplete. Write until the flow slows naturally.

When you are done, read back what came through. You may find some of what comes in surprises you. You might discover a clarity you did not know you had. Often times a perspective will come through on your situation that feels less like your habitual thinking and more like something wiser looking in from a distance.

Early on, I wasn’t sure what to make of this practice when I first began. The line between our own thoughts and something that feels genuinely inspired is not always obvious, especially at the start. But over time, I began to notice a quality to the writing that emerged from this practice that was distinct from my ordinary journaling. A settledness. A gentleness. A capacity to see my own situation with more compassion and less judgment than I could manage on my own.

Try this at least once a week for a month and pay attention to what you learn along the way.

A Note on Patience and the Long Game

I’ll leave you with this before wrapping up…

I received my first psychic reading at twelve years old. By my mid-teens I had a personal meditation practice that was exploring different ways into quiet, meditative states. I have been doing this work, in one form or another, for twenty-five years now and I am still learning every single day. I am having new challenges, new awarenesses and building on an intuitive language that I'm still learning to speak. To this day, I can be confused about the difference between what is intuition and what is just my very active imagination having a very busy day.

I tell you this not to discourage you, but to mange your expectations on this journey. This is an ongoing process of self-awareness and dialogue with parts of ourselves and our reality that are hard to pin down. This is not a sprint. It is a relationship, with yourself, with your own inner knowing, with the loving awareness that I believe is woven into the fabric of all of things. And like any relationship worth having, it deepens slowly, through patience and consistency and the willingness to keep showing up even when the returns seem small.

What I can tell you, from everything I have experienced and witnessed in this work, is that the return is never actually small. It only looks that way before you can see it clearly.

So, can you be still? Can you listen? Can you trust what you hear, just a little more than you did yesterday?

That is all this is. And it is everything.

Deepen your understanding of the intuitive senses that work through these practices in The 6 Intuitive Senses (Clair Senses) Explained, or explore the body awareness practice further in How to Use Body Awareness to Strengthen Your Intuition.

If you feel called to explore your own intuitive connection more personally, I would be honored to sit with you. Book an intuitive guidance reading here.

Onward.

-jb