3 Ways to Nurture Your Intuition as a Highly Sensitive Person
As a highly sensitive person, you’re wired to sense the subtle, which will help when it comes to nurturing your intuition.
Highly sensitive people (HSPs) have a potent gift: The gift of intuition, that mysterious ability to attain knowledge outside the realms of mental or logical processes. It’s the sudden flash of insight; the “gut instinct” or “sixth sense” that so often proves to be right. That quiet voice within that somehow just seems to know.
Now, all human beings have the capacity to connect to their intuition and inner wisdom.
But as an HSP, this gift has the potential to be stronger and clearer than in non-HSPs. After all, it’s one of our HSP superpowers.
That’s because, as highly sensitive people, we’re wired to sense the subtle. We intuitively feel and know there are subtle energies within and around us, and feel drawn to connect to something beyond ourselves, such as the web of life, nature, source, and the divine. As Dr. Elaine Aron states in her book The Highly Sensitive Person, “There is something about HSPs that is more soulful and spiritual.”
And when you learn how to connect to and trust this power of intuition, it provides you with an abundant source of potent inner wisdom to guide you through life.
But Sometimes, the Mind Gets in Intuition’s Way
The trouble is, your mind — which analyzes, frets, and likes to get stuck in the past and/or the future — may be so loud, it’s drowning out the quiet, wise whisperings of your soul.
And it’s easy to get stuck in your head, especially as one of the traits of high sensitivity is depth of processing. HSPs process all they’re experiencing very deeply and in detail. This takes time and energy. And it can lead to a lot of thinking — and a lot of thinking about what you’re thinking about! In other words, overthinking. You can then get stuck in analysis-paralysis: not being able to make a decision because you’re running through all the potential outcomes of a situation.
Furthermore, it can be difficult to trust your intuition because we live in a world that tells us that intuition, at best, shouldn’t be trusted and, at worst, is a figment of our imagination.
How many times have you overridden an intuitive instinct about something or someone and let your fretful mind overrule it, only to realize, too late, that your inner guidance was right all along? Time to stop that!
So, how can sensitive people like us nurture and learn to trust our intuitive inner guidance system? We need to spend some time practicing listening to our intuition and nurturing our relationship to our inner landscape. This way, we can learn to distinguish between what our mind is fretting over and what our highly sensitive senses are communicating to us. To that point, here are three simple ways you can nurture your natural intuitive abilities.
3 Ways to Nurture Your Intuition as a Highly Sensitive Person
1. Practice listening to your body.
You hear your intuition through sensations in your body — tingles, flutterings, heaviness, spaciousness, and so on. It’s not about conscious thought — it’s about learning to feel and interpret physical feelings, which we HSPs excel at.
And to get fluent in understanding your intuition, you need to learn the language of how your body speaks to you.
So spend a few minutes each day simply checking in and noticing how you feel:
- Sit quietly and take some deep, soothing breaths to settle the body and mind.
- Close your eyes if that feels comfortable.
- Move your attention inward and simply notice what feelings are present within your body now.
- And then name them. (Are you feeling calm? Happy? Anxious? And so on.)
Getting used to checking in like this will help you create a habit of noticing how you’re feeling. As HSPs, we can sometimes forget to do this, especially if we’re feeling overwhelmed by all the stimuli in our external environment.
And as you become familiar with your baseline sensations and how they shift and change in reaction to different thoughts and experiences, you’ll learn to understand how your intuition is “speaking” to you. It might be through powerful visceral feelings of “yes” or “no,” or it may be subtle shimmers and tingles or expansiveness. Learn your unique inner language and let your intuition guide you.
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2. Activate the energy of your heart.
As a highly sensitive person, you have the capacity to feel deeply — to feel love, kindness, and joy in every cell of your body, to feel it light up your heart and nourish your soul, and more so than non-HSPs.
In activating the energy of your heart, you’re deepening your relationship with your inner world of feelings that is so essential to nurturing your intuition.
Try this simple, tender exercise to connect to your heart:
- Place your hands in the center of your chest, one hand on top of the other. Focus your attention on the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area.
- Now focus on experiencing a feeling of deep care for someone or something in your life: a person, pet, or memory.
- Focus on experiencing the felt sense of this as you breathe in and out with awareness at your heart. Continue for a couple of minutes. Notice how you feel.
- Invite that sense into your body. You can recite a mantra like, “Compassion, peace, and wisdom reside within my heart” (or whatever rings true to you).
This brings you out of your head and into your body, soul, and spirit, and naturally leads on to the next technique…
3. Ask for soul whispers (also known as inner wisdom).
I believe your heart is the portal to the soul. And when you spend time connecting to your heart, your inner wisdom will naturally begin to whisper to you.
So try this simple meditative practice to consciously receive the guidance of your soul (which will also help your overstimulated HSP self relax):
- Sit or lie down (outside if you can) and feel the strength of the earth beneath you and the spacious freedom of the sky above. Feel how you are completely supported by the two.
- Let your awareness drop into the center of your chest, the center of your being. Maybe place your hands there if that feels comfortable. Breathe.
- And when it feels right, ask your soul, your inner guide: “What do I need to know today?”
- Let any words, phrases, images, or feelings just bubble up. Let the answers come, as they surely will.
- And receive these soul whispers… and trust yourself.
Intuition Is Your Highly Sensitivity Superpower
I know the above may seem foreign to someone who has not practiced these techniques before, but once you try them, you’ll see that they work.
And, as a sensitive person, you pick up on everything and deeply process all that you’re experiencing, even at rest — which is what gives you such powerful intuition. You can feel the answers to problems, you can sense what the person in front of you needs, you can see beneath the surface into the deeper truth of circumstances and events.
You have a sixth sense guiding you in your decision-making. You are a channel for insight and truth. And this is a priceless gift.
So spend time nurturing your highly sensitive intuition and you will be repaid a thousand-fold (and more) in the riches of self-trust, clarity, and the ability to live in alignment with the truth of who you are. Trust me. You’ll see.
Want to learn more ways to nurture your soul? Then sign up to receive my free Soul Notes, all about honoring your highly sensitive emotions, mind, and soul, plus restful meditations.
