Join me this week as I share what it looks like to live an intuitive life, with real-life examples.
In this episode, I share:
- The most compelling reason to pay attention to our intuition in our life choices
- How living aligned with our intuition can lead us to create a life that is more than we think is possible (or available) to us
- The little ‘breadcrumbs’ that led to the intuitive ‘big rocks’ I share from my own life [What hunches was I having? How did I know it was my intuition?]
- How following our intuition often feels unknown, doesn’t totally make sense in the moment, and can mean sitting in discomfort as we wait for more clarity
Episode links:
- Learn how to Map Your Intuition with a guided worksheet, located inside The Resource Library – learn more HERE
- Want some support in getting quiet and tuning into what you’re thinking about, or what’s calling to you, today? Go to www.jenmoulton.com/newsletter and sign up to get my completely free Intuitive Creation Audio. You’ll receive my unique process to reliably tap in BEFORE you make any creative work so you can overcome procrastination, overwhelm, and where-do-i-start-itis.
If you enjoy listening, please subscribe, rate and review, and forward this episode to a friend who would benefit from it too.
Let’s become a generation of creative women who are examples for the people in our lives of what it looks like to prioritize our work (AND recognize our impact).
x, Jen
Full episode transcript below:
Welcome to today's episode, Mapping Your Intuition. Mapping Your Intuition is a concept that I've been tinkering with, to uncover exactly how we create what we want, so how we've done it in the past, and then what can we learn from it, to apply to what we wanna create in the future. I think of it as like a knot with many threads. And once we start to pick apart the knot, we see the ways that each thread is linked together, is connected, maybe overlaps with other threads, to create this whole knot, which in this example, the knot is something that we have created that we wanted. I think we can use this method to uncover how you've created things that you want. And then utilize it to tap into your intuition, to learn wisdom that you can apply to what you wanna create in the future. I'm gonna share the process on today's episode, and there will be a download available in The Resource Library that you can use to navigate this process if you wanna join that. And if you want to dive deeper into this. So the first step in mapping your intuition is to think about the thing that you want. And let's start by thinking about something that you wanted, that you have, that you've already created. In the future you can work through this with something that you are actively wanting to create and have. But let's start with something that you already have so that you can get the steps down. And I want you to see yourself as the hero here. You created this thing in your life. You did it. A lot of us are like, oh, it happened because of this. This is like how I did it. No, you created it. You made it happen. You took a lot of steps to make it happen. So number one, take ownership over that. And number two, let's dig into looking for the nudges that you received that led you to work towards creating it. What were maybe some aligned actions that you took, things that worked and things that didn't, but that you learned from? I find it really helpful to work backwards. What's the last thing I did? Then the thing before that? Like a reverse breadcrumb trail. Or if we go back to the knot analogy, what was the last thread you untangled and then the thread before that? We wanna record all the breadcrumbs, all the threads, and take proud responsibility for everything that you've done that has gotten you what you wanted, that helped you create the thing. Keep going until you get to the first inkling you had of the idea, and maybe it shifted over time. That's great, totally fine, but keep excavating, keep following the threads and witnessing all of your brilliance, all of the ways in which you just kept following the lily pads and slowly, or maybe quickly, built or created exactly what you wanted. And all of the ways that you brilliantly did that. I don't think we give ourselves enough credit. I think, like I said a minute ago, I think a lot of times we think like, oh, this happened because of this, or like, oh, I was just lucky, or whatever. No, you are brilliant. And if you are creating things that are really meaningful to you, that means that you are utilizing your inner wisdom to do it, your inner brilliance to do it. You're tapping into that place inside of you that only you have, and that guides you to creating things that are really meaningful to you. We wanna celebrate that and we also wanna like spend more time there, tap into it, let's explore it. Let's feel more intimately familiar with it so that it's a place that you can tap into more frequently and when you want to, not feeling like it's just this thing that happens by chance. So this is how you create an intuition map. You record what you've done, every single thing. You acknowledge your brilliance and your inner wisdom that guided you here, that led you to create the thing and all of the many things along the way, right? Because because like the thing that you have or have created, that you want, that is made up of a lot of mini things that happened along the way. And what I want you to realize is how much of a badass you are for creating it, and that there was a partnership that helped you do so. If you want to hear more about the partnership, go back and listen to episode 26, it's titled Intuition + Creativity = Flow. To me, there's this alchemical process when we utilize our problem solving skills, this amazingly powerful brain that we were all given, plus our inner wisdom, our inner knowing, this intangible undefined place that we can't fully define and we definitely cannot fully understand. When we pair those two together, and we take something and transform it by taking these raw parts a level deeper, and pairing them together in this alchemical process, and making these invisible callings that we have or invisible nudges/ ideas visible. By taking something that only you can see and making it