P is for: Psychic Gifts
This post is part of a series I’m so excited about: “The ABC’s of What I’ve Learned as a Medium and Intuitive Healer.” This is my full-time career, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned!
I say Spirit to mean God, the Universe, the Cosmos - I use these phrases interchangeably for all enlightened beings who help us. I use “greater Spirit” or “Spirit” to mean everything out there, taking care of and managing in here: Them as a group and concept. You may choose to substitute the word “Spirit” with Jesus, Archangel Michael, Allah, Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, The Universe, The Cosmos, or about a billion other names, and it doesn’t matter. Spirit is all this and so much more than we can ever understand. They don’t care what you call them so long as you give them the same respect they give you. I work with these beings closely, as they are an integral part of my practice and career. It is a relationship I heavily encourage everyone to build, as it enhances every aspect of our physical lives and spiritual practice.
Psychic Gifts
Psychic gifts are those which let a person use extrasensory perception to receive information which isn't available through the five physical senses with which we're usually most familiar.
Being psychic doesn't often look how we've been taught to imagine it! Psychic gifts take time to develop and understand. Gifts are extremely personal and unique, and everyone can hone theirs to do things no one else can do. Our gifts grow and evolve as we do, personally, and on a soul level.
Every being with a soul - whether an animal, a person, a star being, an angel or a deity or anything else at all - every single being with a soul has the same energetic systems. We have a version of meridians, chakras, nadis, subtle fields such as the auric field, etc. Each time we are born into a new physical body, our energetic systems are put in that new physical body, exactly as we last left them. This means when you were born, your current meridians, chakras, and auric layers already had all your past-life psychic gifts stored within them, as well as your past-life traumas and difficulties, and beliefs both positive and negative.
Because of this, I have begun to think of our subtle systems as really who we are. These subtle systems (which store, channel, and convert energy/information) can be programmed into any physical body, but they are always where we last left them. This is why every bit of work we do on ourselves doesn’t matter only for ourselves this lifetime, but also matters for our future and the future of the universe. If we allow ourselves to pass away this lifetime full of hurt, regret, anger, rage, grief, etc., we are ensuring that the next time we are born, we will have to deal with those things again, and starting as a child. Luckily, this also means every bit of work one does to grow their psychic and intuitive gifts is doing so for future lifetimes, as well as their personal knowledge and self-betterment.
I love helping people peel back the unique layers of their own practice. It has been such a gift for me, it’s one I love to share. In case I haven't said it explicitly enough yet: psychic gifts are completely unique to each individual. One who has been an Avalon Priestess, a Mayan Medicine Man, a mail carrier, and a bear will show very different expressions of psychic ability here on earth than someone who has been an Incan Priestess, an African Shaman, a bank teller, and a dolphin. Those are just two examples and that's just earth stuff - when we add in what we may have done and seen on other planets, one can't imagine the number of possibilities. We may have ten lifetimes in a row in which we work hard on our gifts, and then several in which we don't work on them at all. In any case, everything we do is not just for us, now, but for us as a soul.
We're always developing our psychic abilities as a soul, on a multi-lifetime basis. I have yet to see two people who could do exactly the same things, and I’ve yet to have any student or client whose gifts work exactly like mine.
This is so exciting for Spirit, as it’s completely new and unique to this time and this place. Your soul has never existed right here, right now before, and that you use your gifts is a gift to the whole universe.
I’ve worked with people who could only access one sub-gift, but with extreme accuracy and dependability, and I’ve worked with some who had access to many gifts, but which were undeveloped and unreliable. Each of our gifts should be seen as a muscle we have to strengthen to use to its best benefit. I suggest never seeing your abilities as "done." I’ve been working as a psychic for years, but I continue to take on mentors and read every energy healing book I can find - my practice has changed significantly over the years as my knowledge has grown! Not because I believe everything I read or hear (I double check everything I read or learn with my guides and recommend this to everyone) but when something from another practice rings true and helpful, I integrate it. We can develop our gifts nearly endlessly with work, dedication, and reverence for something larger than ourselves.
I believe it’s a gift to have a lifetime in which we can hear from the Divine, and we should spend that lifetime learning everything we can, because we don’t know when we’ll have a lifetime with so much insight again. My practice has evolved significantly over the years as I’ve been able to piece together traditions from my own teachers and my clients and students, all over the world. Nothing in my life has been as rewarding as building my own gifts and relationship to Spirit while finding my spiritual community by fostering the gifts of others.
We can reach into past and future lifetimes alike to build our gifts - we just have to want it, and it helps to have someone guide us through the process. No matter how far along our gifts are, they can always be enhanced by new knowledge, new techniques, new ways to practice, and new perspectives to consider. I learn as much from those with whom I practice as they learn from me, because each one of my clients asks questions I wouldn't think to ask and perspectives I hadn't considered, broadening my awareness, too.
The most important thing to remember is that these are truly gifts - those who have the fullest expression of their psychic abilities do not use them for personal power, but know they are lucky to wield gifts directly from the Divine.
