How to Ignite Your Intuition with Rituals

Your intuition is an untapped source of higher wisdom that draws on your previous knowledge, but intuition is also much more than that. It is that still, calm voice inside you, an awareness of thoughts, sounds, images and physical sensations that can offer you profound insights about your past, present and future. It is sometimes thought to be a form of extrasensory perception (ESP).  

Those who learn how to tap into their intuition often credit their intuition as a powerful ingredient for success in life. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers, innovators, artists, scientists, business people and thought leaders have stressed the importance of intuition and how it shaped their lives and inspired their work. They often describe it as their inner voice, some kind of pre-existing awareness or future knowledge or creative self-expression that is within each one of us but often suppressed. ‘I just knew’ or ‘I trusted my gut’ are vague phrases they often use, along with other equally vague phrases and words such as ‘sixth sense’, ‘hunch’, and so on.  

In a nutshell, intuition is your connection to something deeply wise within you that leads you to make decisions based on your highest level of good judgement. It provides you with valuable insights about yourself, your life, the people you interact with and the situations you encounter. It is not a moral compass or a supreme authority about what is absolutely right and wrong for everyone. But it does provide a sense of what is right for you and what isn’t going to be in your best interests. It is informed by but also beyond reasoning, logic or experience, and is an amazing source of wisdom, understanding and potential. It is your highest self. The best possible you. 

Trouble is, intuition is often so hard to identify, connect to and trust because it is the inner voice many of us lose contact with and don’t know how to identify when it does try to speak. While there is some truth in that as intuition is elusive, it is possible to boost your intuitive reflex through daily rituals. But how? In my latest book, 21 rituals to ignite your intuition, I show how ritual can powerfully boost your intuition. 

Rituals are the key to unlocking your intuition Science is proving that intuition is a real super sense but to connect to it we need to be in a confident, relaxed, preferably positive and calm state of mind. Research has also shown that anxiety can lead to poor-decision making. It seems that, when we are fearful, this short circuits the brain’s unconscious associative process. Rituals are therefore ideal for boosting intuition because they occupy and calm your conscious mind with the action or task performed, while at the same time allowing your brain’s associative powers to get to work, producing the intuitive guidance you need.  

Being relaxed but distracted by an action that doesn’t require much conscious thought is the perfect combination for intuition to emerge. That’s why we often have intuitive insights not so much when we are meditating or brainstorming or actively trying to trigger insights, but when we are doing something which doesn’t require our full attention yet still keeps us distracted, such as walking, showering or driving. During those times we are also in a calm state of mind and this is when inward-looking brilliance happens.  

Not only can rituals occupy your conscious mind, freeing your brain’s associative powers so intuition can bubble to the surface, they are also actions that require an investment of emotion. If you remove emotion or intention from a ritual, it becomes a habit and habits don’t transform lives because they lack a sense of sacred meaning. A ritual isn’t a ritual unless you perform it with feeling and intention. Science has also shown that deepening of emotion is the key to being more intuitive.  

In essence, the more meaningful ritual there is in your life the more intuitive you are likely to become. And the more intuitive you are the better life choices you will make and the happier and more fulfilled you are likely to be.