explicit in the world. So that's what Episode 26 is about. In my opinion, it's a very interesting one, I've heard a lot of really great feedback about it, and it's there to support you in partnering more deeply with your intuition. Okay, so that is an overview of mapping your intuition. And again, I'm gonna repeat it one more time. I know I've already said it, but you choose something that you have created for this first one. You look at every single thing that you did to make it real. Every nudge, every experiment, every obstacle, every success. You acknowledge yourself for all of the amazing work that you did to create it. And you keep going until you get to the original inkling of the idea and like maybe for yourself, what did that feel like? How did you even like start to follow that hunch? What was it about it that was interesting or compelling to you? Breaking down that process for yourself. This is highly individual, but if the more you acquaint yourself to your process, the more it could be predictive. So you've unpacked it for something that you've created. Now we do the same thing for something that you wanna create. You state what you wanna create, what you wanna make, what you wanna see in the world. Then you familiarize yourself with the inkling that you had. How do you know? Why do you wanna do it? And then you start following the breadcrumbs that you've already done, and then paying close attention to information that comes to you, whether through your brain or through your intuitive senses, your inner knowing, these little tugs, nudges, that's kind of how I think about them- maybe small awarenesses. Pay attention to those and you see the way that those are the breadcrumbs that are building the path to get you to create what it is that you want to have or see in the world. That's the mapping your intuition for something you've created and then how you would do it for something you don't yet have. How you would use your intuition to map the way that you're gonna create it, which I think like the open secret here is you'll never know. It's a totally unknown process. It's just gonna unfold one step at a time. And how can you tune into your senses more? Mostly probably your intuitive senses for sure, your problem solving. But how can you tune into your intuitive senses more? To be maybe more acutely aware of nudges, something that piques your interest, a little tug that you feel, and follow that breadcrumb. Then you've done that, celebrate it, and then you stay open for, okay, what's the next thing that's gonna come in? What might be next? What's interesting? And then if you don't have any information, sitting in an unknown place where you're just openly awaiting, you know, not super anxious about it. Not like, Ooh, I gotta figure this out. I need to like force my way there. Just like open, ready to receive. When you do the Mapping Your Intuition exercise, I would encourage you to choose one big rock or one big breadcrumb, and break it all the way down. Following the mapping your intuition method that I shared earlier, to see all the ways in which you created it. Because trust me, you have actively created everything that you have. Even the things that you feel like just happened to you. You did the work to make them happen. You set yourself up, you set the intention, you did the inner work, you laid the groundwork, you did it. And owning that is imperative to you continuing to create what you want in your life. If we think life is just sort of happening to us, which sometimes it is, I'm not like gonna say, oh it we are totally in control, sometimes life does happen to us, but if we think that life is always just happening to us and we don't have much participation, we're going to experience our lives very differently, and we're going to show up and operate in our lives very differently, then if we believe that we are in partnership, I would say, with the way our lives are unfolding and working out. And there's a lot that we can do on our end to influence the things that we have and do and become. That is what I have for you today. Just a reminder, there's a download for this in the resource library if you wanna dig further into this, but there's also the instructions in this episode that you can follow. I am so glad that you are here and that we get to walk our paths together. See you next time. Same time, same place. Bye for now. Welcome to today's episode, Living an Intuition -Led Life. Today's podcast is a bit of an extension from last week, episode 47, mapping your intuition. So in episode 47, I talked about the ways in which we can work backwards to see how things in our lives unfold intuitively. I think working backwards we can often gather wisdom and information that we can use going forward, in things that we want to create and have, and be, and do. In today's episode, I'm sharing what I think of as evidence or for me, the compelling reasons in my life on why I'm an advocate for living in line with your intuition and being connected to your intuition and gathering information and next steps and paying attention to the things that are tugging at you. I talk about some big things that are really foundational to my life that were totally intuitively led. I say this and I just want to repeat it- I could not have foreseen them from myself. I couldn't have planned them if I tried. And I think that is one of the most compelling and exciting reasons to live an intuition led life is that things can be so different, bigger, better or just different than what we foresee for ourselves, or what we could imagine right now. So I talk about some of the foundational things that have happened in my life, especially earlier on, and how those came to be. And basically I share the intuition maps behind these big breadcrumbs in my life. So how these things came to be. It's so interesting for me to reflect on that personally. I love to think about it and I love to talk about it. And I wanted to share it with you because I think that the common theme is that usually you just don't quite know where you're going and it feels kind of confusing, and definitely uncertain and sometimes it doesn't make sense in the moment. Like it doesn't look like it's adding up, but you just keep feeling nudged