How Your Intuition Can Help with Weight Loss – Episode #006

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Welcome to the soul science nutrition podcast, where you’ll discover that when it comes to your health, you’re so much more powerful than you’ve been led to believe. And now your host, she’s a holistic nutrition and lifestyle coach, chef author, and Yogi, Christine Okezie
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Hello, and welcome to the soul science nutrition podcast. I’m Christine Okezie Thanks so much for tuning in today and on today’s show, I want to dive into the juicy topic of intuition, how and why intuition is important when it comes to our food, weight and health goals. In fact, I will even go as far to say that I’ve come to know intuition as absolutely essential for positive lasting lifestyle change. A beautiful quote that captures this is from Einstein. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. So we all have intuitive capabilities that can bring valuable insights and guide our decisions when it comes to our health and by developing our intuition, we can clarify and connect to what really matters. And this is the gold when it comes to transforming your health.
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Nonetheless, suffice it to say that you’ll probably never see developing your intuition as listed as one of the benefits in most conventional diets. And you certainly won’t see it being promoted by the mainstream medical model. Why is that? Well? Because cultivating your intuition cuts right through the limiting diet mindset that negates your body’s natural propensity for self healing. The obvious areas that intuition and diets don’t mix are all the food rules about what to eat when to eat and how much, but on today’s show, I want to dive into the deeper issues. The deeper issues that are involved that have taken us away from valuing our intuitive capabilities, such as feeling betrayed by or distrusting our bodies. And of course it can be really hard to develop our intuition. If we’re feeling overwhelmed or disillusioned with all the nutritional do’s and don’ts, or caught up in social comparison or self criticism, you know, all these things that really go to the heart of diet mentality.
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But what do we want to talk about today? It’s exactly this belief that we can’t trust ourselves, that we can’t trust our bodies for that matter. When it comes to food, that’s at the root of so much of our struggle. Bottom line, our intuition is the medicine for so many things, navigating our food choices, figuring out our hunger and fullness signals, figuring out food cravings, dealing with emotional imbalances. Our intuition plays a huge role even with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart ailments, digestive disorders, and chronic fatigue. Why is that? Well, when it comes to intuition, it’s all about coming from a place of curiosity, compassion, and openness. It’s about learning to see our body’s challenges from a place of informed action instead of reaction, and being guided by the deep, knowing that you have a hand in your own healing. Now, when I talk to my clients about the concept of trusting their bodies, I know it requires a huge emotional leap and a huge behavioral shift because ultimately what I’m asking them to do is to let go of their desire, to control their weight or change their body shape and ask them instead to shift their focus, to changing how they feel about their body.
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Now, let me pause because you might be feeling kind of triggered right now, but ask yourself, has your pursuit of weight loss worked for you longterm? What did you have to do perhaps to get a lower body weight? And what was that like for you emotionally? Did you feel physically good throughout the process? These kinds of questions gets you to see where your true power originates when it comes to your health and your true power is an internal source of wisdom. It’s an intelligence that lives in your heart and speaks to you with a voice called your intuition. Now I get it like most of these important topics that we talk about on this show. This is not a quick switch or an easy fix. Me personally. Well, I used to live in my head all the time. I was defined my, my to do lists, forging an identity based on being productive.
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I was obsessed with making my pro con lists. There was a ton of pleasing and perfecting and my head, well, it was a really noisy and not so fun place. And so how about you? Do you ever stop to consider how much time you spend thinking, controlling, worrying, trying to figure it all out when it comes to your food and weight? If so, I totally emphasize. It’s mentally and physically exhausting and it floods our bodies with toxic stress chemistry that wreaks havoc on our true health. Now I learned a life changing lesson years back that changed everything, think less, feel more. And I made a commitment and realization really how important it was to get out of living in my head and connecting to my heart when it came to taking care of myself. And really once again, I understand our culture and our conditioning.
