I recently moved out of my home of thirty years to a new town. When people here ask me what kind of work I do, I find myself stumbling over my words. I am surprised by my sensitivity and reluctance to readily identify myself as a psychic and medium. Eyes grow wider and the casual friendly hello is soon met with an open stare once my occupation becomes known.
As with many professions, there are a lot of stereotypes and a lot of assumptions and judgments made about what it means to be psychic. However, unlike many other professions, being psychic is more than a job. It is a kind of declaration that informs others that you live outside the box of convention and linear thought. Put another way, you may be viewed by some as woo-woo, one of those, or a bit kooky.
For those who have never gotten their feet wet in the psychic waters and claim never to have had a psychic experience, the topic of psychic phenomena can inspire such things as laughter, doubt, and fear. It might also be met with curiosity, questions, and a desire for proof. However, all of this changes once an individual has had a personal psychic experience of some kind.
Once it stirs the heart, mind, and soul, psychic awareness is no longer a distant and abstract concept to be debated or ignored. It is a force, an energy, and a part of us. Through it we can receive not only guidance and insights but also an unexpected feeling of connectedness to a higher source of wisdom and love. Once you have had a psychic experience, however dramatic or mild it may be, you no longer stand outside the door and curiously and maybe with some apprehension wonder what this being psychic is all about. Instead, a life-changing, thrilling, transformative, and sometimes frustrating relationship has begun. Having piqued your interest and woken your slumbering soul, the misunderstood, persistent, and sometimes fantastical presence of psychic awareness becomes a part of you.
The Timeless Influence
of Psychic Awareness
For all the doubt and scrutiny that psychic awareness is subject to, it is as old as recorded time. Most ancient spiritual traditions and religious and spiritual texts speak of how dreams, visions, angels, and divine beings guide the human realm and reveal the mysteries of life. Throughout time, cultures across the globe have looked to seers, diviners, shamans, and prophets to explain, heal, and intervene and act as intermediaries between the human and nonphysical worlds. Being psychic is more than a fad or an interesting pastime. It is an essential aspect of the fabric of our being. It weaves in and out of our psyche and binds together different cultures with the thread of sacred presence.
We need psychic awareness, not simply to know what is coming our way or to make good decisions and improve our lives, but also to know who we are and what we are capable of and to activate the true potential of our humanness.
Like a match that ignites a fire or a star that lights the dark sky, psychic energy sparks our awareness and perception. It lights a way for us to shift from the mundane and finite to the spiritual and eternal. Approach psychic development with faith, and trust in its possibilities. New awareness, support, guidance, help, love, and goodness flow into your life when its doors swing open. In this life there are few things that wholeheartedly give without restraint and ask for so little in return. Psychic awareness is this kind of blessing.
The Beginnings of My Psychic Ability
As awkward as it has been for me at times to explain my occupation to others, I have always felt comfortable with psychic energy and psychic phenomena. As far back as I can remember, I have been aware of a subtle and comforting spiritual presence that communicates, comforts, and guides. However, I didn’t always recognize it as psychic, intuitive, or spiritual or as anything unusual or questionable.
As a child I had a lot of freedom. My parents divorced when I was six and my mother went to work full-time. By the time I got home from school, she was gone and didn’t return until late at night. Some weeks the only time I saw my mother was when I went into her bedroom to say goodbye in the morning before school. I didn’t have much of a connection with my father either, since he moved to a distant town after the divorce. My siblings and I spent most of our time with babysitters, usually high school girls who lived in the neighborhood. Our longest-running babysitter’s idea of watching us was talking to her friends on the phone and shooing us outside to play until dark. We didn’t complain and always found something to do.
With a fair amount of alone time, I often found myself in the woods near my home. Burrowing into the green trees and brush, I pretended to spy on others or hide from make-believe predators. I would also just listen. I don’t know if this started as a pretend game, but I never felt alone. Huddled in the thick foliage in the summer and in the winter when the frozen snowy hills and valleys were vacant, I sat alone and listened to the inner whispers.
Often accompanied by buzzing and tingling sensations of energy moving up and down my arms and on my scalp, I could feel things that made sense and felt good to know. Sometimes if I closed my eyes, I could see pictures and images. These sensations and images were accompanied by feelings that at times moved through my heart with an intensity that brought me to tears and other times lulled me into a soft feeling of being loved. The feelings and thoughts that I floated into my body, heart, and mind helped me to better understand my mother and father and myself. Although I didn’t always understand all that I received and experienced, it didn’t matter. There was something warm and comforting close to me, and I held on to it.
Even though I spent a lot of time alone in the woods, no one ever asked me what I was doing there and I felt no obligation to share my experiences with anyone. There really wasn’t anyone to tell, and I had no words to explain what was happening anyway. Many of my friends had close grandparents or other family members or a special teacher or neighbor they gravitated toward. I had this presence, and I was not going to let anyone spoil it for me.
