Talents: Drawing on Abilities from Your Past
All talents can be used if recognized. It is important to allow children to explore each of the talents. It is equally important for parents to recognize that their own talents are not necessarily those of their children.
—THE AUTHOR’S CAUSAL GUIDES
The final part of the Instruction reveals how to connect with the Soul World, and, with its support, achieve genuine enlightenment. The first step is to maximize your potential by opening the Door to Creativity, and reaching back into the past to access your natural gifts.
Decades ago, when I was a self-employed illustrator in London, I used to go through misery doing what most people would consider to be the most basic bookkeeping. Income had to be added; expenses had to be subtracted. You’d have thought it would be easy. Not for me. Numbers have always been a source of confusion and stress in my life. As a result, my books were a mess.
One day I shared the problem with a friend.
He said, “That’s a nice shirt you’re wearing. Did you make it yourself?”
I said, “Of course not.”
“What about your hair? Did you cut it yourself?”
“Don’t be crazy.”
“Then why struggle with bookkeeping when you can ask someone who’s good at it to help you?”
The point is that we all have different abilities. (Bookkeeping, it turns out, is not one of mine.)
Before incarnation, your soul chooses one or more talents to help it during its time on the Physical Plane. Each one will be available to you from the time you’re born until the time you die. It means that if music is one of your talents, it’s never too late to learn an instrument.
Those who are most able to access their special abilities are described as talented. We act as if there is something special about them. In fact, talents are there in most people if you look for them. I was born with a talent for Intuition. Not only does it give me a natural aptitude for being psychic, but also the interest to work on it and keep developing my skills.
I’ve often been asked, “Don’t we all have some psychic ability?”
Sure we do. And we all have the ability to play the violin. But most of us don’t have the slightest interest in doing so, and fewer still have the talent.
But, if you want to play the violin and you have a talent for Music, the sky’s the limit.
Talents have their origins in past-life experiences. If you’re a gifted artist in this life, it means you’ve done it before. Perhaps you painted frescoes in Renaissance Italy. Or maybe you were once a monk who illustrated manuscripts.
Because talents create a kind of inner desire for a particular activity, having a gift and being passionate about it tend to go hand in hand.
There are ten talents. Most of us have one or two. Some people have three or even more. Those with multiple talents are often on a mission of Exploration, where their diverse experiences may be enhanced by having access to a broader range of abilities.
Your soul will usually help bring talents to bear when opportunities come your way. Yet, it’s clear that two people with the same talent can have it to a very different degree. That’s because there are ways to “turbocharge” your talents—to fortify them when you particularly need them.
We’ll look at ways to do that later. First let’s look at the way each of the talents works.
The Ten Talents
• The talent for Healing
• The talent for Empathy
• The talent for Education
• The talent for Logic
• The talent for Art
• The talent for Communication
• The talent for Activity
• The talent for Construction
• The talent for Music
• The talent for Intuition
The Soul World regards talents as the secret behind great creativity. That may be obvious in the case of a talent for Art or Music, but it applies to every other talent as well. An accountant who has a way with figures is displaying creativity, as is a gifted acrobat or a particularly able surgeon.
The Talent for Healing
Advantage: Restoration
Risk: Sacrifice
If you have a talent for Healing, your soul will be looking for some way to use it. There is no point in bringing this into your life if it has no place to go.
I have a number of clients who are physicians. They’re all accomplished healers. Yet not all of them have chosen this particular talent.
Why would someone enter a healing profession without it? One who did is the truly gifted physician I described earlier in the book. Wouldn’t having a talent for Healing have taken her abilities to astronomical heights?
It might have. But there is a downside she could easily have run into: the risk of sacrifice. To be safe, her soul decided to do without it.
As my spirit guides put it, “Everything she needs to be a great healer comes from her being an old-soul Spiritualist with a Helper influence. If she’d chosen a talent for Healing, she might have sacrificed herself on the altar of medicine.” (Instead, she chose a talent for Empathy, which, in recent years, has drawn her to help women who have suffered sexual abuse.)
