Why the Body Knows Best
We tend to think of intuition as a gut feeling, but according to psychic Dana Childs, intuition is actually a four-part mechanism that involves our physical bodies, our minds, our souls, and our spirits. Now here’s the tricky part: Not every one of these channels can be trusted. We lie to ourselves for good and bad reasons, self-protection or self-sabotage (which are often one and the same). Her advice? Get as clear as possible on what is going on in all areas of your psyche, which is easier than it sounds. That way, when new information comes in, you are not clouded by your biases.
Body, Mind, Spirit, and Soul
The Body
There are times we all feel like our body must be a liar—when we get a big pimple right before an important date or when we bloat before a black-tie event or a high school reunion. Or maybe when we melt inside looking at a picture of the person we’re no longer with and really wish we weren’t feeling that way. In those moments, we long to believe our body is a traitor.
The truth is your body cannot lie. It is always going to be truthful—it knows no other way. Its sole purpose is to take care of you and work hard on your behalf. Our body is constantly giving us signals to let us know what’s off or amiss. That pimple? It could be your body signaling that your hormones are off or that your new face cream isn’t a good fit for your skin, or it could be an emotional message for you to be kind to and accepting of yourself.
To connect to the body, we have to get quiet. We need the space to feel into what sensations our body is experiencing. Once we take the time to learn to feel what our body’s signals are when we are uncertain, uncomfortable, excited, in love, and terrified, we can use our body’s signals as a guide, pointing us in the direction of our truth.
As you complete these steps over time, you’ll have an idea of how your body gives you truthful information, and you’ll be able to access this at any time.
The Mind
Your mind will lie, send you in circles, manipulate you, and get you way off track. This doesn’t mean that the mind can’t help you with useful facts and information to guide your choices, but the mind has too much capacity for fear and logic, and sometimes these things interfere with the truth. Don’t depend on your mind for your truths. I’m not saying don’t use your mind. What I am saying is listen to your body for the truth and use your mind to determine how best to follow that truth. The body gets to give the answers for the what and where. The mind gets to help you with the logistics of how.
The best way to use the mind is to get it in sync with your heart. Here’s a quick process I like to use to do this.
Moving forward, when making big decisions, be sure to get quiet and centered and put your attention on your heart space instead of your head space. You can also repeat these five steps anytime you feel your mind is in control when it should not be.
The Soul
Your soul is a liar. Surprised? I know it’s sad. We love to believe that our soul is pure. But energetically speaking, it’s the part of us that has free will to choose its beliefs. At times, it can be out of alignment with divine energy.
If we came to earth as pure spirit, we would experience everything that happens to us as acceptable because we would always be seated in pure divine acceptance of what is. If someone abused us, we would say, “That’s okay. I understand why you did that.” If someone hurt our children, we would say, “It’s okay. I know why this is happening.” But that is not okay. We have to learn boundaries and preferences in our time on earth. We must strive to remember our inherent worth and value. In our time on earth, we seek to merge our soul’s beliefs with our spirit’s beliefs.
Our soul is the thicker part of us that can hold lessons and learn boundaries. It can learn right from wrong, although sometimes it may believe in falsehoods. When we’re young, we trust our parents to teach us the truth. But sometimes, our parents can be confused, too, and they pass on bad information to us.
You see, our soul is like a bunch of computer programs. Some of these programs may be operating on spirit code, and some programs may be operating with a virus. With a virus, you are not functioning as ordained by spirit but are instead running a belief system not anchored in divine alignment. Our goal is to align our soul with our spirit, to get ourselves united with the spiritual truths.
The Spirit
Your spirit is always connected to the truth. I view this as the higher-self part of you that walks with the divine. It’s that all-knowing, all-loving part of you that has your best interest and highest good at heart all the time. It’s the you that is pure consciousness, that remembers your divine blueprint and plan for your life. It’s the piece of you that is always ushering you toward growth and learning.
Your spirit is like the unconditionally loving parent whispering to your heart and sometimes communicating messages to you through your body. For example, is your stomach “off” for seemingly no physical reason? That could be your spirit trying to let you know that there is something emotional or situational that you are having a hard time “digesting.” Do you get migraines that don’t seem to be related to an external trigger? This could be your spirit’s way of pointing out that you are feeling helpless around something in your life. Do you feel something compelling you to do something new or to change your life for the better? That’s your spirit.
It takes some practice to learn to listen to and communicate with our spirit. It also requires trust and dedicated time.
By communicating with our spirit, we learn its preferred language. For some, perhaps it’s mostly messages that come in through physical body sensations or emotions. For others, it could be images that appear in the mind’s eye, like snapshots. It can also be an auditory sensation where you hear a kind, loving voice in your head or see words in your head light up like billboards. Our spirit is creative in the ways it communicates.
Dana Childs is an intuitive, an energy healer, and a teacher. She leads workshops, online courses, and retreats to help others learn to open their own intuitive gifts.
