Enhance Your Intuition with These 6 Spiritual Practices

Before diving into the practices, let’s define intuition and psychic abilities. Although related, they are not identical.

Intuition is a “gut feeling” or “sixth sense” that allows you to understand something without conscious reasoning. It arrives suddenly as an insight or inner knowing. Everyone has intuition to varying degrees.

Psychic abilities involve perceiving information beyond the physical senses through extrasensory perception (ESP). This includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Some view psychic abilities as a rare gift, while others believe everyone possesses them to different extents.

Intuition and psychic perception exist on a spectrum and often overlap. Intuition can be a subtle form of psychic perception. Both involve accessing a realm beyond conscious thought and the five physical senses. Practice and mindful attention can cultivate both.

The practices in this article can deepen your intuition and open the door to psychic experiences. Pay attention to hunches, gut feelings, or insights, however subtle. The more you trust your intuition, the stronger it becomes, paving the way for deeper psychic development.

Meditation is perhaps the most important practice one can engage in to heighten their intuitive and psychic instincts. Although it may not be for everyone, consistent meditation practice is the quickest way to grow intuition.

When a person meditates, they learn to focus their mind, distinguish between self and non-self, and discover a connection to a “higher” power that resides deep within them. Additionally, meditation has been proven to provide numerous health benefits.

There are many different types of meditation, all of which ultimately serve to deepen the spiritual connection with the “higher” power and improve psychic sensitivity. Some popular types include:

• Progressive Relaxation: A system for relaxing each body part through mental cues and muscle tension and release. Most people start with the feet and work their way up, but starting with the head can help relax the mind first, making the rest of the process easier.
• Pranic Meditation: This style focuses on breathing, often involving counting inhalations, holding, and exhalations. This focus helps induce an altered state of consciousness, deepening the connection with the Divine, building a focused mind, and increasing the ability to discern inner thoughts.
• Focused Meditation: Beginners often practice this style, which involves focusing attention on a single image, such as a candle flame, a photo of a loved one, or a religious icon.
• Chakra Meditations: These visualizations help open and clear the chakra centers in the human body. By focusing on the various centers and their associated colors, you can clean and clear them, improving their functioning and addressing various aspects of life.
• Guided Visualizations: Similar to chakra meditation, guided visualizations involve being led on an inner journey for healing, wisdom, connecting with angels or guides, or being present with God.
• Mantra: This style focuses on sound, with the most recognizable being “om.” Chanting the sound repeatedly often leads to an altered state of consciousness similar to pranic meditation.

Consistency is key when it comes to meditation. Meditating every day for a short period is more effective than a single long session. It’s also important to remember that the mind tends to wander, especially for beginners. When this happens, gently guide your focus back without harsh self-criticism or frustration. With practice, the mind will wander less and less.

The second spiritual practice to enhance your intuition and psychic abilities is affirmations.

Affirmations are positive, constructive phrases said to strengthen the subconscious mind. They are usually formulated as “I” or “My” statements and focus solely on the desired outcome. Effective affirmations tend to be short and simple.

Examples include:

• “I am filled with willpower.”
• “I know my psychic abilities are improving every day.”
• “My inner power is greater than any obstacle I may encounter.”

There are two main belief systems when it comes to using affirmations. The first holds that you need to repeat them consistently and often for them to sink deep enough into the subconscious mind to work. Some proponents of this belief system teach a three-pronged approach: saying the affirmation out loud, reading it silently, and then closing your eyes and repeating it either out loud or silently.

The second belief system states that you only need to think of your affirmation, design it, and verbalize it once for it to work. In this case, faith is considered the most important aspect of an affirmation’s effectiveness. The idea is that if you have to repeat the affirmation over and over, you lack faith in its power.

In my experience, both approaches can be equally effective. The key is to determine which style resonates with you and stick with it. As mentioned, affirmations can be used to improve psychic ability by making that the focus of your affirmations.