Besides doctors, nurses, dentists, and midwives, the talent for Healing is found in many people who have chosen more alternative therapies such as acupuncture and homeopathy, and particularly hands-on healers (who also have a talent for Intuition).
But it’s also a talent frequently chosen by parents, teachers, and others in order to help those in their care who have been damaged spiritually, or who are finding it hard to fulfill their potential. That’s why the advantage is described as restoration. Even when a person is unaware they have this talent, they’ll be motivated to help those around them complete their life plan.
The Talent for Empathy
Advantage: Understanding
Risk: Identification
Though empathy in many people is a result of the breakdown of the Illusion, the talent gives a boost to those who can generally use it in their work or in their lives.
The talent for Empathy is associated with Caregiver types and gives them the ability to understand communication that’s not always verbal.
But it’s not just those who are looking after children or the elderly who can use empathy. For a therapist or counselor, this talent can create a deep connection with their clients through its advantage: understanding.
Using a Talent to Enhance a Relationship
Between couples, empathy is important. Yet, like all talents, it can be ignored, unrecognized or, most often, blocked. If a person is conscious that they’re not expressing empathy toward their partner, they can try accessing the talent. It’s available to many more of us than you’d imagine.
Children often trigger a talent for Empathy that’s been lying dormant. That’s the reason many people you’d never expect to make good parents suddenly rise to the occasion when a baby is born to them.
Wendy went through her pregnancy with a sense of dread. “I thought my life was over,” she said. “Everyone was so excited, except for me. I didn’t want to be a mom. As I got closer to my due date, I even thought about giving the baby up for adoption.”
Everything changed the moment little Elizabeth was born and Wendy’s talent for Empathy popped up. “I don’t think I really ever knew what love was until I saw my little girl. Now I understand why women keep having babies. It’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Of course, as with all talents, there is a negative aspect. The risk is overidentifying with someone else. The mother who loses touch with the adult world after the birth of her baby may be crossing this line.
The Talent for Education
Advantage: Persuasion
Risk: Pontification
Every week, Tanisha had to give a report to her bosses about what was going on with their staff. The problem was that she hated having to do it. Even thinking about these meetings was making her sick.
“I’m fine with my friends, in fact everyone tells me how they can’t shut me up. But once I stand up in front of a bunch of suits, the words fly out of my head,” she said. “I stand there stammering and struggling to find words I’ve been using all my life.”
We began by looking for all the usual culprits: a challenge of Insecurity, a fear of Judgment. Sure enough, there was a little of both. I showed her how to get on top of them.
Then my guides asked me to examine her talents. There it was: a talent for Education. That was why she was so good at getting her point across in smaller groups.
I showed Tanisha how to call in her talent. Now she’s learning to use it to make her weekly reports less of a challenge and more of an opportunity to develop her ability in front of larger groups.
A talent for Education has the advantage of persuasion, which helps a person impart their knowledge convincingly. Its risk is pontification: imparting dogma with equal conviction.
The Talent for Logic
Advantage: Reasoning
Risk: Orthodoxy
A talent for Logic will help someone take one step at a time, and think things out in a linear way. Fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot would agree with each other on that:
“One must rely on the little gray cells, mon ami, Holmes.”
“Elementary, my dear Poirot. When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The talent for Logic allows people to tap into their ability to think rationally in a step-by-step way—an essential qualification for scientists and mathematicians. Many of them are Thinkers who have a natural bent for this kind of reasoning anyway. But engaging the talent takes it all to another level—a bit like adding high octane fuel to the family car.
Because logic is a talent, not everyone has it. In a world where students are expected to be good at logic, the result is a lot of misery and wails of “I can’t do math!”
Imagine if everyone had to be proficient in art to graduate from high school. “I can’t do math!” would soon be replaced with, “I can’t do art!”
