sixteen
PERCEIVING
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be
open, all desires known, and from
whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the
thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration
of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly
love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy
Name: through Christ our Lord. Amen.
EPISCOPAL COLLECT
ONE NEW YORK PSYCHIC or intuitive who asked not to be named gave a reading to the sister of a dear friend. The sister wanted to rent an office for her business, and she had found a site that seemed to fit her needs. He advised her to wait. Don’t take it. In a few weeks, he said, another opportunity would present itself that would be much better, and that’s the one she should rent.
Sure enough, in a few weeks the restaurant in the same building closed, and the space, which was larger than the original office and with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street, came up for rent.
Some psychics have their gifts from earliest childhood, like one I know, whose parents belonged to a Spiritualist church in Baltimore and practiced giving readings on each other at home. It was no more of a surprise that their son should demonstrate psychic ability as a little boy than that Mozart, son of a musician, would have musical talent. Others have the skill from childhood despite the fact that no one in the family demonstrates the talent and may even be discouraged from using theirs. Others discover their gifts late in life after some remarkable experience, a mountaintop mystical experience, or (and this is true of many mediums) a loss or tragedy. Brenda Marshall, an English psychic who served for ten years as president of London’s College of Psychic Studies, was one of these, acquiring her abilities only after the death of her husband, when, upon agreeing to work temporarily as a secretary at the college to help out a friend, she discovered to her amazement that she herself was psychic. Often it was her husband whom she felt guiding and supporting her during a reading.
And some people take classes and study with the industry of the young wizards at Hogwarts, developing their skill by hard work, the way a child learns to walk by falling down again and again and pulling himself up each time until he finds his balance and walks. No sense of failure for a child. A child learns to read the same way, studying the alphabet and putting the letters into words, until one day he can read deep philosophical treatises without even wondering how he does it. Everything takes practice, after all.
Still others discover their abilities by accident, as I did. I tell the story not to blow my own horn, for there are hundreds of thousands of psychics and mediums, and many with finer sensitivities than mine, but rather to illustrate the generosity of the Divine: God’s grace lies everywhere. And once again we’re reminded to turn all things over to God, asking only to serve unselfishly. Once again we’re reminded to trust our intuition, those fragile whispers to the heart that come to us unbidden—gifts poured upon our heads, anointing us with oil.
It began some years ago. I had been in one of my troughs, between books with nothing to write (always difficult for a writer). As the months passed, I despaired that I wasn’t doing anything with my life. I wanted to be of service. I wanted to be useful in some way. I prayed and prayed, asking for direction. Where was I supposed to be? What was I supposed to do? “Show me, show me.” I prayed fruitlessly. And then, one morning I woke up from a sound sleep with the startlingly clear knowledge: “New York City. Six months.”
And the leap of my heart, the purity of the yes! That I have come to associate with the Will of God.
My joy was followed instantly by doubt.
“New York City! I can’t afford New York!” And then, the inward reproof and reminder: “Don’t be silly. All things are possible with God.”
That morning I phoned two people I knew in New York. One of them was a schoolmate I hadn’t talked to in years. What made me think of her?
“I’m considering coming to New York for four or five months,” I said, already bargaining down the time frame. “If you know anyone who has a furnished apartment to sublet ...”
My classmate said, “I don’t know of anything, but maybe Charlotte can help you. Here’s her number.”
It turned out that Charlotte was a real estate agent. I left a message on her answering machine at work.
That morning Charlotte was getting the mail in her building when a woman came up to her and said, “You do real estate, don’t you? My friend Mary just died, and the family wants to find someone to rent her two-bedroom, furnished, rent-controlled apartment for six months.”
When she got to work, there was my message on her answering machine. Coincidence? Serendipity? I only know that’s how a stunning, two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on the fashionable East Side came to me.
I went to New York with no idea why I was there or what I would do. Was I supposed to move there permanently? (No.) Was I to meet someone? I still don’t know. But one of the people I met during this time was Charlotte, and we became close friends, living in the same apartment building. She was very sick. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong. We talked a lot about death during the next months, though neither of us knew that within the year she would be dead, and I wonder sometimes if meeting her and the deep conversations we had late into the New York nights might be one reason why I was “sent” to New York.
