How to Know If Your Intuition Is True

Meditating by the Sea

Experience

The ability to know inwardly what will work in any undertaking comes partly with experience. If we’ve repeated an activity for a long time, we will more or less automatically know which choices to make. Experience hones the sharp edge of intuition. The feeling of inner, intuitive guidance is subtle. I still approach it cautiously, even after years of trying to tune in to the guidance of God and Guru.

Continue to Listen Quietly

When people first try to work with their intuition, they can become too affirmative about it. You find them saying such things as, “I just know this must be so. My inner guidance told me.” I tend to be a bit skeptical when people talk like that, because when you really feel something with certainty, you don’t need to proclaim it to the world. It’s best to sensitively hold on to the feeling, and continue to listen quietly within yourself for further guidance. (Paramhansa Yogananda, on right, with his Guru, Sri Yukteswar. Yogananda credited his attainment of perfect divine intuition to his Master's grace.)

Calmness, Clarity and Joy

If you want to learn to recognize the kind of feeling that indicates true guidance, you can look for three qualities: calmness, clarity, and joy. Intuition is always grounded in a deep sense of calm detachment. Ask yourself if the guidance you receive makes you feel restless or excited. If there’s a tinge of nervousness, it’s safe to assume that you’re merely going along with your own desires.

Emotional Excitement

When you receive a true answer, there will not be emotional excitement: “Yes, yes!” Rather, your attitude will be, “Whatever is, simply is. It doesn’t touch me personally.” To develop your ability to recognize real guidance, it’s important to test your intuition over a period of time.

Practice First

Don’t make big decisions on the strength of your intuition, unless of course, you have no choice. It’s better to practice first with making small decisions, while continually testing your ability. You’ll begin to notice that when a certain feeling comes and you follow it, things work out well. At times, you may notice a different feeling that is less calm or clear. At first, you may think it simply has to be right, but over time you’ll realize that this feeling is false guidance from your subconscious.

Pushing it Away

There’s another method that has worked quite reliably for me over the years. If you’re unsure of your guidance, you can experiment with inwardly saying “no” to it and pushing it away. If the intuition continues to return with strong energy, then it’s probably more than your own thoughts at work.

Guidance Comes According to Who You Are

True guidance comes according to who you are and what you ask. A mathematician is unlikely to receive guidance for painting a picture. Rather, he’ll receive intuitive guidance about mathematics, and if he speaks English, it will be in English.

Good Advice

Don’t assume that if you’re guided to do something, that it’s necessarily right for everybody. Be open to accept that someone else may need to take a different course. When people offer me what seems like good advice, I can sometimes see that although it would work well for them, it would be a disaster for me. In that case, I’ll reply, “This guidance may be true for you, but there are certain things I have to learn by taking another direction.”

Feelings of Blocked Energy

When you ask for guidance, try to be aware of any feelings of blocked energy, or of a psychic threshold that you can’t cross. Be sensitive about this, and don’t try to blast your way through it. The voice of intuition is usually very quiet and calm, and it’s often easy to ignore it or shout it down. Listen for the merest whisper, and be prepared to follow it, because often it’s the quietest voice of all that’s most likely to be right. If you feel a sense of nervousness or agitation about a course of action, it’s better not to proceed. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should abandon the project, but perhaps only that further refinement is needed.

Does it Feel Right

I remember an experience I had while writing a letter to someone who asked for my advice. I was trying to draw my reply from a sense of inner guidance, so that I could tune in to what this person really needed to hear. At one point, I introduced a new element into the letter, and as soon as I did this I felt a nervousness in my heart. I thought, “Logically, it seems right, but it doesn’t feel right.” As soon as I removed it, I felt calm again and finished the letter. We need to uphold tradition, at least in this sense: the saints and sages throughout history who have found the truth have experienced the same reality, and they’ve never disagreed about it. Nobody has ever come along and said, “In this century God is not love – God is hate.”

True Wisdom

So when you’re trying to decide if your guidance is right, ask, “What have people of wisdom done?” It’s not enough to follow someone simply because they’re a scholar, or the president. Consider who said it, and ask, “Do they have true wisdom? Is this what’s been done through the ages?” If so, then don’t imagine that you can get away by doing the opposite. When you test your feelings to see if your guidance is true, understand that true intuitive feeling doesn’t change with outward circumstances. It isn’t dependent on external things, but is centered in your inner self. The happiness you feel when you’re in tune with the divine consciousness comes not because you’ve decided to do this or that, but simply because you’re centered in the joy of your own higher Self.