Learning to recognize and trust your spiritual intuition is an essential task if you are highly sensitive.

I remember all too well the first time I consciously recognized my spiritual intuition—that deeper knowing that serves as the foundation of a sustainable, happy life for highly sensitive people (HSPs.) I was twenty-ish, and I was head-over-heels in love with a guy I’ll call Dan.

Dan was in grad school 600 miles away. Email didn’t exist yet, or texting, so we actually wrote letters to each other. We also talked on the phone once every week or two. These calls were an extravagance for grad students on a budget, but they were a treat. Until they weren’t.

More and more often, I’d been hanging up from these calls feeling sick to my stomach. Finally, I decided to speak up. It took all the courage I had. I asked Dan point-blank, “Is everything OK? Are we OK?” He replied, “Oh, yes, everything’s fine.”

My stomach kept telling me a different story, though. Sitting with that queasy feeling, I wrote in my journal, “Dan says we’re fine. But this feels so awful, I’d almost rather end the relationship than keep feeling this way.” A week later, a letter arrived in the mail. “I’m seeing someone else,” Dan wrote. “But I want us to be best friends.”

I was devastated. Why hadn’t he told me the truth when I asked? And who was he kidding, suggesting I could switch to being friends? I was more likely to turn into an elephant and sprout a trunk. Like many HSPs, I had always taken breakups hard. This was no exception.

The dawn of trust in my spiritual intuition

I was consumed by shame. My harshest inner critics came out to play. I told myself I must have some terrible flaw; I had caused the breakup; it was my fault. I wondered what qualities his new love had that I didn’t have (the fact that she was 600 feet away from him, not 600 miles, was probably a big reason, but that didn’t occur to me then.)

The pain of these self-accusations was excruciating. In the midst of these waves of shame and insecurity, though, I discovered a small but solid patch of ground on which I could plant my feet. I realized that my stomach had been right. I had known something was wrong. I had even acted on that knowing.

What a revelation. My spiritual intuition had been trying to steer me in the right direction. I felt the truth of this in my bones. That’s the moment I began trusting that I could listen within me for this voice of wisdom. I could trust it. I could learn its language and tune in to the different ways it communicated with me.

This process of learning to trust your spiritual intuition is crucial for you if you are highly sensitive. HSPs need our spiritual intuition to live in integrity with ourselves and others, to create the lives we want, and to connect to a sense of deeper peace in the midst of the inevitable challenges of life.

If trusting your intuition is a process, how do you engage in that process? These three steps are essential:

1—Learn to listen to yourself

Before you can trust and act on your spiritual intuition, you must learn to recognize it and listen to it. This takes practice. At the beginning, your discernment may be ruefully retroactive, as mine was with Dan.

On rare occasions, a voice may boom over your internal loudspeakers, broadcasting an inner truth at top volume. Most of the time, though, your deeper “knowings” will not sound like God speaking from the clouds in a Monty Python movie (although I adore that scene.)

For me, spiritual intuition feels more like a little kid tugging at my sleeve—a subtler sense of something needing attention. Because I know how to recognize it now, things rarely get to the point they got to with Dan, when my stomach had to work hard to get my attention. The most important thing is to know how your spiritual intuition sounds. This knowledge is the key to living your life with integrity.

In addition to this self-knowledge, you need courage to listen to your spiritual intuition. If you are afraid, the fear in your body will tend to drown out the subtler voice of your inner knowing. Fear is loud. If you let it, it will dominate your inner airwaves with its volume and urgency.

Spiritual intuition, on the other hand, is usually quiet. It may require your patient attention to emerge. Think of a Polaroid image, gradually forming as the air reacts with the chemicals in the photo. In a similar way, your open, curious attention helps your spiritual intuition to form and become clear to you.

2—Make sure all your inner parts are on board

At first, I thought that simply hearing my spiritual intuition should lead directly to action. I couldn’t understand why I sometimes failed to follow through on the wisdom I had received. Calling this pattern “resistance” only made me feel worse.

Finally, I figured out I was missing a key step. In addition to hearing a spiritual intuition, I needed to take it into my body. I could sense how it resonated there, then notice what came in response.

When you check your spiritual intuition in your body like this, you create the opportunity to address any not-wantings, doubts, and conflicting beliefs that arise. Each of these reactions needs a fair hearing, because all your inner parts exist to try to help you in some way. (This is true even when they end up doing the opposite.)

Only the “bigger you”—the “you” that can connect to your spiritual intuition and hold the bigger perspective—can discern whether a part’s fears are based on current reality, or whether they are outdated. Parts can’t do this themselves. Their perspective is partial.

In other words, some of your parts may be afraid because they are holding on to false beliefs. These parts need empathy. However, other parts of you may be expressing concerns for your safety and well-being that are both current and accurate. In that case, the parts need more than empathy. They need you to take action.

Either way, you move forward by listening to everyone and everything that comes up. If you skip this step, your dissenting voices will not feel acknowledged or heard, and they will hamper or even prevent you from acting on your inner knowing. You end up feeling like you are driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.

3—Act

Once you’ve recognized a spiritual intuition and addressed any inner objections, your way to action is cleared. If the issue at hand is not emotionally intense for you, then you may be able to move easily into action.

But if an issue is emotionally intense for you, then action may still feel scary—even if you have addressed any related false beliefs and acknowledged any real-and-present concerns. What should you do if you’ve listened to your deeper knowing and made sure all your inner parts are on board, and it still feels really scary to act? Use these simple but powerful steps:

• Remind yourself that fear is loud.
• Remember that “loud” does not mean “true.”
• Choose to listen to and act on your deeper knowing—even in the face of fear.

In other words, you can take action even when you are feeling afraid. Grounded in your spiritual intuition, you can find the courage to act on what you know to be true, even when you are shaking in your boots. Once you’ve taken the action, you’ll feel the rightness in your body.

When I was a kid, my favorite record featured Danny Kaye telling the story of The Name of the Tree. In seven delightful minutes, it conveys the power of staying focused on what is most important. In the story, only the tortoise manages to pull this off. In doing so, he saves the land from famine.

All the other animals succumb to various distractions, temptations, ego trips, and accidents—each failure drolly punctuated by the bass clarinet. The tortoise, on the other hand, focuses on putting one foot in front of the other in the right direction, repeating the true and magic word.

Trust your spiritual intuition

We need to do what the tortoise did. Listen for the truth, then put one foot in front of the other to act on that truth. Don’t put it off. Don’t get ahead of yourself, or fall asleep, or get distracted by your busy HSP mind. Keep it simple. Do what you’ve been guided to do. Trust that the next step will come when the time is right.

To be highly sensitive is to have a strong sense of spiritual knowing. It comes with the territory. You can accept that, cultivate it, and learn to trust it. Or you can try to ignore it, deny it, or minimize it.

The problem is, even if you try to squash your spiritual intuition, it’s still there. It will manifest as a sense of grinding unease. Unacknowledged knowings can tear you up inside, and denying them can exhaust you. They need to be brought out into the light.

How has your journey of inner trust unfolded? Does your spiritual intuition show up in a characteristic form? Have you found reason to trust it? I’m interested to hear about your experiences.

Image: © 2024 by Emily Agnew
Note: This is an edited and expanded version of the article that originally appeared on September 18, 2018.