Coincidence is God’s way of performing a miracle anonymously.
ANONYMOUS
By coincidence, however, I’d been contacted just before moving to New York by the now-defunct organization Healing Works, which provided alternative healing to the poor and disenfranchised, to those who could not afford acupuncture, massage, psychotherapy, Reiki, cranial-sacral, or other healing energy modalities. It was run by Julie Winter, an exceptional woman who was a visionary, healer, intuitive, and therapist. And here is another example of the mysterious workings of God. How many little tucks in time and small coincidences were involved in orchestrating the convergence of our disparate lives? I offered to volunteer with them.
“What can you do?” Julie asked me, when I arrived to offer my services.
“Whatever you need. Lick envelopes, work the computers, help with your mailing lists—whatever would be useful to you.”
She looked at me. She knew my books. “No,” she said firmly. “I won’t waste you on that. You’ll give readings.”
“Readings?” I was appalled.
“You can do it,” she said confidently. “You have angels with you. I’ll send you clients.”
And that’s how I spent the next four months, learning to trust my intuition and the words that fell from my mouth. To this day, I don’t know why Julie knew I could do it. Was it intuition on her part, or did she simply understand that creative people have this sensitivity?
I DON’T THINK OF myself as a medium. I think of myself as giving an intuitive or spiritual reading. Sometimes (but not always) an angel appears and sometimes (but not always) a spirit. But sometimes I feel I am merely dipping into the client’s history in some mysterious fashion that I don’t understand myself.
Before she arrives, I ask the client to write down all her questions. It’s not for me. I don’t want to see the list. Rather, I want to make sure that she doesn’t go away and later remember an important question: “Darn! I forgot to ask about such and such.”
Before she arrives, I go into a prayerful state. I turn the coming session over to the Holy Spirit, praying that I may “hear” what is needed and speak words that will strike her heart, her soul. I pray for illumination. I pray for clarity, for a way to be of help.
I have one special place in my apartment reserved for meditation and for readings. When the client arrives, I settle her on the sofa, and I pray again, this time with her.
Straining or striving to “receive” an intuition or psychic illumination is useless. It throws up a brick wall and wards off the experience.
I ask to hold something imbued with the client’s energy. It could be her ring or necklace, keys or watch. This practice is called psychometry, whereby you “feel” the history of an object. Every object carries an energy memory, as it were. Ambrose Worrall, the sensitive and healer, tells how once as a youth he picked up a curious metal bracelet and was struck by pain across his back, like the lash of a whip. The bracelet had been worn by a slave girl from North Africa who had been whipped to death. I know of one palm reader who holds the person’s hand, but what she is doing is reading not the lines so much as the client’s energy field, in the same way that I use a set of keys or a ring. Of course, some seers do not need to hold an object, and indeed I’ve given readings holding nothing. But psychometry is a method I feel comfortable with. Perhaps you’ve had the experience yourself. You are drawn to a particular jewel, or, conversely, you avoid wearing another one and can’t for the life of you say why. If the client has brought no object, I hold the list of questions, folded into a tiny ball.
Now that we are settled, I write down the client’s full name and date of birth. I take a breath and go into a slightly altered state, not a full trance. Am I using the delta brain waves? Theta? I have no idea. Words spill from my mouth. How do I know the things I say? It’s beyond comprehension. But one thing I’ve learned to do is to speak exactly what I’m seeing, even if the vision makes no sense, for either it makes sense to the client, or else (and I myself have had this experience) she goes away and a few days later smacks her brow in sudden recognition: “Of course! That’s what that was about!”
This is why I like the client to tape or write down everything that’s said, for these are not my words, the language of my own limited understanding. They come from somewhere else, sometimes in a style that is often precise and different, using unusual words or imagery.
Often I don’t remember afterward much of what was said. I cannot repeat the session, therefore, once I’m out of the altered state. I can only remember the gist of things and sometimes not even that.
Usually the first impression comes to me as a visual image, and I’ve learned to trust these swift metaphors, too.
