A question I often get from people is how do I know when I can trust my intuition, or, how do I know that what I am getting is really intuition? Most people tell me they believe their intuition has not been right all of the time and that is why they are reluctant to live their life according to what they feel. At the same time, all of them express a deep desire to find out how and when they can trust what they feel.

The basic problem of learning to trust your intuition is not as complex or hard as you may think. In today's society things like gut feelings or intuition are still relatively unknown. Unfortunately this means that when someone has a problem, they often don't know where to find the answers they need. This has led to living a hit and miss experience as far as intuition is concerned. Their lack of understanding of what is actually happening is holding them back.

The process of creating that understanding is learning the difference between two aspects of your inner self. The first aspect is intuition and the second is monkey mind.

Monkey mind is the collection of random thoughts that flow through your mind every day. Sometimes these are nonsense thoughts about things that you would never say or do and sometimes these thoughts are very close to what you would say and do. When this happens at a time when some sort of decision or action is required, it can easily be mistaken for intuition. As these random thoughts are sometimes driven by things like fear, they are often far from accurate. It's not hard to see how the mistrust of intuition can result from this happening. This in turn can create more monkey mind which in turn compounds the problem. In short, monkey mind has been mistaken as intuition and is the real reason for the mistrust being there in the first place.

Pure intuition is something that you can completely trust, but when you are unsure if its intuition you are feeling, its hard to learn that trust. When you combine that with the fact that most people feel that they have made many mistakes in their lives its easy to see why most people end up trying to logic out the situation. This often leads to a great deal of confusion and sometimes making choices that are later regretted. It becomes a vicious circle which seems to have no exit.

The key to breaking this cycle is being able to pick the difference between monkey mind and intuition.

Learning the difference between monkey mind and intuition is a relatively simple process that just takes a little time and effort. All you need to do is follow a few steps and repeat them.

Whenever you have an intuitive or gut feeling, there is normally a physical sensation associated with it. This can be an internal tingling sensation, or butterflies, or a feeling in your heart, or one of the many other sensations I have had described to me. A similar sensation is sometimes associated with monkey mind and is part of the reason for mistaking it as intuition. Because this physical sensation is something tangible and recognizable it is the best place to start.

Whenever you believe you have an intuitive feeling about something, focus on the physical sensation. By focussing on this sensation you are creating a memory of it within you. At the same time make a mental note of the information that comes with your "intuition". If you can, write down the "intuitive feeling" as this will help to strengthen both the memory of the physical sensation and the information that came with it. The idea is to create an association between the memory of the physical sensation and the information that came with your "intuitive feeling".

The next step is to wait for the outcome of the "intuitive feeling". If the outcome match's the "intuition" then you have a confirmation that it was intuition. If the events don't match then you have confirmation that it was monkey mind.

Now it's simply a matter of repeating this process. Each time you do this exercise your confidence will grow in the validity of your intuition because you will recognize the feeling physical sensation easier each time. This means that your associations and memories are building and growing more and more sensitive each time you repeat this exercise. The added advantage of this is not only getting to a point where you will have absolute confidence in trusting what you feel, but that you will also have a much finer degree of intuition than you have ever had in your life. It will even get to the point where you will be able to ask yourself a question and immediately have an intuitive response you know you can trust totally.

It will lead to you to the point where you will have intuitive feelings every single day and sometimes several times within that day. If you wish, you can build it to the point where you can get very detailed intuitive responses that can be used to help others.