The Four Clairs
All psychic information, no matter what we are practicing, comes to us through one of four over-arching gifts, or through a combination of any of these four gifts. Many refer to these as "the four clairs." The four clairs are: clairvoyance, clairaudience, claircognizance, and clairsentience.
*While there is a lot of information floating around about "clairolfactance," Spirit says this is not a distinct gift and not a distinct branch of gifts. When we are smelling something which others can't, we are more likely to be smelling a spirit who is communicating with us (a use of mediumship), or be practicing remote viewing through clairsentience in which we are smelling a location in which we are not physically present.
All other gifts can be considered sub or secondary gifts, as they each must be practiced through the four clairs. No matter which sub-gift we are practicing, whether we are remote viewing, using shamanistic gifts, using psychography, mediumship - with every psychic activity we practice, the information comes to us through either psychic sight, hearing, feeling, or knowing, or a combination of those gifts.
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance or "clear seeing" is the ability to gain visual psychic information without using the physical sense of sight. This is the most well-known form, which is why psychics over time have been called things like “seers,” and why the gift has been called things like “the sight.” Over time, people have called clairvoyance: the second sight, the divine eye, the inner eye, the eye of God, the psychic eye, the eye of Horus or Ra, the mind‘s eye, and many other names - mostly to do with eyes or seeing. Clairvoyance is the gift usually associated with things like aura reading, remote viewing, and even gifts like mediumship.
Clairvoyance is working through the third eye chakra the vast majority of the time, but there are actually several different styles. One who is clairvoyant may have no visions during their waking hours, but have incredibly clear psychic dreams. One may have inner visions which they don’t see with their physical eyes, but see more like a memory in their head. One may also receive external visions, such as physically seeing spirits roaming around who others cannot see.
Other clairvoyance comes through the crown chakra, and these are direct messages in the form of symbolism from our spirit guides. Messages through the crown chakra are more likely to be in black-and-white, and to be simple images or silhouettes rather than full color scenes like we can get through classical clairvoyant imagery through the third eye chakra.
A person whose third eye chakra is blocked or being used in properly is unlikely to have access to their clairvoyant gift, and definitely cannot use it to its best advantage. If our crown chakra is blocked, it affects our clairvoyance most, and it tends to affect all gifts. We'll get further into chakras and their effects on our gifts in a little while!
Clairvoyance is one gift which for children and/or the overly-sensitive psychic (who often start as children) can be incredibly alarming and unsettling. I have worked with many overly-sensitive psychics who have felt their whole lives that they were inadvertently causing the imagery they saw, and many would only receive disturbing imagery, such as seeing a black cloud around someone they knew who was going to pass away. Our spirit guides always remind us that no matter what kind of imagery one receives, it is not meant to be negative, and it is not meant to be hurtful. Someone who receives prophetic imagery when others are about to pass away may have that gift because they used it very well to help others in the past lifetime, perhaps on a different planet or within a different culture which is difficult to understand. Each of our abilities, even when they feel difficult or painful, was initially meant to be a gift, even if we can’t see how we can use it well now. A mentor can help overly-sensitive psychics, children, and anyone who is disturbed by their gifts to try to see the good in them and use them well, and learn to tune out the parts which are unpleasant.
One who has the gift of clairvoyance can often visually see spiritual beings differently than others, should the spiritual being allow it. Through one form of clairvoyance or another, many of us have been able to see angels, deities, elemental beings, fairies, and dragons as they would like to be seen, among others. This is one reason I love to help people develop their clairvoyance - to receive such clear imagery of the being you are working with is such a wonderful way to make a connection and feel solid in your relationship to Divinity.
Divination is using a tool, rather than your psychic gifts, to gain unknown information. Divination can help many of us build our gifts further, because the addition of a tool often makes us feel our results are more tangible. Divination and psychic gifts can be used in tandem and can be used to strengthen one another. For those for whom clairvoyance is the most natural gift, I find that scrying is often the best use of divination, and can help build clairvoyant gifts immensely. There are so many forms of scrying, it’s almost impossible to choose a favorite. Those who are clairvoyant often have great success with water scrying, black mirror scrying, scrying in flames, smoke, or ashes, as well as in a crystal. If you would like Spirit-provided instructions for any of these divination methods, please send me an email and I will happily send them on over! When doing any of these activities, what’s especially helpful is seeing how it can help one actually build their clairvoyance. If one receives a symbol while scrying, they can write down their meaning for that symbol, and use it later without the help of the divination tool.
Clairaudience
Clairaudience or "clear hearing" is being able to hear something psychically without the physical sense of hearing. Clairaudience is usually the gift we are using when we partake in something like psychography, or psychic writing. It’s almost always the gift we are using if we engage in pendulum use.
One who uses clairaudience will often hear "voices“, and these are typically the voices of their spirit guides or passed on loved ones. Additionally, one may also hear environmental noises, animalistic noises, or hear a scene from somewhere else. This gift can be very useful in tandem with energy healing, especially for sound healers, as sometimes one really needs the overall sound intake or output of their body corrected, and sometimes there are sounds just "sitting" in someone’s auric field or other subtle systems which need to be released.