I remember one of the first readings I gave in New York. I was still uncertain at the time that I could really do it. I settled the pretty young mother on a chair opposite me, took up the ring she offered, wrote down her name and birth date—and suddenly I saw a mouse scurrying around on the floor, here, there, everywhere, frantic, frenzied, changing direction every two feet. I could feel my heart pounding! It so startled me that I didn’t know what to do. Did it have anything to do with this woman? I was by no means sure, but remembering to trust, remembering that I’d been taught to tell everything that came to me, I started to describe it, and the girl lifted her head, eyes filled with tears: “Yes, that’s me. I can’t stop running.”
“We humans are porous.” Mary Jo Peebles is a Washington psychotherapist who discovered this in her own work. “We pick up what is going on in others.”
And still it doesn’t explain the appearance of spirits.
I’M ASKED if I’ve ever received nothing in a reading. It’s happened twice. The first time I was just beginning. The client was a woman in her early thirties, with strong black hair. I held her ring in my closed fist. I closed my eyes and got ... zero. Total darkness. No sound. No taste. No sight. Nothing. Pitch-black.
Suicide is not an option. The words popped into my head, but I wasn’t about to say them out loud to her.
Finally I gave her ring back and admitted that I couldn’t give a reading. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t “getting” anything. If such a thing happened to me now, I’d speak bravely what I saw and heard, but being so new I didn’t trust my intuition yet. I didn’t know what to do. I offered her a healing Reiki treatment instead, and she agreed. In this form of healing touch, the client lies fully clothed on a massage table, while the practitioner places her hands gently above or on her body. Energy flows into the client. It is warm and soothing. It is golden in color or white. It has an electrical energy, and it fills you, moving naturally to those places that need healing. The practitioner doesn’t need to know or “do” anything. Instinctively her hands will tell her where to move, send energy. Two or three times during the Reiki session the same words came to my mind: Suicide is not an option.
I’d never experienced anything like this before. I could tell she was angry, depressed. Even the Reiki felt unsuccessful, for the woman was resistant, deliberately and purposefully blocking energy.
As she left, I held the door for her and unexpectedly blurted it out: “Suicide is not an option.”
She turned with the ferocity of a tiger! “How dare you!” she cried. “What do you know? Who do you think you are?”
She left in a fury. She didn’t deny the idea, and I felt miserable. I should have spoken up earlier, when we would have had a chance to talk.
To this day, I don’t know what happened to her. I phoned Julia, who had sent her to me, and reported my concern. I was told that her brother had committed suicide earlier and that her therapist would be notified. I never saw her again, but I have not forgotten that single time when I met nothing but a dark void.
The second occasion came years later. A woman arrived for a reading, jaunty and electric with energy. She hooked her shoulder-length brown hair behind her ears and happily handed me her keys. I went into my slightly altered state, and for the second time felt ... nothing. It was queer. Finally, in defeat, I returned the keys to her. I couldn’t lie.
“I’m sorry. I guess I can’t give you a reading. I’m not getting anything.”
“Good!” She broke into a huge smile. “Now I know you’re for real. They aren’t my keys. That was a test. They aren’t anything. If you’d given me a reading using those, I wouldn’t have believed you. Here are mine. I’m ready.”
Beforehand, I always feel I’m not going to “get” anything and sometimes I feel that way during the reading: no angels, no spirits, and not even much information. Often that’s when people later write to tell me what a good reading they received. So what do I know? The whole process teaches humility.
SOME PEOPLE WONDER how the psychic gives bad news, and others may even refuse to visit an intuitive for fear of hearing information she hasn’t strength to bear. But look. How do we know what is “good” or “bad”? Often the very things we claim to be “bad” come trailing clouds of glory, while those successes we trumpet as our triumphs may pierce our flesh with thorns. (My children have taken to asking their little ones, “What was the rose in your day, and what the thorn?”—a question that avoids all judgments of good and bad.)
In every life we face challenges. A crisis can be an opportunity. I speak of how best to rise to the occasion. I speak of wisdom, attitude, choices, and of strengths and opportunities, for these empower and offer hope.
How to Tell Someone He or She Has a Disease
I don’t. I’m not a doctor. I might say, “Your health looks good,” or “Have you seen a doctor recently?” But I will never offer a diagnosis or prescribe a remedy. I remember once seeing a kind of darkness at one client’s belly. I suggested that she see a doctor, and when she did the doctor found polyps on her ovaries. But I avoid telling clients anything about their health, not only because of my own ignorance but also because of legal liabilities. It’s not my place. It wouldn’t be ethical.