Multiple Talents
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was renowned for his ability to argue logically. He combined a talent for Logic with talents for Communication and Education. The first helped him plan his arguments in a well-thought-out, rational way. The second gave him a facility with words. The third gave him a gift for imparting his knowledge.
A talent for Logic has the advantage of reasoning. This can be seen everywhere. Many lawyers have it, as do a lot of accountants. University professors throughout the world choose it. The risk is orthodoxy, which is why so many people in the above professions are conventional in their approach to their work.
Incidentally, many musicians also choose a talent for Logic, as it helps them see mathematical relationships between notes, intervals, chords, and scales.
The Talent for Music
Advantage: Inspiration
Risk: Technicality
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began composing at the age of five. Not just playing, but writing scores. As a child, he toured Europe performing his compositions on the piano, on which he was considered a virtuoso. At fourteen, he wrote his first opera.
When he died at the age of thirty-five, he left behind over six hundred compositions, including more than fifty symphonies. Needless to say, Wolfgang was a musical genius.
When his soul was on the Astral Plane planning the life it would have as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it made some very careful calculations.
In several previous lives, Wolfgang had been a musician and composer. Most recently, he’d been a composer of religious music in a monastery in Sweden.
Wolfgang’s soul sought out a musical family that would recognize and nurture his talents. His father was the eighteenth century’s equivalent of a stage mom. His obsession with his son’s career played a huge part in the success that Wolfgang enjoyed.
The Problem with Talents
Between incarnations, you choose one or more past lives that you can tap into for talents. Here’s the problem: when you reach back into a past life in this way, you don’t just access the good stuff, but also some of the fears and grief.
This is the reason many highly talented people are tormented, insecure, phobic, or depressive.
It’s no coincidence that many great musicians were born into musical families. Imagine possessing a talent for Music, but having parents who won’t encourage it, don’t recognize it, or can’t afford to buy you an instrument. The result could be profoundly frustrating, and it might have huge repercussions on your life plan.
The risk for many musicians is technicality, which happens when they focus on developing skill, but lose the emotion and the advantage: inspiration, which allows music to communicate with others on a soul level.
The Talent for Communication
Advantage: Expression
Risk: Digression
A talent for Communication has enhanced the lives of many people in very many arenas. Lawyers like Clarence Darrow and Johnnie Cochrane had it. Musicians like Prince and Michael Jackson have it. Performers as diverse as Maria Callas and Elvis Presley used it to connect with their audiences. Not surprisingly, the one group of people in which the talent for Communication turns up most often is actors.
What separates an actor from an actor with a talent for Communication? It’s hard to describe. A very overstated Performer type like Jim Carrey has it. But so did the much more restrained James Stewart.
Walt Disney used it to help express his ideas to his staff. On one occasion, he acted out the entire story of Snow White, playing the part of each character to explain his vision to his animators. His performance made a lasting impression on those who went on to make the film.
Sandy is a Level 8 Thinker with Creator and Spiritualist influences. When I saw she had a talent for Communication, I said, “You’ve got a story to tell. Are you a writer?” She fell back in the sofa laughing.
“That’s my dream,” she said. “It was going to be my big question—whether I should devote myself to writing or not.”
Sandy let out an even louder laugh. “That’s exactly what I’m working on.”
An hour later, Sandy left my office, armed to the teeth with techniques for bringing her talent to bear on her work.
The positive benefit of having this talent is that it will help you express yourself. The downside is that you might slip into the risk, digression, which is often seen in highly communicative people who forget to focus on getting a clear point across.
The Talent for Construction
Advantage: Origination
Risk: Preoccupation
We all know what it’s like to have a sense of satisfaction when we complete something, even if it’s just cooking dinner. For those with a talent for Construction, the need to see a finished result is a major motivating factor. They want a tangible reward for their efforts.