As I got older, my curiosity and interest in understanding and knowing why people acted the way they did and why life was the way it was became a driving force. This was likely the result of my chaotic home life, which included an absent father who liked drinking more than being with his kids, an unpredictable mother who could go from one emotional extreme to another with no notice, a second marriage and divorce for my mother, and the failed experiment of a blended family. I listened and clung to an invisible source of comfort and caring. Perhaps this intuitive connection was my way to have some form of control or create a sense of security. Knowing and feeling what was coming before it came and understanding and having insight into another’s behavior helped me to feel a sense of order and predictability in what otherwise felt random and out of control. Connecting to this calm presence felt good. Being at church, home, school, or even with my friends couldn’t match the electricity and feelings of peace that came over me when I was quiet and listened.
If there was a choice about what to place my faith and trust in, the invisible won hands down and it still does. While I didn’t have a name for it when I was young, I now know that my psychic development began in the woods huddled in the trees, simply listening. Psychic awareness is still a source of spiritual connection that provides me with a loving and wise nurturance that I do not want to live without.
Guidance on the Psychic Journey
I have been a professional psychic, medium, medical intuitive, and psychic detective for over thirty years, most of my adult life. During this time I have given readings to all kinds of people all over the world. I have worked with celebrities, those who have suffered great losses, business leaders, police detectives, physicians, people who are ill and dying, those seeking more of a spiritual connection, women and men who are perplexed by their relationships, and those who desire to create more abundance and happiness in their lives. Most of the people I work with are seekers who know that there is something more than the five senses can touch, feel, and know, and I am honored to help them along the way.
Along with performing psychic and medium readings, I also teach others to develop their own intuitive, psychic, and medium abilities. Through this process I have discovered that while many people have trust in my ability to receive guidance and insight into their most private and personal issues, their confidence in their own intuitive and psychic capabilities is low and at times nonexistent.
If you are like many others, there may be a divide between your psychic aspirations and your ability to actualize your innate psychic potential. Like a mountain climber, you see the majestic summit of the mountain high in the sky. However, as you travel the path of psychic development, you may encounter obstacles or what feel like impassable crevasses along the way. If this is true for you or if you would just like to know more about psychic awareness, consider me to be a guide here to support your passage.
The Psychic Experience
There are a number of books that explain psychic abilities and how to develop them. Most teach psychic development as a subject to be read about, understood, and then practiced. However, psychic awareness cannot be learned through a purely logical and rational approach. Although well-meaning, this method tends to increase the divide between the reason-oriented mind and the elusive non-logical energy of psychic awareness. This sets up a dynamic of false expectations and allows the thinking mind to judge and control the process.
One of the biggest challenges that I confront in my intuitive and psychic development classes is breaking through what the participants think it should be like to receive psychic impressions and insights and the actual experience of it.
For instance, here is a typical discussion that occurs in every class I teach.
In this conversation I am talking to Karen, who has just completed an intuitive psychic exercise with her partner, Blair.
I ask Karen, “Can you share what you received for your partner in this exercise?”
Karen casts down her eyes, pauses, and then replies, “I didn’t really receive anything.”
“Can you describe what you did experience, even if it does not make sense or seem important?”
Karen shifts uncomfortably in her chair and says, “I don’t think I’m good at this. I thought I was a little intuitive, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.”
“Please just give it a shot. Did you see, hear, or feel anything?”
“Well,” she begins, “my body started to feel warm and tingly and I felt that something good was going to happen. I think I may have made this all up though, because I saw an envelope. Only it was more like a cartoonish-looking envelope. It was stuffed with money. I had the thought that money was coming. But isn’t that what everyone wants to hear? I don’t think that it was real.”
Karen’s partner, the woman whose energy she was intuitively tapping into, smiles and is almost in tears. Confirming what Karen intuitively received, the woman tells her that she has been waiting for a much-needed check in repayment for a loan.
Like many people, Karen disregarded her psychic impressions because they were not what she thought they would be like. She assumed that psychic information would come to her in a way that would be more clear and verifiable. The images she received were not realistic-looking, and she felt that the thoughts, sensations, and feelings she experienced were her own. What she received did not match her expectation, so she disregarded it. Like others, she assumed she was making up her impressions and doubted their validity. However, once she realized the accuracy of the images, feelings, and awareness that she experienced, she began to trust the process and make progress in her development.
The kind of psychic information that Karen intuited is typical for a person who is just beginning to develop psychic abilities. She received energy information through sensations in her body, through her emotions and thoughts, and through images. Not only are these kinds of intuitive impressions common when developing psychic skills, but they occur naturally and spontaneously for everyone in everyday life. We just don’t notice them or pay much attention to them. Psychic abilities are not foreign and elusive and something outside of ourselves to strive for; they are already a part of us and they occur naturally and frequently.