EVERY CULTURE HAS a myth or legend or story about spirits. When Christ ascended, his spirit continued (continues) on this plane. Before, he was present to his disciples in the physical world and afterward as the Holy Spirit. The Dalai Lama notes that while Buddhist beliefs vary from culture to culture, Tibetan Buddhism affirms the special relationship between the emanation and its perception by another, and although “the emanation form of a human being may have ceased” he is still present in the form known as his sambhogakaya.” He “continues to emanate and manifest in various forms that are most suited and beneficial to other sentient beings.”
I HAVE HAD MEDIUMS tell me in a reading that a spirit has appeared. I find it hard to believe, unless they offer some means of identification. Anyone can say they see a spirit: “Oh, there’s the most beautiful spirit here, a grandmotherly type. She has pink cheeks and the prettiest smile. Does the name Rose mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter. And there’s a man here, too, a fine-looking gentleman. He has a wonderful smile. I think he’s your father.”
“Maybe.” But one part of myself is cringing at descriptions that could hold true for anyone. Every man is a fine-looking gentleman or might be thought to be so. Moreover, the fact that the spirits usually don’t have much to say does little to assuage my mistrust. But some mediums are truly gifted at naming spirits.
One of these, the late Gladys Strohm, was ninety-two when a friend gave me a reading with her. I had never heard of Gladys, but she was a large, extravagant, happy woman. (Why not? Like many spiritual people, she was joking with the spiritual dimension all the time!)
Gladys gave me one sharp, piercing glance as we walked toward her front door. “December twelfth,” she blurted out, and then a year.
I broke out laughing. She’d just announced my birthday. “You do your research.”
“No. It just comes to me.”
We sat down, and with no preliminary prayers, no jotting down of names or dates, no psychometric holding of an object, not even a moment of quiet prayer and reflection, she rocked back in her chintz-padded chair and proceeded to tell me the first and last names of my mother and then of my father, and to describe them with frightening accuracy.
“They’re both here. They just want to say they’re watching, and they’re very proud of you. They’re together on the Other Side. Everything’s fine. They’re happy.”
She then gave me a reading that I have referred to every now and again over the years, since so much of what she predicted has come to pass.
The Reverend F. Reed Brown, former pastor of the Arlington Metaphysical Chapel in Virginia, now retired and living in Roanoke, Virginia, at the campus that he founded, is also good at getting the names of attendant spirits and describing them punctiliously. In one reading, he heard the first names of both my parents and caught a close approximation of the unusual surname. For one friend of mine, a grandfather came through, complete with his Norwegian name—the same grandfather, I might add, who had sexually abused her when she was a little girl. He was not someone she cared to hear from, until she heard of the heartache and remorse he felt for his actions, now that he had passed over and learned more about the pain he’d inflicted, the evil he had perpetrated. It was after this conversation with him that she was able to let go, to forgive. Move on.
As for me, I’m not so good at receiving names. I have to ask for identification, some indication of the spirit’s former life, something that makes sense if not to me then at least to the client who has come for the reading. And usually the entity complies.
One woman suddenly displayed a large green banner running diagonally from her right shoulder and across her chest to tie on the right hip. The word Irish thrust itself into my mind. All I could think was Irish. But it was enough for this daughter to recognize her first-generation Irish mother, who had belonged to Irish orders and marched in her green banner on St. Patrick’s Day.
On another occasion a spirit appeared, claiming to be the client’s husband. But how could we be sure? I asked her to think of something that would verify her husband’s identity.
“The song that was playing when we met,” she challenged.
“‘Some Enchanted Evening,’” I answered without hesitation. After which the spirit told his wife how to handle a financial problem puzzling her.
I repeat: A spirit does not always appear, for they are not our slaves, but I remember two events in particular. In one, I was giving a reading to a young woman, Sandy, when a girl appeared at my left elbow, asking to be heard. It was her sister. I was talking at the time about Sandy’s relationship with her boyfriend. “Wait till I’m finished,” I spoke to the spirit telepathically, and she stood patiently at my elbow, waiting.