If a child is great with Tinker Toys and Legos, that’s often a sign of a talent for Construction. The same goes for any kid who’s what we call “good with their hands.”
When they grow up, these little Lego builders might become architects or engineers. Or they might choose occupations and hobbies where they can use their hands: guitar-making, ceramics, or building furniture. The advantage is origination, which is why they enjoy developing something from scratch.
Individuals with this talent have founded many successful companies. A business, just like a Lego project, involves planning and building, and offers concrete results.
The reward for people with this talent is seeing the fruits of their labors. Unfortunately, for many of them, having their eye so firmly on the goal keeps them locked into the risk, preoccupation, which prevents them from fully enjoying life’s journey.
The Talent for Activity
Advantage: Discipline
Risk: Unrest
If you want to see this talent in action, check out Cirque de Soleil. Circus performers are often Creator or Performer types who have chosen this talent to help them on the high wire, the trapeze, and anywhere they need exceptional physical dexterity and coordination.
Take jugglers, for instance. They make great practical use of this talent and the passion it instills. Without it, few of them would ever have the patience to put up with all the practice juggling requires.
This talent brings its advantage, discipline, to great athletes too. The Olympic Games offer an opportunity for people of all soul types to express themselves. Whether it’s a Thinker type competing in an archery competition, or a Creator type who’s part of a synchronized swimming team, the talent for Activity will be what unites them, and what first gave them the drive to get so far in their particular activity.
A talent for Activity gives a person phenomenal coordination. Combined with the discipline, it becomes the secret power behind magicians who can make playing cards appear and disappear, or a baseball player who can connect with an incoming ball traveling at 90 mph.
Not everyone who has a talent for Activity uses it quite so dramatically. Some people choose it to help in jobs like nursing, where they’ll be required to do hard physical labor.
The problem many of those with a talent for Activity slip into is the risk of unrest, where they feel they have to be on the move all the time. It can be useful for them to work out or run to let off excess energy.
The Talent for Intuition
Advantage: Insight
Risk: Hypersensitivity
Intuition is the least recognized of all the talents. Yet if you know the signs, you’ll discover there are a lot more intuitive people walking around than you’d imagine.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, I began having psychic experiences in childhood. Like everyone with a talent, I came into the world with the ability in place—even if the Soul World had to go to extreme lengths to get my attention.
When I finally embraced my calling, I looked back on my life and saw that my past was littered with random, quite unrelated events of a psychic nature. Most were so trivial that they’re hardly worth mentioning—just variations on déjà vu, or knowing what song was coming up on the radio.
One of the more noteworthy ones, however, occurred when I was a student back in Scotland. Of course, I had no idea it held the slightest spiritual significance until years later, when I started communicating with the Soul World.
It all began after my landlady’s chihuahua fell in love with me. He’d swallowed a needle attached to a long piece of thread, and I managed to pull the whole thing out of his throat without hurting him. After that, he was besotted with me. We used to joke about how he thought I’d saved his life.
I had very little routine in those days. One day I might come home when classes finished, the next I might work late, hang out with friends, or play a gig with my band. Yet as long as I was home before my landlady went to bed, I’d be met with a freshly made cup of coffee.
The reason she knew I was coming was that twenty minutes before I arrived, Carlos would leap up on a stool by the bay window looking for me. We lived in a top-floor flat at the end of a crescent, which meant I only came into view at the last minute. When I did, Carlos would become hysterical with excitement.
When I walked in, he’d run around me in circles, yelping and wetting the floor (and occasionally my shoes), then I’d pet him for a couple of minutes, drink my coffee, and life would settle back to normal—until the next time.
What I didn’t know then was that dogs are psychic—the result of being pack animals. In a pack, communication on a telepathic level is important. And if your dog (or even someone else’s) knows when you’re coming home, it’s a clear sign that you yourself are psychic.