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They have us living in our head, especially when it comes to these bodies and maintaining our physical health. Most of the time, we’re navigating almost exclusively with our overactive thinking mind, analyzing intellectualizing, using our thoughts, which by the way, are often negative to inform our choices and actions. But here’s the problem when we don’t use our intuition, it’s often because we don’t even appreciate our own personal power. In fact, we give it away habitually to external authority, whether that’s to diet cultures, seductive gimmicks, big pharma, or having an overdependence on pharmaceuticals and the medical system, I’ve discovered that what unleashes our ability to actually create and take empowered action for ourselves and live a life that’s in balance with authenticity, all the things ultimately that help us heal while this is not something that we quote decide when we decide that’s the execution part and that’s important, but the change factor is the inspiration that you receive from inside of yourself.
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Listening to your intuition. Let’s just take a moment and think about that word inspiration. It’s so often referred to when it comes to health and fitness and weight goals, right? But inspiration when you break it down, comes from the word in spirit, which is something within not outside of you. So you develop your intuition to recognize what is real, what is most important to you? Your intuition sharpens your intellect because it frees you from debilitating self doubt and insecurity. When we use our intuition, we are able to take authentic action and our commitment comes from our heart. And here’s the beautiful thing. This is not just poetry. When you act from the heart, from the intelligence of the heart, we override our subconscious programming. And that again is gold. When it comes to long lasting habit change, you see our heart contains the wisdom of feeling as opposed to the head wisdom of reason and rediscovering this exquisite connection is the key to having a deeper, more real experience of all the things that perhaps we’re so busy chasing in our head, physical health, balanced lifestyles, personal contentment on purpose living, right?
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While the mind plays a brilliant and invaluable role, it’s not where you or I are meant to live. Our minds tend to stir up endless drama and stress acting out of fear and insecurities, especially when it comes to navigating our food and weight issues. You see, when we rely on ordinary thinking and we’re cut off from our deeper emotions, from our inspiration, we can end up living in a virtual reality, feeling disconnected and uninspired, and it can make it really challenging to prioritize nourishing ourselves. You see our true heart is not limited by self doubt, by shame or neuroses. When we connect to our heart, we can relax and awaken in our body and experience a different way of knowing, trusting, and navigating our lives. And what we know about the human heart today is that it’s actually so much more than a cardiac pump.
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It has its own neurology, its own nervous system. Yup. Our physical heart actually has a heart brain composed of about 40,000 neurons that can sense feel, learn, and remember, and this brain in our heart talks to the brain in our head about how our body feels and so much more. You see, we all know that ancient traditions teach us that our heart’s function is to house wisdom, emotions, and most of all, our soul. Now this understanding alone creates a whole new inspiration for taking care of ourselves. But here on soul science, nutrition, I want to share with you that this is not just a fluffy metaphor. In fact, once again, science is on its way explaining these higher dimensions of our heart and proving that our heart has an astounding intelligence that we can call upon to have more balance, greater health and personal fulfillment. So much of my work with people is helping them get out of their heads and into their bodies.
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But most specifically into their hearts on a spiritual level, you can see your heart and the wisdom that lives there as the voice of your soul. This is your inner GPS and this intuition, if you will speaks to us in the language of emotions and sensations now, energetically, our intuition is actually a frequency, a subtle frequency that we have access to, but only when our central nervous system and our body mind and emotions become a balanced, integrated whole. And there are tools that can get us there. Okay. So you might be asking right about now, will cultivating my intuition helped me lose weight. Well, the short answer is yes, but not simply with the wonderful practice let’s say of intuitive eating, right? Which you might have heard a lot about, and we’ll dive deeper into, on another show, but cultivating your intuition will help you achieve and maintain your natural weight because ultimately you get to navigate your whole life beyond food at a higher level of consciousness.
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You get to stop the toxic battle with food and your body and with life, quite frankly, which benefits you on all levels, emotionally, psychologically, and behaviorally, which leads to improvements in all aspects of your wellbeing. When you learn to have your intuition guide your decisions and actions around taking care of yourself, you release yourself from the reactivity and the fear and the negativity that the mind has because our busy mind is always speaking its opinion, it’s all about should and shouldn’t. Notice that it’s our minds seemingly rational arguments that keep our emotions churning when it comes to taking care of ourselves. Ironically, we know from the science now that it’s actually the mind that has the tendency to be irrational., whereas our heart is the place of true intelligence. So if we wake up to the wisdom of our heart, which is the voice of our intuition, we can navigate our health with so much more ease, common sense, intelligence and integrity.