I was still fairly new at giving readings. What if Sandy didn’t have a sister?
“Um. Do you have a sister?” I asked cautiously.
“I did. She died.”
“Well, she’s here now.” I was relieved. “And she wants to talk to you. But I think you don’t need me. I think maybe you can feel her yourself.”
“I can!” she cried. “I feel her.”
“I tell you what. I think you won’t need me to interpret. Talk to her. She can hear you. Tell her everything you need to say. I’ll act as an antenna, holding the space for her, for you. If you can’t hear her, tell me, and I’ll pass on what she says, but maybe you can even hear her without me.”
I felt myself reaching for a higher vibration, trembling, my whole body quivering. I was surrounded by light.
It turned out that Sandy could feel her sister’s presence and talk to her, but she could not hear the answers. Then I received an astonishing bit of news: You want me to say that? The spirit was almost dancing foot to foot in her excitement.
“Um. She wants you to know she has a boyfriend on the Other Side.”
Sandy was in tears. Her smile spread. “Oh, that’s wonderful. She always wanted a boyfriend.”
“Well, she has one now.”
I don’t remember much more about the session. After a while the spirit began to fade.
“Finish quickly,” I said. “I can’t hold the space much longer. She’s leaving.” And then she was gone, and my body stopped shivering. I returned to myself, already missing the pleasure of that heightened state, which was both difficult and exquisitely sweet.
Is this what the other mediums feel when they report, “There’s a spirit here. She’s a grandmotherly type, pink cheeks, so sweet ...”?
I said that I particularly remember two spirit apparitions. The second one concerned a lovely woman in her late forties or early fifties, a stranger, who telephoned out of the blue. I will call her Suzanne. She asked if she could bring her husband. I answered no, that his energy would confuse her reading, but if he wished to come, he could sit in the next room while she and I had our session.
I don’t know how I knew that; it was simply another example of perceiving intuitively a truth unknown before.
As it happened Suzanne’s husband came with her, and I settled him in the other room while Suzanne and I went to my meditation alcove. I wrote down her name and date of birth, reached for her keys—and was so hit by a headache I thought I would faint. I felt nauseous. Could I even give the reading? This was the racking headache of Zeus, out of which sprang the goddess Athena. A moment later it occurred to me that the headache might not be mine.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked.
“No.”
“Well, I have one, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever known. It’s so painful I’m going to faint.” The next moment the spirit appeared. “Oh, there’s a spirit here, a young woman. She’s your daughter.”
“I don’t have a daughter,” Suzanne replied stiffly.
By now the headache was gone. “Well, she’s looking at you. She’s saying, ‘Mother. Mother.’ You may not have a daughter, but to her you’re her mother.”
“I have a stepdaughter.”
“I don’t know. She’s calling you ‘Mother.’ ”
During all this time I felt myself uplifted, in that heightened state of energy I described earlier, in which my body is shot with electricity: I am clear; I am numb; I am both present to the client and yet not fully aware, straddling two worlds, one foot in each.
“She has a child with her.” I described the baby, about a year old, tottering at her knee, clinging to her.
“What is she wearing?” said Suzanne suspiciously.
“Something brown, a kind of brown pantsuit. And boots.”
“Can I bring my husband in?” she asked, and now her voice was fevered. “I think this is his daughter.”
I agreed. The spirit told me to.
He sat in a nearby chair, and I watched, describing the spirit as she climbed into his lap and curled her arms around his neck, kissing and hugging him, clinging to him. He hardly needed my description, for he could feel her presence in his arms.
“It’s how she always sat on my lap,” he said. All three of us were weeping. It turned out that the young woman had been in the army. A year earlier, she had been walking from one building to another when she was struck by lightning and killed. She’d been pregnant.
This spirit stayed a long time, before it was time for her to go. Afterward, I gave a simple intuitive reading to the man and his wife but without any further dramatic apparitions.
“Oh, you’re going to write a book,” I remember saying, and not long ago I received in the mail a copy of the book she had written, together with a note saying that she and her husband were sailing on the long cruises that I’d also foretold.
