Trusting Your Gut Feeling part 1 | Difference between Your Intuition & Someone Else's Advice
One of the most common ways to make decisions is to ask someone else for their opinion. The conversation of trusting your gut feeling is becoming more popular and we are beginning to see the advantages of listening to your own intuition.
As a Spiritual Mentor & Author I focus my work on supporting others through soul healing in order to harmonize their shadow and light. Part of this process is about guiding you to understand your intuition and gut instincts so you can trust yourself to follow your soul path.
There are a lot of different reasons why as a society we’ve come away from trusting our gut feeling and intuition. Throughout this series I am going to be sharing many different tips, lessons, examples and exercises to help you trust your gut feeling and understand the meaning of your intuition.
We are starting things off with Trusting Your Gut Feeling part one, which is all about the difference between listening to your intuition versus someone else’s advice.
First let’s look at the reasons why we listen to someone else’s opinion.
1 It’s easier to make a decision when we don’t actually have to make our own decisions. Asking for someone else’s opinion in order to make your decisions is because you don’t want to make the wrong decision.
2 We’ve been taught as a society to not trust ourselves and instead to trust the people in “power”. This started with being a child and always going to our parents or guardians in order to make decisions and choices. In our jobs we typically look towards our managers and the people above us to have more wisdom than we do. Of course, there are our political views as well, we look at the people who run our country to tell us how to live in the right way.
3 We are so focused on our failures rather than recognizing the lessons we’ve learned from our past decisions. When we’ve failed at something we believe we can’t trust ourselves to make the right decisions moving forward. This is because we were hurt or experienced a challenge due to the failure, and rather than sit with the pain and learn the lesson in order to become wiser, we simply push off the responsibility of making decisions.
There are so many other reasons as to why we listen to someone else’s opinion before trusting our gut feelings and intuition, but this gives you a quick glimpse into the most common patterns we experience.
Next let’s look at why it’s important to listen to our gut feelings and intuition when following our spiritual journey through life.
Your spiritual journey is another way of saying your soul path and it’s basically the journey you came here to live out. The one that allows you to co-create a life you enjoy where you pursue your passions, fulfill your soul purpose, learn lessons and expand your soul’s journey.
1 Your soul path is different from anyone else’s and we need to stop comparing our spiritual journey’s to each other. Asking for someone else’s advice and listening to it over your gut feeling and intuition is a sure fire way to disconnect from your soul path and become misaligned.
2 Your confidence grows from making decisions on your own and building trust in your abilities. If you don’t start listening to and trusting your gut feeling and intuition then your level of confidence will hit a plateau.
3 Your gut feeling and intuition is how your Higher Self and the Universe/Spirit speaks through you. Imagine your Higher Self is the next level version of you who has already learned the lessons and advanced to the next level. Wouldn’t you want to trust the direction they are guiding you in? This doesn’t mean life is going to be easy and you’ll never fail because sometimes your Higher Self is guiding you into a valuable lesson that will support you in your soul healing. Your mind does not carry the answers you are looking for, it’s a feeling that moves through your body.
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Back to the blog - Trusting Your Gut Feeling part 1
Now, all of this is not to say that you cannot listen to someone else’s advice at all. It’s about gaining as much information from outside of you as possible and then learning to check in with yourself to see which direction resonates the most for your soul path.
Here is a great example of trusting your gut feeling for you to reflect on.
I went to the park today to go for a walk, as my spiritual power lies in my connection with Mother Earth. Nature walks are always beneficial for my spiritual healing, and harmonizing my shadow self with my inner light. It’s where I receive the most signs & messages from the Universe and it’s how I’ve built a strong connection with my Inner Spirit, or Higher Self.
Walks in nature are a necessity to my soul path and purpose.
The moment I arrived at the park I passed a lady that was leaving, and she said to me, “You don’t want to walk in there, it’s extremely muddy, slushy and wet.” She was using her negative experience at the park to give me advice on what was best for me. Now of course, I see this as her offering an opinion, but a lot of people would take her words and use it as a deterrent to not follow their gut feeling.
I walk in nature every day, usually multiple times a day.
I am extremely aware of my surroundings, especially when they include the going-ons of Mother Earth.
What I mean by this is that, I know springtime is around the corner and it’s been fairly warm recently. All of the snow and ice has been melting over the last few days and where I walk starts off in an off-leash dog park. Heading to the park I knew it was going to be muddy, and I went anyway because my gut feeling was leading me to this park at this specific time.
I shrugged off what she said and kept walking. Not 45 seconds later did a Bald Eagle fly right over my head. The spiritual meaning of Eagle is to trust your higher self and the bigger picture. I thanked Eagle for sharing its spirit with me and confirming I was meant to keep trusting my intuition.
About 10 minutes later, I was walking down a path and immediately my intuition pointed me in a direction I had never walked before. I understood the message right away because I could see that the path was in direct sunlight for most of the day and it would most likely be the driest area in the park. Plus it was beside the flowing river and I really wanted to connect with the cleansing energy of the water. Win win for me.
The moment I reached the path that my intuition guided me to, a runner came up behind me on the path and immediately said to me, “You don’t want to go any further, it’s like a swamp in there. My shoe got stuck and almost pulled right off my foot.” Then she continued on running in the direction she told me not to go in.
My intuition is extremely strong, so much so that a different time I was walking down a path where all of a sudden my gut feeling told me to turn around immediately for no logical reason. After hearing this second piece of advice from someone else today, I took a moment and checked in with myself to see if I was missing something.
Nope.
My gut feeling was, trust yourself, keep going.
The rest of my walk was amazing and the trail was nice and dry just like my gut feeling told me it would be. There were a couple puddles I had to maneuver around, but nothing I couldn’t handle. My walk was extremely cleansing energetically, I felt my soul healing, and I knew my Higher Self was proud of me for embodying my soul truths and trusting my gut feeling.
People are always going to offer you their opinions and advice based on the experiences they’ve had.
Their experiences don’t need to define your own experiences. Usually people share their advice when they aren’t happy with something. Don’t let their resistance block you from enjoying the life you are creating.
Start listening to your gut feeling and trusting your intuition more, even for the small decisions. You will gain confidence and feel empowered to create a life of your dreams.
I look forward to sharing part 2 with you soon.
Until next time, sending love & light on your journey,
Sydney Smith
Founder of Adventuring with Poseidon Wellness