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how to listen to your own gut feelings from the philosophy of Carl Jung.
Carl Jung once said ‘Intuition is perception via unconsciousness.’
Your gut feelings or intuitions are entirely
unique to you and can say a lot about who you are as an individual.
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, delved extensively into the workings of the unconscious, offering
insights that can help us better understand our intuitions and ourselves.
Jung’s most famous theory is ‘the individuation process.’
Individuation is the art of learning how to recognize your inner and most unique attributes,
desires, goals, strengths, and weaknesses.
The most vital practice within this process is the exploration of the unconscious.
A part of the unconsciousness is what Jung called ‘the shadow’ - this contains all
the aspects of yourself that you try to push down and deny, the attributes that you try
to pretend you don’t have, even to the point of convincing yourself.
Examples of such traits are explosive anger, jealousy, envy, greed, pride, laziness, vanity,
and more.
But suppressing or ignoring these traits doesn’t make them go away - rather, they grow and
fester in the shadows.
This is the cause of sudden outbursts, emotional blowups, snapping at others, unwanted thoughts,
unfairly blaming others, and more.
In other words: they could be the source of your less desirable intuitions or gut feelings.
Another highly influential source of intuition are your unconscious archetypes.
Archetypes are part of the collective unconsciousness: a form of unconsciousness shared by all human
beings.
Jung was of the opinion that certain parts of one’s personality and traits are present
from birth, only waiting to develop, and that is the reason for all similarities between
people across cultures, time, and space.
They are the natural tendencies in our minds that help us understand and react to the world
around us.
An example of a Jungian archetype is ‘The Caregiver:’ the human urge to take care
of one another.
Jung’s teachings on the unconscious and archetypes are vital to understanding your
gut feelings, and how getting to know and learning to listen to those gut feelings can
improve your life.
Which is why in this video we’re going to talk about how to listen to your gut feelings
from the teachings of Carl Jung.
Get To Know Your Shadow and Your Archetype Jung says ‘Intuition is not mere perception,
or vision, but an active, creative process that puts into the object just as much as
it takes out.’
You can get to know your intuitions by getting to know your unconsciousness - by analyzing
your shadow, by working on your individuation process.
You can do this by utilizing self-reflection, meditation, analysis of dreams, fantasies,
urges, and your own behavior.
For example, you can keep a dream journal, in which you write what you remember from
your dreams as soon as you wake up in the morning.
Dreams can tell you a lot about what was going on in your head before you went to sleep,
such as your worries, fantasies, desires, fears, and so on.
If it turns out that you carry a lot of worry with you, this might affect your shadow and
thus your intuitions.
You might get the sudden urge to act tougher than you are to hide your insecurities, for
example.
Another very standard but very effective way to get to know your intuitions is to simply
reflect on how you felt, acted, and made your decisions on any given day.
Regularly reflect and ask yourself questions such as, ‘Why did I make this decision?’,
‘Is there anything I wanted to do instead?’, or ‘What did I feel in the moment?’.
You can practice reflection at scheduled times or whenever you have time, and you can do
so by either thinking about it, or even better write about it, otherwise known as journalling.
In this way, you examine your shadow.
Getting to know the shadow is a difficult and never-ending, yet incredibly rewarding
process.
When you get to know what it is that you push away, you get to know what drives you the
most - and thus, what it is that forms your intuitions.
Another incredibly important part of the unconscious that influences your gut feelings, are the
collective archetypes.
It’s crucial to identify which archetypes you can find within yourself.
Examples of the archetypes and the kinds of intuitions that come to these types of people
are the following:
The Hero The hero is a courageous fighter who believes
that as long as they work or try hard enough, that they can achieve anything.
Their intuitions would be rooted in stubbornness, faith in their own abilities, and perhaps,
even arrogance.
The Caregiver This is an archetype that almost cares more
about others than themselves.
Their intuition is to think of others before thinking of oneself, and their gut feeling
is often to say yes.
The Creator The creator is a very artistic and creative
type.