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When we connect to the guidance of our heart, our choices become clear, calming. They simply feel right. So I hope at this point, you are curious enough to know, well, what does it take to connect to my intuition? Well, connecting to your intuition is only possible when you cultivate a calm mind, actually what’s specifically known in Kundalini yoga as the neutral mind. It’s worth understanding. The neutral mind is the part of the mind that is in direct communication with your soul’s guidance with your intuition, your neutral mind is your inner guidance system. It knows ultimately your highest desires and can direct you there on the most efficient, safest route. Without our neutral mind, we don’t have access to our intuition and we can end up taking some pretty bumpy, windy, detours, questionable roads, if you will, to where you really want to go. All practices strengthen our neutral mind because this neutral mind, it helps us make choices without the fluctuations of our dualistic rational mind.
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When we have a neutral mind, we have the power of nonjudgmental observation, which again, releases us from that habitual subconscious programming. And we get to observe our own reactions and patterns and we can learn from them. We can practice being really discerning on how we want to spend our energy or how we’re going to respond to life’s changing circumstances. And obviously this plays a huge, huge role in how we take care of our health bottom line. When we are in the neutral mind, we have this big picture view, this big picture view of what’s possible, and we become less rigid when it comes to outcomes and expectations, we become open to possibility. So the neutral mind is the pathway to our intuition. Remember the Einstein quote? So the intuitive mind is our sacred gift. And we need this now more than ever quite honestly, to keep us on track, living healthy and inspired lives.
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The more we can learn to cultivate and call upon our intuition to guide us in all our decisions, the more stronger a foundation we begin to build, that makes everything that we aspire for that much more possible. So I’d like to close today’s show with a simple but powerful meditation practice to help you awaken your intuition access, your heart’s profound capacity to guide you and point you toward true wellbeing. So please come into a seated, comfortable position with a nice straight spine. If you are seated in a chair, just make sure your feet are resting flat on the floor, sitting up straight. You want to pull up on your upper chest and diaphragm just to help you sit up a little bit taller. You can tip the chin slightly in and down to avoid any tension in your neck and place both hands in your lap with the palms facing up, resting the right hand in the left, forming just a gentle, a little basket there. And it’s to allow the eyes to gently close feeling the tension melting away in every part of your body, relaxing your face, softening your jaw, allowing the tongue to relax, resting the tip of the tongue. Oh, so lightly on the space behind your teeth, softening the shoulders and allowing yourself to just let go.
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Imagine seeing yourself sitting peacefully and full of radiance. Now gradually let your energy collect like a flow at the center of your brow point. This place of awareness, the seat of your consciousness. We know it as our third eye, bringing your attention to this location between our eyebrows and in the centermost area of our brain. This is the location of our pineal gland, at the energy center in the body, the seat of our intuition.
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And when you put your awareness on that center, you heighten its power. So just allow your consciousness to be in this place simply in this center with your eyes gently closed and bring awareness. Now, just to your natural breathing in and out the nose and let the breath regulate itself into a meditative slow, almost suspended manner. And from this place of letting things be as they are. And if your mind gently wanders, as mind’s do simply bring your focus back to that awareness between your brow point, your seat of consciousness, the energy center that holds our intuition. And once again, just allowing the breath to regulate itself in this stillness, allowing things to be just as they are now feeling and sensing the vastness of this quiet still space inside taken the knowing that you have everything you need to be healthy and mentally affirm to yourself. My inner voice is clear and strong. My intuition is here to guide me. I know what I know. Thank you. Beautiful. And thank you again for tuning in to today’s episode of the soul science nutrition podcast. I’m Christine Okezie. If you liked what you hear, please subscribe and feel free to leave a rating or review. I’d really appreciate it. That helps me keep my message going out strong and reaching as many people as possible. So sending you lots of light, love, peace and great health bye for now.