I DON’T WANT YOU to think that having extreme intuition is any help to normal living. I heard of one psychic who came home after work one evening and sat down in the living room. It took him a few minutes to realize that none of the furniture looked familiar, that he was in the house next door. Embarrassed, he left, closing the door gently behind him, and walked across the lawn to his own house.
There’s a reason Tiresias, the blind seer of ancient Greece, was sightless. Being psychic or intuitive doesn’t mean that you necessarily are able to smoothly navigate your life. One brilliant psychic did not “see” that her second husband was sexually abusing her little daughter, and neither, after she had finally divorced him, was it easier for her to pick up the pieces. We all face life situations, ours to confront, and intuition comes in its own time.
THE ARRIVAL of an apparition is a powerful experience, but often the information received when giving a reading comes simply as a quiet, inner intuition. It makes me wonder: Is what I’m doing any different from reading body language and microexpressions, a host of subtle physical clues and energy fields? In some cases, I think not. After all, anyone who comes for a reading is troubled to a certain extent, confused. He’s looking for a path. So, already you know a lot right there. Meanwhile, you are reading the tiny signals we all send out: a nod of yes, a confirmation, or the flash of a frown, a hesitation, or rejection of something said. Do you adjust? Of course you do. And yet it doesn’t mean the insights are not right. Sometimes I find it easier to give a reading with my eyes closed or looking into some hazy middle space and not directly at the client’s face.
For the first twenty or thirty minutes of a session, I ask the client to say nothing or not to speak until I pause and ask for information. For I find the client is often dying to spill everything, like jewels from a sack, to pour them into your lap. Some people, if they had their way, would take up the whole hour with their catalogue of problems and solutions.
I have three reasons for not letting the sitter speak immediately. First, my reading would be tainted by her revelations. Second, by listening, I would be thrown out of the slightly altered state wherein I attend to the whispers of intuition and can be of help. Third, having already told me everything she knows (or thinks she does), the client wouldn’t trust the reading. How could she? Hasn’t she already told me everything?
Sometimes I think I’m doing nothing special. A thought pops into my mind. Or doesn’t. Sometimes I worry: I’m not “getting” anything! The information comes hesitantly, full of stops and starts. I have come to understand that how the information comes (via spirits, intuition, or psychic insight) is not important. My task is merely to pass on what I hear.
And sometimes the information comes through clearly. With certainty.
Years ago a woman named Jane came for a reading.
“Oh, your daughter’s going to college in the fall! She’s going to the University of Michigan!”
“She’d like to,” Jane said, “but we can’t afford it. She’s applied to two other colleges now.”
“No, she’s supposed to go there. You have to get in the car this weekend and drive to Michigan with her and talk to the financial aid office. This weekend. She’ll get a scholarship.”
“Can I telephone?”
“No. You have to go in person.”
Fortunately Jane followed the advice of her spirit guides and drove to Michigan with her daughter, who received a hefty scholarship.
Recently Jane reminded me of another situation. She was working at an embassy here in Washington at the time and wanted to find another job. Clear as a bell, the information came: “Don’t look. Let the job come to you. Something is coming along, but they’ll call you.” And in that same reading: “Don’t forget to fight for your retirement.”
“What?”
“Don’t forget to ask for your retirement. You may have to fight for it.”
“I don’t think I get retirement. Do you mean in the new job?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I know.”
“What retirement?”
“It doesn’t matter. When the time comes, though, fight for it.” Later, as she left the embassy for her new position on Capitol Hill, she remembered that counsel, fought doggedly, and received the retirement pay the embassy had first refused to pay.
Where do the thoughts come from? What guidance puts these ideas in one’s head? Not long ago I got a letter from a woman reminding me of a reading she had had a year before. At the time she had wanted to leave her job, because of two offensive supervisors.
“Stay,” she was told. “It’s a perfect fit for you. They’re both going to leave. They won’t be there long.”
She wrote me to say that both supervisors had taken other jobs and that everything had turned out as predicted. Now she loved her job.
Inviting Intuition V: Compassionate Observation
Here is another practice. Whenever you meet someone new, try for a quick “reading.” It takes only the time to shake his hand—or glance up as he comes through the door. What do you know about the person? Guess. What is his profession? What is she worried about? Is he happy, excited, angry, frightened, or sad? What else can you “see”?