Their gut feelings are often out there, but not in a bad way: they have a talent for quickly
thinking of the most creative solution to a problem.
The Rebel This type of person is someone who likes to
make their own rules and ignores limits.
Their intuitions are often extreme, destructive, and on the far end of the spectrum.
The Trickster The trickster is a joker who mainly seeks
out enjoyment and good times.
Whenever they get into trouble, their gut feelings would include joking around, bargaining,
and playing with the situation they’ve found themselves in.
The Sage The sage finds honesty extremely important.
They’re the type of person who always tends to seek out the truth and be honest before
anything else.
And finally The Ruler
The ruler is someone who feels most at home in a leadership position and who strives for
control.
Their gut feelings are influenced by this desire: they are most often alert when they’ve
got opportunities to grow their control and their intuitions lead them to greater positions
within their life, society, or company.
Doing research on the Jungian archetypes and trying to determine which ones you see the
most in you can tell you a lot about what types of intuitions you usually get.
When you know yourself well - and, for example, realize that you often act as a caregiver
- you’ll start to identify gut feelings that result from this archetype much more
quickly.
It’s important to know that you can outgrow archetypes and grow in to new archetypes when
you think of this.
Moreover, Jung identified two types of intuitions: introverted and extroverted.
Introverted intuition focuses on rational thinking and recognizing patterns, while extroverted
intuition is about exploring new possibilities.
Introverted intuition looks inward for information, like solving riddles or predicting the future
based on current clues.
Extroverted intuition seeks outside the box ideas and solutions, often coming up with
creative solutions effortlessly.
So for every gut feeling you’ve managed to identify, you can try to figure out if
it was introverted or extroverted.
What information was it based on?
For example, if you had an intuition not to take a certain offer, is it because it seemed
sketchy, or because you’ve heard something bad about the person offering it?
The former reasoning is introverted - based on the offer itself - and the latter is extroverted
- based on outside information.
This way you can find out whether your intuitions are more often introverted or extroverted,
and how you can use that to your advantage.
You can also learn to improve either of the two kinds of intuitions, as we’ll explain
later.
Your personality, unconsciousness, and intuitions are ever changing.
Thus, your self-analysis should be permanently ongoing.
By paying attention to your subconscious, shadow, behavior, feelings, and archetypes,
and by analyzing all your gut feelings in hindsight, you’ll manage to get to know
exactly what kinds of intuitions pop up in your head from time to time, and where they
come from.
2.
Remove What Blocks Your Gut Feelings According to Jung ‘‘We cannot change anything
until we accept it.
Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.’’
Even when you know what your gut feelings can look like, you might find yourself unable
to act; recognition isn’t enough for action.
Individuation is more than simply getting to know yourself: it also includes accepting
yourself and then integrating all parts of yourself - thus creating one whole.
You might have found out that you have helpful introverted gut feelings as a result of a
certain archetype, but you could also have conflicting intuitions from the shadow.
You could even have helpful unconscious gut feelings from certain aspects of yourself
that you push away that are then blocked by your archetype.
Fore example, imagine someone who’s very trusting and optimistic, which is wonderful,
except for when they let people start taking advantage of them.
This might be the result of an archetype called ‘The Innocent.’
Now imagine that this same person has some distrust or fear in their shadow, which they
unconsciously suppress.
These ‘negative traits’ could be a useful source of accurate gut feelings when people
mistreat you.
So when somebody ends up selfishly using this person, the person could have a gut feeling
coming from their shadow traits that identifies that this is happening, but the trusting intuitions
from the innocent archetype override that instinct.
In other words: if you embrace your innocent archetype but reject your more ‘negative’
traits, that archetype will always block the intuitions coming from the shadow, no matter
how helpful they could be.
And the same is true the other way around: if you embrace distrust but none of your more
empathetic or caring archetypes, you’ll become someone who never learns to trust or
lean on someone else.
So how do you make sure that none of your gut feelings are blocked?
According to Jung, the way to individuation is by integrating your conscious and subconscious.
