The other day I attended an unusually hot Bikram yoga class. Somewhere in the middle I needed to lie down, as my heart felt like it would burst. While lying there, staring up at the ceiling, I suddenly had a voice inside me speaking words told to me long ago by my High School art teacher:

“An artist always knows when a painting is complete”

After hearing this, I felt something, like a deep knowing, then it shifted to a physical sensation that washed inside me and I realized what this meant. These words don’t necessarily apply to just creating art, but to life. It’s important to recognize when something is over it’s just over. If you keep putting time and energy into it, it’s wasted effort or you may ruin it, just like an overworked painting.

This is a powerful intuition indicating completion.

This is also a lesson on intuition, how it speaks to you, and interpreting it.

So how does your intuition speak to you?

Sometimes, it can be a small voice inside you; it can be flashes of visual images, a feeling in your stomach or even knowingness in your heart. The one consistency is a lack of visceral emotions when the intuition hits. It’s just a message delivered… then after the message is delivered, the emotional response happens.

It works like this because the way you process information:
1) Message
2) Mind receives message and thinks about it
3) Emotions follow thoughts

Sometimes you receive the message and process it so fast, you go right to the emotions. (i.e.: As soon as I walked in, I instantly felt sick and tired.)

The easiest way to tell the difference if a message is a thought, or an intuition is your emotional response.

Thought – if you had very intense emotions at the same time as the message
Thought – very negative feelings and obsessing over message
Intuition – when the message came you didn’t have any emotions
(Maybe exception of compassion)
Intuition – after receiving the message, even if bad news, you felt a sense of relief or as thought you already knew the answer already.

Where does this message, this information come from?

Sometimes that inner voice is you, these are your thoughts which are influenced by your past experiences. Other times it is your Higher Self, also known as intuition, which is actually your Soul; your Soul is directly plugged into God the Divine and touches the entire Universe.

This is how every question you have is always answered. And it is ALWAYS answered and usually as soon as you ask! But, why you don’t think you have an answer is because the answer you received isn’t want you want to hear, so you dismiss it and claim you don’t know what to do.

Perhaps the biggest step in working with intuition is trusting it. When you know that you’ve receive the truth and it feels like the correct course of action in every aspect, it’s important to trust it and follow through.

And if it means something is over, which is often difficult to accept, take comfort knowing that now there is room for something new to begin…