to do something a certain way. And you can follow that. And so I wanted to share my evidence of that and how that has all added up to be the life that I have, which I feel so grateful for. It's so much different than what I envisioned for myself when I was younger. And I talk a little bit about that in what I share. So, what I hope you take from this is going into your own life and seeing when things have happened, either intuitively, maybe you've been aware of it, maybe you haven't. Maybe there's been some synchronicities that have happened in your life. And looking for the intuition map behind it. How did that come to be? What hunches did you have? What was interesting to you? What was tugging at you? That led you to this bread crumb in your own life. I think it's really powerful to reflect on this because the more you become acquainted with and attuned to your own intuitive processes, the more predictive they can become, the more sensitive you can become to them when they're actually happening, and the more you can tap into it and harness it. . I just think living an intuition led life is like the most exciting thing we can do. So let's get into today's episode. I hope you enjoy. And now I'm gonna share some of my breadcrumbs in my own life. Because I think it's really interesting. I mean, I think it would be really interesting to share, because to me, when I look back, it's really crazy how things have come together, and I am often asked like, how do you know you're intuitive? How did you become intuitive? And it's something that I feel like I've just always had access to. I just always paid attention to it. When I was younger, it was harder to follow because a lot of times it like didn't totally make sense to me or it wasn't logical, and it definitely wasn't on the achievement track that I was on. But I just from a young age started listening to it and I think was willing to experiment. I was like, I don't know, let's just see what happens from here. And then knowing that I could change course if I wanted to or needed to. But I wanna share some of the, what I think of as big rocks in my life, that have led me to where I am today. I have been doing this work since, and, and I'll share this in a minute, the first time I felt like a really strong intuitive nudge was when I was 15 years old, so a little more than 20 years. And so I've explored this quite a bit. And if I, you know, all of the like micro breadcrumbs, like there'd be probably thousands of them to share with you, but I'm gonna share the big breadcrumbs, like the big rocks. To show what it's like when you let a life unfold, mostly intuitively, and I think I shared in a previous episode that I feel so thankful that I have followed a mostly intuitive path in my life. Because I could have never planned where I am right now, and I'm fairly content with that. I feel really good about it. If I had tried to like strategize my way here, I wouldn't have even known to think of the things that are in my life right now. And so to me, that's the most compelling reason to allow your life, or maybe to commit your life, to following things intuitively and mapping your intuition as a tool that we can use, because what we think is possible for us is so limited. And if we pursue that, we will limit ourselves. Versus following intuitive nudges, not really quite always knowing where it's gonna take you, trusting yourself, being willing to adjust course, and it's a lot of being willing to sit in an unknown place, which is pretty uncomfortable and be like, I have no idea why this is happening. I don't know where this is leading me. I don't know. And just sitting with that and having a deeper trust that- I guess I choose to believe that I'm learning some really important lessons in these moments and focusing on that while I wait for more information to come in. So that was a little bit of a tangent there about why I'm an advocate for living intuitively. And I'm gonna share some of my big rocks, my big breadcrumbs with you. So my intuitive journey started I would say when I was a teenager, though I can see back to always having it as a little kid. And side note, I think everyone has it. I think everyone is intuitive, just like I think everyone is creative. And I think it's just a muscle that we can develop. I think it's a relationship that we can develop, but I always felt like a deeply intuitive person, even as a little kid. But my strongest memory that sticks out is when I was a teenager. I was 15 years old and I had a hunch to go to a particular university for a college. Where I knew no one. I had no idea why, but I had this inner knowing at 15 that I was meant to go away to school. And I heard someone talk about the school that I ended up going to, which was George Washington in DC, and I had a very strong resonant body response and I was like, that's where I'm going. And it just became like, I just made the decision in that moment. Like only a 15 year old would. So fast forward I visited, which was my very first time going to DC, and it was the only school that I applied to for college, which again, something that only a 17 year old would do. And I got in early decision and I was elated. And it was the first time that I really had, and it was, you know, an extended period of time when you're applying to college. It was the first time I really wanted something, like for myself, like genuinely wanted it, not just an achievement, like I wanted to get good grades or win this certain award or whatever. I really wanted to go to school there and I got it. And I don't know, maybe I needed that like big win in the beginning to be evidence of what can happen when we follow our intuition. But it was major for me at 17 to have this first experience. And I will say I had a very difficult time adjusting to being away from my family, at such a big school, in a city. I grew up in a town of 12,000 people. But I never, that first month I was at school was really difficult, but I never was like, I'm not supposed to be here. Or, oh, something is terribly wrong because I feel so deeply uncomfortable. I just was like, oh, I'm in this uncomfortable place. And I don't know that I had the forethought to think like, oh, I'm gonna get through this, because I was like 