Instead of being two separate sides of yourself, you should be able to be optimistic and trusting
without being naive or blind.
This can only be done when you accept all parts of yourself.
This, of course, is much more difficult than it sounds.
Getting to know and accepting all parts of yourself is frightening.
For example, the idea that you’re actually a deeply jealous person, or that you’re
secretly selfish, or a bit of a liar - you probably can’t imagine embracing these parts
of yourself.
However, every ‘bad’ trait has a positive side to it.
Fear and distrust can protect you from dangerous situations, anger can make you more assertive
and help you advocate for yourself, jealousy or selfishness can be an ingredient for ambition,
et cetera.
Even in the example just described, with intuitions from the shadow being overtaken by intuitions
from an archetype, the shadow played a helpful part.
And, moreover, it’s impossible not to have any negative traits.
The reality of the situation is: the shadow is only frightening and unhelpful when it’s
unacknowledged and unaccepted.
Accepting it is the best way to let it help and benefit you.
So instead of denying or working against traits you’d rather not have, ask yourself: in
what situations have these traits helped me?
In what situations could they help me?
How could I balance my traits?
Your shadow side and archetypes are here to teach you.
They are there to show you who you are, why you are the way you are - and how that could
be a good thing.
All shadow and archetype traits are traits that could be positive, if only you use them
right.
So question yourself, think of how to use them right, and never ignore or push them
down.
3.
Cultivate the ability to have Your Gut Feelings In the words of Jung ‘Intuition doesn’t
say what things mean but sniffs out their possibilities.
Meaning is given by thinking.’
By daily, weekly, or even only monthly exercises, you can sharpen your mind and cultivate the
ability to have quicker and more beneficial intuitions.
Intuitions, as said before, are the result of our personal and collective unconsciousness.
So by exploring your unconsciousness in different ways, you train your intuitions.
A few activities that can help you cultivate your introverted intuitions are the following:
Try and view your problem from different perspectives; someone who thinks very differently from you,
your future self, a character from a movie - or whoever else you think could be helpful.
Meditate and try to examine your inner world.
One of the most important aspects of meditation is to witness your thoughts as if you were
an outsider: you acknowledge them, and then let them go.
By doing so you can’t distract yourself or get lost in unimportant matters, but you’re
still thinking.
And this way, eventually some thoughts may arise that seem entirely new and original
to you.
Thoughts that you would never have had otherwise.
Make art.
Carl Jung believed that things like drawing, journaling, metaphors, and storytelling could
help you come to new insights.
If you have a certain problem, it might help to draw the situation or write a fictionalized
short story about it.
This creates both a certain distance and overview of the situation that could help you reconsider
it in an entirely new way.
A few activities that can help you cultivate your extroverted intuitions are the following:
Expose yourself to new situations often.
Try things that you’ve never done before, speak to people outside of your own social
circles, and ask others for their opinions more often.
Doing so will give you a whole range of new ideas and perspectives that you would never
have known existed otherwise.
Broadening your horizons means broadening your mind - which means that you have way
more knowledge to draw from if you ever have a problem that needs solving.
Again, make art.
Mindmapping, for example, is an excellent way to try and think outside the box.
By brainstorming on paper, you challenge yourself to fill the page with as much information
as possible and thus try and exhaust all the knowledge you might have.
Try to relate as much as you can to your current problems, and you’ll find that the paper
tells you more than you ever knew before.
Make a list of ideas and try to combine them, even if they initially don’t seem to go
well together.
Examples of making new combinations like that could be using two opposing colors in a drawing
and trying to make it look good, using two weird ingredients in a recipe and trying to
make it taste good, using two items of clothing that don’t fit together and trying to make
it work as an outfit.
But aside from this kind of daily practice, it might also help to try and combine various
aspects of all the solutions to a problem you can think of, and use that as a basis
to create an entirely new solution that’s the best of all worlds.
Of course, none of the insights you attain thanks to these activities are gut feelings
or intuitions - after all, they didn’t come to you spontaneously.
