You may have heard of intuitive eating before. The concept of listening to your body for the foods that you consume rather than following a strict fad diet that is likely to fail a few weeks in. There are many pros to intuitive living as it allows you to continue to enjoy the foods you loves while also respecting the nutrition that your body craves most. It’s a great concept but unfortunately, people have used it as an excuse to engage in unhealthy habits and have blamed it for extreme weight gain and imbalanced blood levels. Intuitive living is a similar concept to intuitive eating (and includes intuitive living) but allows for this mindset in all areas of life. When it becomes a lifestyle rather than just a diet, it is much easier to maintain and create healthy lifelong habits. Hiring a confidence coach is a great way to learn about intuitive living and self-love and how it applies in your life.

Societies Standards and Our Sense of Self-Worth

The standards set by society have taken over our minds and bodies and we’ve lost all sense of connection to who we truly are. We live in an over-stimulated world filled with never-ending to-do lists, expectations that will never be met, and opinions from people that we would never actually ask advice from. We have lost all connection to our roots; our innate personalities and characteristics that built us as young children. How? Through listening to the demands placed upon us by others, the sounds and standards of who we “should” be, and the desire to belong.

But what ends up happening? When you lose your sense of connection, you lose your sense of self-worth. That instinct and intuition that seemed like second nature growing up slowly begin to fade and you begin to question every little thing about who you are and what you truly want and need in this life. Our inner voice gets drowned out by the noises around and we begin to believe that there’s an exact way that we should be living. Between diet-culture, the pressure for success, all of the influencers sharing their opinions, the ongoing debates regarding politics and religion, and the “picture-perfect” nuclear family, we’ve forgotten what it means to come back home to our minds and bodies. It’s so common to lose the skill to trust your gut and intuition. But…good thing there are ways to unlearn everything that society expects from us and connect back to our roots. Let’s look into it…

What is Intuitive Living?

Intuitive living is a lifestyle that brings you back to your innate instincts and helps you live with intention and fulfillment. It’s living in such a way that you listen to your innate desires for all that you do. It’s trusting what your mind and body are telling you when making decisions. Intuitive living involves cultivating a deeply rooted mind-body connection in order to not need outside influence on decision making, eating, exercise, and overall choice of living. It gives the chance to come back to your natural thought process and make decisions that serve you.

Intuitive living includes the way you eat, form relationships, move, make life decisions, communicate, make purchases, etc. Though intuitive living is trusting your instincts and natural tendencies, it’s important to have a clear connection in order to be able to make intuitive decisions. This is something that takes time. This is not a quick-fix to feeling great or an overnight process. You get out what you put in. It crucial to understand your purpose for wanting to live the lifestyle of intuitive living. When you can clarify your “why”, you’re more likely to make it a lifelong journey rather than something that you’ll start and quit a few weeks in.

Intuitive living gives you the freedom of living your life the way that you want. There are no restrictions or guidelines to follow. There are no diet rules or exercise standards. It takes the shame and guilt out of the decision-making process and allows you to step into a place of loving your mind and body and standing by the choices you make because you know they are the best ones to serve you. This is a lifestyle of self-love, self-worth, and self-evaluation.

Cultivating the Mind-Body Connection

The mind-body connection must be strong to live intuitively because it allows for signals to clearly be sent throughout the body. When you are energetically blocked, it can become difficult to understand what your body wants and needs or to make proper decisions that also serve your mind. Cultivating the mind-body connection is an on-going process but once it’s established, it’s fairly simple to maintain. The cool thing about intuitive living (once you really get integrated with it) is that you may fall off here and there (by having a rough day emotionally or physically) but you are able to trust that your body knows how to and will get you back on track.

Meditate & Quiet the Mind

Take time every day to quiet the mind and digest how you are feeling. This may take some time to get used to. When you first sit down, you may feel your mind wander in a hundred different directions. Don’t give up here. Let yourself to get to a place of genuinely tapping into your feelings and emotions and creating a deeper understanding of what you feel and why you feel this way. Eventually, you’ll get to a place of being able to process these thoughts and emotions almost instantaneously.

Evaluate the Signals Within

Trust your gut and everything that your body tells you. This could be hunger, aches and pains, emotional desires, cravings, etc. Listen and honor those signals within because they aren’t there just for fun. Your body is insanely smart. Give it credit where credit is due and honor that space within you.

Say “no”

When you say no, you identify your priorities and allow for self-worth to become at the forefront of your mind. It’s a good thing to say no to people, places, and things that don’t make you feel good. After all, intuitive living is about being able to do everything in this life that helps you feel alive and leave anything that doesn’t align.

Journal

Write down what you think and feel. Unpacking the day rather than numbing it is so important when tapping into your intuition. Journaling gives you the chance to fully express everything that may subconsciously be on your mind.

Implement Wellness Strategies

Creating a lifestyle around trusting your intuition, implementing wellness strategies in your everyday life will make it easier to connect within. This occurs because when you live a life of wellness, you can better evaluate when things are feeling off and take action to get back on track. Wellness strategies may include physical movement, nutrition, having a clean and organized environment, creating a budget, understanding your spirituality, etc.

Grace & Gratitude

Give yourself some grace when you’re struggling. Using negative self-talk will only drag you down and make you feel less than enough. Intuitive living is about honoring where you are at any given time. We all have rough days but it’s important to give yourself some grace when you just need a break.

Practicing gratitude is a HUGE part of connecting to yourself. It allows you to see the world in a different light. Gratitude allows you to recognize all of the good that you have in this life so when days seem rough or challenging, you have reminders to keep pushing forward.

Breathe

Like, really breathe. It calms the mind. It calms the body. Breathing helps unify the mind and body together. It’s an important thing to learn breathing techniques because when you feel like a situation is getting to be too much for you to process, breathing will help calm you and remind you that you have all of the answers and resources within you to make informed decisions that serve you and your life.