Mindfulness: The Tuition of Intuition

Tuition refers to the price or payment for instruction. Tuition gives us access to a class or teacher that will help us improve or change in some meaningful way. We may think the opposite of tuition is intuition or the ability to understand something immediately or know something from instinct rather than conscious reasoning. Sometimes we may call this a gut feeling.

Who wouldn’t want the superpower of intuition or to immediately know what they need to know? There is a way to improve your intuition, but it comes at a price. It’s often difficult to go through the process of paying the price for some knowledge or skill. Pain, suffering, or growth is a price or tuition for knowing some things, but it often clears a path for intuition and wisdom that becomes instinctive.

The early Roman satirist Juvenal said, “All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price”.

I would suggest that when some idea or emotion comes easily to us, it may be because we have gone through a series of steps of learning that created an environment that allowed us to reach a place where we could “intuitively” or unconsciously understand the next step. While this next step seems to have come without a price, an earlier tuition for this intuition was paid.

Mindfulness and intuition

At first glance, mindfulness, which is an awareness of the present moment, may seem to stand in contrast to intuition, which is defined as a subconscious knowing. However, researchers have begun to explore how these two skills can be developed and may inform one another. Mindfulness and intuition may have a symbiotic relationship in that a mindful person may able to read more cues and thereby trigger intuition to engage in problem-solving or decision-making seemingly by instinct or intuition.

Reading cues

Research has categorized intuition into many groups. But even with these many groups of intuition, researchers acknowledge that intuition may be obtained or honed through the brain processing patterns from earlier experiences or observations.[vi] Consequently, individuals who are more aware and give attention to detail in the present moment, may be able to pick up on more patterns. For example, one study has shown a positive connection between emotional awareness and mindfulness.[vii] In a relational setting, couples who can regulate their emotion (be aware of the emotion and respond by tempering the emotion) reported more satisfaction within their relationship. Mindful couples may have an intuition that helps create connections and avoid conflict.

Ignoring cues

Sometimes cues are intentionally ignored so that hard issues don’t have to be addressed. This just undermines our intuition because we are ignoring the cues that could inform us. However, that just causes stress and anxiety. For example, we may have an intuition that our partner is put off by a need for emotional closeness and we are uncomfortable with that much vulnerability. It may be that we experienced criticism as a child for wanting emotional connection. Despite the current desire to talk about emotions or discuss vulnerabilities, we close down emotionally to avoid or ignore these cues. In this case, our intuition will be undermined, and not trained to learn from the nuance of these signals.

Misreading cues

We may misread cues and thereby hamper our ability to use intuition. One good example is anger. Anger helps us identify our values and helps us establish our own boundaries and boundaries for others. Anger is an important element of healthy relationships. But if we misread our anger we may distrust the cues anger is providing and instead assume we need to react with forgiveness which may distract us from confronting the issues that have created the anger.

If we always opt for immediate forgiveness we may fall into a trap. Our body responds with anger for a reason—it is neither bad nor good. Slow down and notice the cues or your intuition about your anger. What circumstances occurred that flagged or cued your body that there was danger or a big imbalance? Examine deeply what has happened. If we slow down and notice the cues or the intuition of our emotions, the relationship between anger and the meaningful process of forgiveness may reveal something infinitely more complex. This same process is true of each emotion. Slow down trust the cues your body and mind have noticed and learn about how this informs intuition. This is the price or tuition of our intuition.

Conclusion

Don’t shortchange the process of developing intuition. There is a price or a tuition to it. The price is paid by carefully attuning to or being mindful of the cues that are all around us. Allow your body and mind time and space to absorb these cues and learn from them.