However, all of these activities serve as a sort of training for your mind.
The more insights, knowledge, and ways of effective thinking you have, the more your
mind starts to use all of that unconsciously.
If you teach yourself to think outside the box, your gut feelings might start to come
from somewhere outside that box, too.
Other activities that Jung recommended are set times a day for reflective journaling,
engaging with nature, or spending time now and then acknowledging your bodily sensations.
All of these practices can help to sharpen your mind, reveal more of your unconscious,
and thus cultivate your intuitions.
The more you work on your mind, the more helpful your gut feelings become.
4.
Don’t Get Lost In Your Gut Feelings In our final quote from Jung for this video,
he says ‘Intuitives are often very poor because they never wait for the harvest.’
Finally, a tricky part: there will always be unhelpful gut feelings.
This has been discussed before, when we talked about how positive gut feelings can be blocked
by more negative instincts, but sometimes we just have an unhelpful gut feeling, with
no better alternative in sight.
Our unconscious houses lots of attributes, not all of them pretty, and they can manifest
in the form of obstructive or harmful intuitions - so just because you’ve learned how to
act on your gut feelings doesn’t mean you should constantly do so.
For example, anger can result in helpful intuitions, but also very destructive ones too, such as
the urge to isolate yourself or to alienate people.
And the caregiver archetype can give you some wonderful intuitions, but you also have to
ignore your own needs and feelings in favor of those of others.
Thus, intuitions are not something to blindly give in to.
One of the most difficult things about your gut feelings is mistakenly giving in to one
that ends up being unhelpful.
Another risk is when an intuition does seem beneficial, but there’s an alternative that’s
even more beneficial.
In determining the legitimacy of a gut feeling, rational thinking is paramount.
What is your gut feeling telling you, and does it make logical sense?
What are the benefits and downsides of your gut feeling?
You can also have a situation in which the most rational-seeming option doesn’t feel
right.
In that case, think further.
Why doesn’t it feel right?
What is it about this option that makes you feel hesitant?
If you can’t seem to think of it, then try other ways of tapping into that unconscious
feeling: try meditation, drawing, writing, or mindmapping to name a few options.
The answer might come from an unexpected corner - but don’t make a decision unless you understand
why you’re making this decision.
For example, imagine that you get offered a new job that seems good and has better pay,
but it doesn’t feel right.
After some inward searching, you might find out why: maybe you’ve once heard something
pretty bad about the company, maybe there was some suspiciously ambiguous phrasing in
the offer letter.
Both are potential red flags for your future circumstances in this job, and realizing this
could help you avoid a bad situation altogether.
But maybe your ‘bad gut feeling’ turns out just to be anxiety and insecurity, because
you’re not sure you’re worthy of the job.
In that case you should try to fight this feeling and turn your anxiety into a challenge
for yourself: accept the job and see how you do.
Then, there is the case of alternatives.
Maybe your intuition tells you to do something that also makes logical sense and you make
the decision just like that!
This, however, is something Jung discourages.
Even if it seems like the best option, it might not be - there might be new, other options
out there that your intuition didn’t focus on.
So whenever you’re about to make a decision, give yourself a little time to think it over.
Again, mindmap, make art, meditate, and see what comes up.
Are there unforeseen consequences to consider?
Are there alternative pathways that haven't been explored?
Only after exhaustively pondering all possibilities can you confidently determine the best course
of action.
Only if you’ve contemplated all options that you could think of, do you know whether
your preferred option is the best one.
Moreover, someone who always gives into their intuitions without giving themselves some
time most likely is someone who doesn’t plan or practice patience - two abilities
that are very important aspects of achieving your goals.
Spontaneity can be great, but very destructive, too.
Thinking is what truly gives your intuitions power, because by assessing your intuitions
you gain control over them instead of the other way around.
No matter how helpful and insightful intuitions can be, you have to determine their helpfulness
and insightfulness first.
In other words: don’t let your gut feelings keep you from waiting for the harvest.
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