054 • My methods for harnessing intuition and flow state
Hello again,
Thanks for being patient with me whilst I procrastinated over sending this issue and the video issue for the previous week.
I said that filming video wasn’t something that I’m confident with, and this showed in the time that it took me to get up and actually hit the record button.
But it’s here now. I’ll normally share the previous issue’s video at the bottom of the current issue, but seeing as this is the first, I’m going to put it at this start of this one.
Click through, hit subscribe so you're there when I post new ones and see what you think of the one here...
Please bear in mind that I’m not very good at these videos yet, so you’re going to have to put up with waffling and stumbling for a couple of weeks.
Anyway, on to this week’s issue, which is all about intuition…
I think it’s a cop-out to tell someone to simply ‘follow intuition.
Despite it being easy to say, it’s not easy to tell the difference between the feeling of intuition and the feeling exacted by hundreds of other desires and influences we’re exposed to day-by-day.
Through becoming aware of this, I’ve developed a few practices that have helped me to remove the mental clutter and become more aware of my core desires and drivers.
One is meditation. Up to this point, I’ve just been sitting down and focusing on the sensation of breathing. This does a brilliant job of taking me out of my head and into the real world, and is a great starting challenge for beginners.
Now, however, I have access to Sam Harris’s $150/year mindfulness app (I didn’t pay, instead asked nicely for a scholarship) and I’m looking forward to digging into this extra layer of insight and discovery that its content is going to bring.
An additional simple method to isolate your intuition is to simply limit your brain’s inputs. If you’re spending all day on social media, then you’re going to be more tuned into the content and desires of other peoples’ heads and not your own.
This is no way to understand your own brain. Strip things back, spend more time creating rather than consuming, and when you’re not, get off the internet. There’s a lot to see in front of your own eyes.
The last practice that has stuck with me is journaling. By writing what you feel, you can better determine where these emotions are coming from and this really helps with making complex and important decisions.
When you lay out the pros and cons of a dilemma, it’s much easier to make a decision based on logic rather than quick-changing (and not necessarily correct) desires.
And what does intuition feel like itself? A personal answer - nothing. It’s a pursuit of what’s most likely to put you into a flow state, progress you in your goals and deliver optimal human experience. And that means you have no thoughts in your head. You’re focused entirely on execution of the task at hand.
If your ‘gut feeling’ points a lot of time towards you engaging in activities that put you in a flow state, it’s likely you’re in good tune with your intuition.
Continue to hone this through mental practices and paying attention to which activities put you in this state of wholistic focus.
Now next time you hear that you should follow your intuition, or your gut, or any other way of defining the drive and direction you feel in your bones but can’t explain the source, know this extra context and make sure these feelings are truly yours.
I’ll see you next week!
– Theo
P.S. I promise to get the video for this issue out quicker this time. Now the first one’s done with, I think that it’ll be easier to keep going.
What I've written this week...
Obsidian for Mobile - My Setup and Opinions on Sync - I've been using the iOS app version of Obsidian (which incidentally just received a large update). This piece is all about how I've been using it, and my opinions on the sync service that Obsidian offer.