Don’t worry about not checking your information. This is an exercise in developing empathy, in learning to listen. Later, you will be given the opportunity to check out your intuitions. The Universe will provide you chances, but only when you’re ready and when no harm can come of it. Meanwhile, consciously practice an attitude of gratitude. Develop sympathy for others, empathy, compassion. I cannot stress this enough. I know plenty of people, many of them young, who are actually frightened of entering any unknown group. (What will they think of me? Do I look all right? They’ll be talking behind my back!) If you start practicing this exercise in compassionate observation, you’ll soon discover you have nothing to fear; they are probably not thinking about you anyway!
This also entails observing your own thoughts. Are you gossiping? Why? Is it to feel superior or righteous, or is it out of true concern for your own friend? The more you are aware of your own feelings and the more tender you become, the more readily do psychic powers appear.
The Gift of Mistakes
In your early days of listening for whispers, you may mistrust the messages, or else you let reason override a warning that’s as weak as the shimmering of a leaf. Perhaps your intuition makes no sense. You bull past it, ignoring the signals, inattentive to such psychic signs, and thus by your mistakes you learn the signals, and that’s another gift right there.
Some people beat themselves up for making a mistake, but I say no, give thanks for them. By your mistakes, you learn in what form your intuition comes to you.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN? Is there Fate? Predestination? Destiny? I believe we make our future, choice by choice, each moment of the day. I believe we’re given a general map, a soul map, if you will, but we have absolute Free Will to follow or decline the plan. What’s important is to listen to the nudges of your inner wisdom, leading you to higher consciousness. I believe that our task is always to become more “spiritually mature.” And what does that mean? To be less angry, less prideful, less greedy, less intolerant, less violent. To have more patience, serenity, compassion, inner tranquillity, simplicity, and happiness.
It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I MUST CONFESS THAT in the beginning I doubted these visions, visitations, insights—everything. I reported them to the client, yes. But I would finish a reading, see the individual out, and then in despair run over and over it in my mind, whatever I remembered of the reading, doubting everything. Today, I’ve learned to trust my guidance and not look back. I am a conduit, that’s all, and what the client does with the information is also not my responsibility. For you have Free Will not to accept or act on what the intuitive sees. I know several people who paid for readings with renowned psychics and ignored their every word.
I never doubt the guidance I receive at the time of a
reading. It’s important to be detached from it. I see myself
simply as a vessel through which the information flows.
That also releases me from carrying the memories and
concerns about it. This is perhaps one of the most difficult
things for many mediums to learn. I was fortunate to have
a teacher who insisted on this discipline. I encourage any
medium to develop it too, because it’s not healthy to carry
concerns after the reading.
ANNE GEHMAN, medium
Ethics
The ethics of psychic readings are basically the same as those of normal living: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Be truthful. Be kind.
Do not give a reading if you are emotionally shocked, angry, or in distress.
Don’t give a reading without permission. Don’t go marching up to someone at a dinner party or a business convention and declare that you’ve just received some psychic information he needs to hear: Believe me, he doesn’t!
And never ever “look into” someone without permission. (Note that this injunction is different from practicing your intuitive skills in an effort to discern microexpressions and body language. If you wish to develop psychic skills, do so by sending and receiving telepathically with a friend, or gather four or five people together expressly to practice your perceptive and projective skills. It’s wrong to impose on strangers.)
Finally, as an intuitive, you never kiss and tell. I heard of one psychic who, needing money, decided to write a tell-all book in which she’d spill the secrets of the famous congress-men and celebrities who’d come to her for readings, naming them all. Fortunately, the project came to nothing, for it was totally unethical!
ALL THESE STORIES RECOUNT my successes and none of my failures. Is that because I don’t remember the times I’ve failed? Or are the clients too kind to throw my misses in my face? One thing you learn in giving readings is to be gentle with yourself, especially while you are learning. Forgive yourself. You may need to practice forgiving yourself daily (another spiritual discipline). Giving readings is an imprecise skill. You see through the glass darkly, snatching moments of illumination before the mists roll in and boundaries close.
But one thing is certain. You love the client during a reading. You merge in surprising ways, and if she or he is receptive, the two of you can travel to the stars.