Here are some specific affirmations to help improve intuition and psychic skills:

• My psychic abilities improve every day
• I see psychically
• I hear psychically
• I know psychically
• I am psychic
• I am aware of all psychic energy around me
• My intuition keeps me safe from harm

Prayer is a form of communication with the Divine, by whatever name you choose to call it. There are several types of prayers:

• Bargaining Prayers: In this type of prayer, a person offers something in exchange for a desired outcome. For example, “God, if you just do this one thing for me, I’ll go to church more often!”
• Petitioning Prayers: The most common style of prayer involves directly asking for something.
• Gratitude Prayers: These prayers are said to thank a higher power and express sincere gratitude for what has occurred or will occur.
• Ritual Prayers: This category includes mantras, most indigenous practices, and ceremonies meant to be pleasing to the Divine or to create something within the self or in the world. Examples include the Catholic Mass, Native American or Wiccan Circles, and the use of prayer beads or the Catholic Rosary.
• Meditational Prayers: This type of prayer focuses the mind and heart on God/the Divine or their attributes, such as unconditional love.
• Affirmative Prayers: Similar to affirmations, these prayers are constructed and spoken from a place of complete knowing and faith.

In my experience, all of these prayer types can have a profound impact on your life, with the exception of bargaining prayers. In my opinion, bargaining prayers are often ineffective and can put you in a difficult position. I would recommend avoiding them and focusing on the other types of prayer.

How does prayer improve psychic ability? It depends on the type of prayer, but generally speaking, by focusing on your desire for increased intuition, it typically occurs, similar to the effect of affirmations.

Another spiritual practice I recommend to almost all my spiritual mentoring students is journaling.

There are many ways to approach journaling. The most basic is keeping a diary of the events that happen to you and your thoughts and feelings about those events.

Other styles of journaling include:

• Keeping a journal for specific reasons, such as recording and interpreting your dreams, noting your psychic impressions and experiences, or venting when angry.
• Using journaling questions, which are spiritual or philosophical prompts that a person spends time contemplating and writing about.

Regardless of the approach, journaling helps improve psychic sensitivity by enhancing your inner awareness and understanding of the self. Additionally, being able to review past journal entries and observe how you’ve changed over time can be one of the most profound and empowering experiences anyone can have.

Indigenous and shamanic traditions have used drumming, rattling, dancing, and trance music for ages to create altered states of consciousness. Rhythmic sounds affect brainwave patterns, making it easier for most people to journey in this state.

Journeying is a personal psycho-spiritual experience that you control in your mind’s eye or the non-physical world. Similar to a guided meditation, you discover and control the experience yourself without external guidance.

Before beginning the drumming, rattling, trance music, or dance, set a specific intention for your journey work. Then, use these tools to induce the altered state of consciousness.

Learn journey work with an expert for the best results. Basic shamanism courses often teach the fundamentals, or you can read books like “The Way of the Shaman” or “Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice For Daily Life.”

Attending drumming circles, belly dancing, or going to raves can strengthen your intuition and psychic abilities, even without the intention of journeying. The sounds positively impact your brain waves.

The final spiritual practice to enhance intuition and psychic abilities is perhaps the simplest of all: going on nature walks or being present in nature.

Some say that being in nature is to be one with God and the beauty of God. The natural world is filled with energy, a type of energy that many people in today’s world don’t have enough access to. While anyone can get out into nature, not everybody makes time to do so. Moreover, the larger the city one lives in, the less likely they are to take time out of their busy day to connect with the natural world.

A few years ago, I read an interesting article that provided the minimal recommended time for being in nature, called the 20-5-3 rule:

• 20 minutes a week in a city park, botanical garden, nature trail, neighborhood walk, etc.
• 5 hours a month in a state (not city) park, nature preserve, or forest.
• 3 days a year off-grid, such as camping or renting a cabin.

If one can commit to these minimal times, they typically see improvements in their life, health, clarity of mind, emotions, and even psychic abilities and intuition.

The key point is that while engaging in these activities, it’s assumed that you are not connected to your phone, tablet, laptop, or any other digital or electronic device, including walkmans, stereos, or iTunes. In other words, your sole experience should be focused on being in nature and connecting with the natural world.