18 years old, but I was just like, yeah, I'm in it. I wasn't like, I need to come home, this is wrong. It was just like a deeply uncomfortable, transformative period for me. And luckily I met a friend on my floor early on, in my dorm, and that friend was roommates with my now husband. And I keep a lot of my life pretty private. But when I met Matt, I was immediately drawn to him. And I had this tugging that wouldn't leave me alone. And I had had, you know, teenage relationships before that, but this one felt different. This resonance I had with him felt very different than with anyone I had been interested in before that. And I just felt this like tugging, and pulling, the nudging that I keep talking about towards him. And so we pursued it, and now we've been together for 18 years. And our relationship is one of the greatest gifts of my life. But it has not been easy and I'm never one to glorify relationships, or marriage. My experience is that it's not easy, and it's not really meant to be easy, I don't think. But if you find someone with common values and goals and you share a joint desire to learn and grow, then it can flourish with consistent care. So that's my second big breadcrumb. Another one is during my freshman year of college, just after returning from winter break, I felt a strong sense that I needed to travel home, which it made no sense at the time cause I had just been there for several weeks. But I followed this feeling that I needed to go home, and I was able to see my grandmother just before she unexpectedly passed away. It just still feels so wild to me, and I'm so grateful that at that point I had had a couple experiences with this inner knowing, because I remember my logic was like, this is so silly. You were just home for several weeks. Like you, it doesn't make any sense for you to go back. But I was just like, I have to go. And I went. And of course I didn't know that she was gonna pass away, but I got to see her again before she did. And I, you know, of course I grieved it, but I didn't have any regrets of like, oh my God, if I would've just listened to myself and gone back home like I thought I should. Like, that is another compelling reason to me to follow our intuition is, of course you'll still have regrets sometimes, but I think when you're living aligned with your inner knowing or your intuition, you feel more congruence that allows you to be more settled in your decisions and more peaceful with the ways in which life works itself out, or shakes out. So after graduating college, Matt received a job offer in California and I felt this sense that we were meant to go, and we did. I'll never forget, he sent me a message on Gchat back in the day when that was a thing of like, I got a job offer, dot, dot, dot in California, and I was like, he's meant to do this. And that was the first time we were on our own really. We were young, 23, and traveled and visited parts of the country that broadened my mind. It was so different from the east coast, and this little beach town where I grew up. We got our two dogs who we adore, and it was a really transformative experience. It really planted seeds for me about what was possible and just seeing different parts of the country. I'm a huge advocate for expanding our minds, like we, what we see is what we think is possible, and so exposing yourself to so many things, as many as you can, so that you can begin to think that more is possible for you than what you currently believe. When we are moving back from California, back to the East coast, we drove across country and while driving through Amarillo, Texas, I sometimes I have like no filter between these like inner knowings and I just speak 'em out loud, and this is one of those examples I just blurted out: I wouldn't mind living in Austin someday. And then six months later, Matt got a job offer in Austin. Neither of us had ever been to Texas before and he accepted it. And now we've lived here for almost 12 years. A few years ago, we bought our first house in the exact neighborhood that I wanted to buy in. We bought the smallest house in the neighborhood, and it was only the second house that I saw, and I just knew I had this feeling. I remember standing in the living room and just knowing that we were meant to put an offer in on it. Our realtor kind of pushed back. She was like, are you sure you haven't barely seen any houses like how do you know? And I just knew and within a few months of closing, the neighborhood just blew up and our house increased in value by a very significant percentage, and we would've been completely priced out of our neighborhood had we not bought exactly when we did. I have more examples I could share with you- strangers who became some of my closest friends, chance meetings, office spaces, projects, career changes. But those are some of my big rocks that have been really kind of life defining. When you do the Mapping Your Intuition exercise, I would encourage you to choose one big rock or one big breadcrumb, and break it all the way down. Following the mapping your intuition method that I shared earlier, to see all the ways in which you created it. Because trust me, you have actively created everything that you have. Even the things that you feel like just happened to you. You did the work to make them happen. You set yourself up, you set the intention, you did the inner work, you laid the groundwork, you did it. And owning that is imperative to you continuing to create what you want in your life. If we think life is just sort of happening to us, which sometimes it is, I'm not like gonna say, oh it we are totally in control, sometimes life does happen to us, but if we think that life is always just happening to us and we don't have much participation, we're going to experience our lives very differently, and we're going to show up and operate in our lives very differently, then if we believe that we are in partnership, I would say, with the way our lives are unfolding and working out. And there's a lot that we can do on our end to influence the things that we have and do and become. That is what I have for you today. I am so glad that you are here and that we get to walk our paths together. See you next time. Same time, same place. Bye for now.