The easiest way to develop your psychic abilities is to recognize when you are already intuiting and then build from there. Through observing participants in my psychic development classes, I have discovered that everyone intuits somewhat differently. Some people receive energy information primarily through a sense of knowing, others see images, and some feel unexplained emotions or experience sensations in their body. When I encourage my students to build on these kinds of spontaneous and natural ways of intuiting, they more quickly recognize and embrace their innate intuitive awareness and develop psychic abilities.
What’s in This Book
In my first book, Discover Your Psychic Type, I describe the four most common ways that we naturally intuit. I call these psychic types. Soon after the book was first published, I began to hear from readers who were enthusiastic about this approach. Not only was it easier for them to develop psychic abilities through this system, but they were also better able to understand and make sense of previous intuitive experiences and increase their confidence and self-awareness.
Following the success of this intuitive approach, I went on to write other books that describe how to develop intuition in relationships, medical intuition, and medium abilities through the four psychic types. In this book, You Are Psychic, I circle back to the basics of developing psychic abilities. Through continued feedback from readers and students, I have further refined my understanding of psychic types and how to best help others develop their innate psychic abilities.
You Are Psychic begins with a description of the four psychic types and helps you identify your natural intuitive strengths and weaknesses. This insight empowers you to become more aware of when and how your innate intuition operates. As you read through the descriptions of the four psychic types, you will likely recognize aspects of each type that feel familiar and that you can identify with. There may be one or two types that particularly stand out. However, the focus of this book is not to find your intuitive type and stick to it, but to become more aware of and comfortable with the intuitive impressions and hunches of each type and use them as an integrated whole. Discover Your Psychic Type explains the varied facets and characteristics of the four psychic types, and this book expands on these aspects and information. It then provides easy-to-follow steps for the development of the psychic abilities associated with each type, such as clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, claircognizance, telepathy, and psychometry. Along the way, you will learn strategies to deal with and negotiate the doubt, fear, and other obstacles that inevitably crop up.
We also delve into the difference between intuitively tuning in to another and intuiting your own personal issues and questions, what to do when your intuitive impressions are confusing or incorrect, and how to become more adept at interpreting the energy information you receive. The unexpected gifts of psychic awareness and the spiritual inclinations and potential of the different intuitive types are also explored.
Psychic awareness is only as good as your ability to put it to use in your daily life. For this reason I have included exercises to help you apply your psychic awareness to practical and everyday issues and concerns. These step-by-step exercises empower you to use your psychic ability to intuit energy information and guidance in the areas of finance, abundance, relationships, and career and life direction. There are also intuitive exercises to help you reach a goal and receive spiritual guidance. A glossary is included to assist you with interpreting and understanding the intuitive feelings, sensations, impressions, images, and other information that you may receive during the exercises. In the last chapter there is a summary of the psychic development process for future reference.
The information in this book builds from chapter to chapter. For this reason, it is best to read one chapter after another. However, after having read the book, you can refer back to the material and exercises on a continuous basis. Throughout the book I use the words intuition and psychic interchangeably. They both describe the phenomenon of becoming aware of energy information without relying on an outside source.
Trust the Process
Have patience and compassion with yourself throughout the psychic development process. It is also helpful to have a sense of humor and have fun. If you are judgmental and critical of your intuitive attempts, you will lose interest. What fuels this journey, keeps your interest, and helps you to develop and improve your psychic abilities is curiosity, a sense of adventure, and the desire for truth. Take your time and allow your psychic awareness to unfold.
There may be times when you want to give up. You may become frustrated, and the whole business of being psychic may feel like a waste of time. However, feelings of doubt and confusion are not indications that you lack psychic ability. Instead, these are some of the signs that you are about to have a breakthrough. When your mind tells you that being psychic does not make sense, you are on the right path. Psychic awareness is non-logical and can feel irrational to the thinking, conscious self. Let your mind give up; you will be better off. This allows the wise inner psychic you to surface and lead the way.
There will also be moments of enlightened connection and transcendence. Perhaps while you are practicing a psychic exercise, driving in your car, or sitting and looking out the window, psychic awareness will bubble up to the surface. From the inner shadowy depths, its light will shine and illuminate your consciousness. Your body may shiver, your mind may feel like it is expanding, and your heart may want to burst with a lighthearted feeling of joy as it recognizes this illusive yet familiar feeling of psychic connection. Trust these moments. They call to you to continue the journey. As you evolve and move beyond the five senses and the known and predictable, be brave and true to yourself. Invite the electrifying and transformative energy of psychic awareness to have its way with you.