how to listen to your intuition (and teach the kids how to)
Why is it important to listen to our intuition - and why is it important to teach our children how to listen to their intuition, too?
Listening to your intuition, listening to those ‘spidey senses,’ as I call them, means being aware of those little gut feelings that can happen. They can make you feel good about someone or something, or maybe make you feel a bit wary in certain situations.
Those things are what I call ‘spidey senses’, or my husband does, and they're the sort of things that we want our kids to be able to utilize and to be able to listen to when they need to.
They're also the things that we as parents can sometimes listen to, but sometimes we are really, really good at dulling them down.
In this blog post, I’m going to go into how you teach your children to listen to those things using some different ways, using different strategies, and then I'll share about how we can start to learn to do the same thing to the things that we are dampening down. Because mama, you’re not getting out of this one!
First, why do kids need to listen to their intuition?
What we want our kids to be able to do is basically listen to their own intuition. Listen to what they are thinking about different people, and understand what reaction or process might be socially acceptable but also keep them safe if need be, in a situation.
So if your child goes near someone that they don't like, maybe someone that they don't even know, and then starts to feel a bit of a vibe coming from that person, and thinks ‘I don't really feel safe at this moment’; we want them to be able to interpret those feelings. So for instance, feeling a few butterflies in your tummy, some wariness, or feeling like you’re not sure what they're going to do next?
One of my children the other day and she was struggling with the words to describe how she felt about a certain group of people.
I asked her: ‘Do you not feel safe around this person?’
‘No, I don't feel safe around them. ‘ she replied.
For her, at six years old, that was a real revelation. Her eyes went a little wider as she realised, that's actually what it was for her in that group of people. She didn’t know what they would do next, and wasn’t sure if she could handle it.
This is a practical strategy for teaching your child about listening to their intuition.
The key in this situation was I gave her some words - that she could take or leave. ‘Is this how you felt?’ can be a wonderful thing to ask children, because they may struggle with the terminology.
There could be any reason why kids don't want to be around another person. But giving them the language and thought patterns to prioritise their own inner gut feelings equips them for the future.
The main part about intuition that can be lost, is that we feel it in our bodies - this means that we need to transcribe it from body sensation to actual rational thought.
This requires some body awareness!
Teaching kids about how their feelings are present in their body in a physical way, is something we cover more in The Emotionally Equipped Child course, my short course for parents. We talk about how our bodies feel when we are angry, scared, sad, and so on.
Feeling something in their intuition might include gut sensation (ie. gut feelings), but also tingles on the back of their neck, and so on.
Some other ways kids might feel this in their body:
‘I felt a bit funny in my tummy and I felt like I wanted to be a bit closer to mum’, or ‘I just didn't want to go into that area at the moment’.
‘I was worried I might get hit’.
Being able to have those sense, rely on those senses and be able to react as they need to, is essential for men and women, and especially for kids as they grow up. Using our ‘big girl bark’ like Bingo from Bluey, is a useful skill - but all too often we see people who don’t use their confident, strong voice because a)they don’t want to cause a fuss; or b) aren’t self-secure in how they interpret their inner feelings or intuition.
As parents, we are coaches for our children and we really, really need to be helping them have those tools, learn those tools, and have the skills to be able to do and understand what they need to do for themselves.
To keep themselves safe, but also to enable them to understand what other people are going through as well.
How to listen to your intuition
So we've talked about the kids.
What are we going to do as adults, to actually start listening to the different feelings that we've got going on inside?
How are you dealing with the things that you know are going on? As women, as adults, as people, we are very, very good at squashing down the things that we find a little bit too defensive.
The things that we find just make us get a little bit annoyed, angry, potentially triggered. Triggers are the more extreme version of emotional reaction, that have emotional build-up behind them, and create a moment when the emotional reaction is far exceeding the event in this current time and place.
But we often don’t focus enough on processing those things that we really need to dig into.
Before we keep going, am I saying dig into them, re-live them, re-hash them and re-traumatize yourself? No, of course, that's not what I'm saying. I don't mean you need to sit there with a pen and paper and go through your deepest, darkest fears. Gentle awareness is the first step for triggers; but that is not what we’re talking about here. Find out more about triggers here.
In order to give your nervous system a chance to integrate, to finish processing what is actually going on; here’s what I mean.
What I mean is being true to what's going on at that moment in your body, in your brain.
Listening to yourself, what that inner voice is saying, and going you know what, what do I feel like right now?
Here’s a little bit of info:
Even if you don't act on it, acknowledging what you feel like is allowed. So, if you feel jealous of somebody, it’s actually OK. We tend to push these feelings down and ‘repel them’ because we don’t want to feel jealous, we feel like that’s something shameful.
Here is what we want to portray to our children, and therefore to ourselves: FEELINGS, ARE ALLOWED.
But, acting on those feelings (which includes sharing the fact we have a certain feeling, with someone else) actually brings those feelings into a space where they can then be fully present, rather than the fleeting emotional feeling it is before that. So, the way we act on those feelings is actually the key. We need to work on our actions, but not squash down the feeling.
Why is this important?
Because it’s just a thought. It’s just a feeling. You don’t have to turn yourself inside out with worry, thinking you’re a horrible person because of it. Acknowledge that yes, I felt like that. No, I’m not acting on it.
Don’t beat yourself up over the fact you thought something, but you don’t have to pursue the thought any further than that, either.
We need to be working on our own skills, our own ability to think about what is going on inside ourselves, not with judgment. We're not here to judge ourselves, simply regulate ourselves and act with intention.
So what does this mean? It means that we need to be aware of our thoughts. It means that we need to be aware of what's going on in our bodies. It means that we need to be aware of exactly what we want to teach our kids about!
‘I've got a bit of a weird feeling about this person, bit of a weird feeling about this situation. What am I gonna do about it?’
Am I going to just go: it's a weird feeling, whatever. Or am I going to acknowledge that and think, I'm not feeling okay with this right now.
I'm actually going to make a different choice because then I might feel better about it next time - or maybe we can ease into this. Maybe you don't want to drop my child at that person's house because you don't feel that you know them well enough.
So then we decide we might have a mutual play date at a park.
Or your gut feeling might let you know that you don't really want to go and say yes to that opportunity in my workplace. Maybe I don't feel that this is something that I really want to commit to.
Obviously we have to do things sometimes for financial reasons and so on; but apart from that, if you don't have to do something or if you feel really strongly against something inside?
Don’t do something you don’t feel right about!
Listen to your intuition and do what you feel is right, with logical thinking AND following your gut feeling as much as possible.
When you want to listen to your intuition, try these ideas:
Give yourself a time gap. Ie: take a breath, ask for a second to think, etc.
Do a quick body scan. How does your tummy feel? Back of neck, clammy hands? Assess what you think your body might be telling you.
THINK about your action and then follow through.
It’s so important to learn how to listen to your intuition, teach your kids how to listen to their intuition. Teach your child and yourself how to listen to their body signals, take notice of what thoughts are going on in their head. Being able to listen and be aware of what is going on for yourself and teaching your children that as well is a hundred percent worth doing.
Do you feel like you live authentically by following your intuition in different situations? Drop a comment below - is this easy or hard?