But there are other markers, too. Because time is more fluid in the Soul World, your soul will often experience emotions ahead of your conscious self. (Until I understood this, I wondered why bad news always hit me when I was already feeling down.) And since the advantage is insight, if you’ve seen a ghost, known about an event ahead of time, or sensed that someone was in trouble only to find out later you were right, then it’s highly likely that you have the talent for Intuition.
There is, of course, a risk to being psychic—and that’s hypersensitivity. Those who are psychic can find it hard not to be affected by the emotions of those around them.
Advantage: Imagination
Risk: Distraction
Creator types are the ones most usually associated with the arts. Yet anyone with a talent for Art can access it to literally create masterpieces. That’s what Leonardo did.
Leonardo da Vinci was a Level 7 Thinker type with a strong Creator influence. He called upon his talent to create the Mona Lisa, in what has been described as his spare time. He was, after all, a Thinker, much more concerned with scientific inquiry than simply being a painter.
Creator types will often choose to get by without this talent because its risk is distraction: “I want to finish my painting, but I still haven’t completed the mosaic top for my coffee table, and there is my book to illustrate . . .” And that creates distraction. It’s one of the reasons Leonardo only completed a handful of paintings in his lifetime. (And why he never did finish his coffee table!)
Determine Your Talents
Enter into a meditative state, and call in your spirit guides. Ask them to help you identify which talents are available to you. Use the following list to help you:
The talent for Healing: A gift for healing; a concern for the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual welfare of others; the ability to channel healing energy
The talent for Empathy: The ability to sense others’ feelings; experiencing a connection with most people; understanding nonverbal communication
The talent for Education: A desire to impart knowledge; innate wisdom; ability to get a point across
The talent for Logic: Excellence at games like chess; mathematical skills; an analytical approach to problems
The talent for Music: An ear for music; a passion for music; the ability to play an instrument
The talent for Communication: Writing or speaking skills; expressing ideas coherently; the desire to reach out to others The talent for Construction: The ability to plan ahead; being task-oriented; the desire to see tangible results
The talent for Activity: Enjoyment of strenuous exercise; coordination; a preference for work that involves at least some physical activity
The talent for Intuition: Psychic ability; sensing others’ moods; receiving communication from non-physical sources
The talent for Art: Imagination; ability to express creativity; responding strongly to visual stimulation
Talent/s:___________________________________________
Engaging Your Talents
Now we’re going to continue the exercise by bringing your talents out of your past. The method is as follows:
Enter a meditative state and call in your spirit guides. Ask them to support you in manifesting your talents. Repeat the following:
“I call upon my spirit guides, acting in my highest interest, to help me engage my talent. I ask for my talent for__________________to be brought into my consciousness to allow me to live the life my soul intended.”
Repeat this exercise for each of your talents. And, of course, when you’ve finished, thank your spirit guides and tell them, “Session over.”
Before beginning any activity where you can make use of your talent, ask your spirit guides for their support:
“I call upon my spirit guides, acting in my highest interest, to engage my talent for_________________________________________.”
Often, when I tell a client what he or she has a talent for, say, Music, they’ll nod and tell me how they play the guitar or the piano, or maybe how they sing in the church choir.
Then, every so often, someone will say how they used to love playing the piano, or how they were in a band at college—all in the past tense. They’ll say something like, “I used to love playing music, but I’m so busy with my job I don’t have time for it anymore.”
Your talents are there for a reason. Unfortunately, being so focused on our careers (another effect of the Illusion), many of us forget that what we do at work is not necessarily as important as what we do outside of work.
Whatever your talent, engaging it will give you creativity. And that will help you live the life your soul intended—one in which you’re firing on all cylinders.
Having its origins in past lifetimes, creativity is truly spiritual. The more you can bring your creativity to bear on whatever you choose to do, the more you can avoid being caught up in the Illusion.
Like engaging your talents, the process of breaking down the Illusion can be turbocharged. The way to do this is to connect fully and permanently with the Soul World. In the next two chapters, we’ll investigate ways to do just that.