This gift happens entirely in the realm of the throat. Which means one whose throat chakra is blocked or being used improperly will have no access to clairaudience whatsoever. One has to be an open and good communicator to be able to receive their best clairaudient messages. Throat chakra issues often come from lashing out, being violent, excessive lying - essentially incorrect uses of self-expression or the voice. This chakra is so hurt by these behaviors is that it shuts off all ability to use clear hearing. While each chakra has thousands of jobs, the throat chakra is arguably the most simple, while also being the easiest for humans specifically to have trouble with. Our chakras can each be broken down into physical, relational, spiritual, or emotional chakras. Our fifth or throat chakra is a purely relational chakra - it is meant to help us relate to others and relate to ourselves and higher selves. Because its functionality is relatively simple, that makes it easy to shut down and to lose the gifts available through this chakra.
As briefly touched on, clairaudience is the gift through which we typically engage with a pendulum. Spirit absolutely loves and hates pendulums, because they can help somebody open up to their gifts, but they are such an easy way for us to let our worst guilty pleasures out. Typically, one who has a pendulum can’t help but ask questions they should not ask, such as questions which would breach the consent of other people, and questions which are simply none of the person’s business. While it can be hard for some of us to admit that anything is none of our business, some things absolutely are not, and unfortunately, one who gets a pendulum often cannot help ask questions which are not the best uses. Spirit likes to remind that when one uses a psychic gift for this, or divination like a pendulum or tarot cards, their answers will not be accurate because of the inherent breach of consent. Psychic gifts are coming from the Divine, which means the Divine has to be inspired to give you the information you are asking for. If we are asking for information we have no business hearing, or especially if we are asking for information which would give us negative karma or give someone else negative karma, we aren’t going to get the answers we think we are.
Guided writing or psychography is usually the easiest divination method for people who are working to build their clairaudience. One can set the intention at the beginning of the process to speak to their spirit guides as a chorus, to speak to a specific spirit guide, if they have the gift of mediumship, they can ask to speak to a specific spirit, etc. Either way, I would recommend putting the conversation in the hands of the greater Spirit and asking for an appropriate brain state. Both of these help the process so much, as we will see later in the tips and tricks section!
Most of the beings who speak to us do not have physical mouths or bodies anywhere near this dimension through which to speak to us. So for many, it is difficult to trust this gift because the words said come through in one’s own thoughts or internal voice. However, this can be a very good way to build up all gifts. When we tune into those which are actually clairaudient messages and not our own thoughts, we start to recognize that those thoughts actually have a very different vibration than our own, and it also helps us become aware of vibration and a use of our clairaudient gifts at the same time. Also, though these beings cannot speak to you in their own voice, they will still use their own tone and cadence. When I receive clairaudient messages, I can tell because they are absolutely not in a tone or cadence I would use, so even if they "sound" like my own thoughts, which they do a lot of the time, I can assess them by recognizing that it still isn’t my own speech patterns, and that again, it is coming through on a very different vibration than mine.
Claircognizance
Claircognizance or "clear knowing" is the hardest one to develop on purpose, and in a lot of cases, one kind of either has it or doesn’t. It’s also the hardest gift to trust in a lot of cases, because one often cannot understand the mechanisms underneath it or see where they got the information. When we receive a hit through claircognizant knowing, we “just know" something, without knowing how we know it. Many of my readings are actually done through this gift these days - I will receive a few clear words through clairaudience, and then I will just know the rest of the picture. From there, if I get clarification, those may come through any of my gifts. This is how one who uses their gifts quite a lot begins to let them all blend together into an amalgam that works best. When I am energy healing, I have the best results with a mix of clairsentience and clairvoyance. But other than in energy healing and mediumship, I almost never use my clairvoyance. It’s also the only gift I feel I can’t just call on.
(All of these things are what I mean when I say gifts are completely unique to the individual! There may be 75 mediums in a room and I promise you no two of them are doing the exact same thing. Even if two of them get the exact same information from the passed on spirit, they are not getting it the exact same way. This is part of the problem when we aren’t respecting others gifts and intuition. We have to recognize that ours will never come exactly the way someone else’s does.)
Clients often wonder how to tell claircognizance apart from clairaudience, especially if clairaudience sounds to one like their own voice. That’s a good time to look out for tone and cadence! Also, clairaudience in this context would typically come in like a full sentence, whereas with claircognizance, you literally “just know” without words telling you.
Clairsentience
Clairsentience or "clear feeling" most often arises as a physical feeling in one’s body which explains what their subtle energetic systems are going through. One may also feel the energy of a being nearby, rather than hearing or seeing something which would let them know the energy was there. This is also the gift we use when we feel healing energy, energy from a crystal, moving through our meridians, etc.
Clairsentience is easily the most complex gift, has the most going on at one time, works through the highest number of chakras, and is the hardest to give a clear definition of. I do many psychics readings, and I also work as a mentor helping many to develop their gifts. I can say in most cases, especially depending on soul age, clairsentience is the last gift to develop and is generally the hardest for one to understand or make use of, especially as a career. However, especially for energy healers, there can hardly be a more important gift to thoroughly develop and work to be able to interpret clearly.
The word energy really means information. If you say someone has “bad energy,” you’re implying you don’t like the subtle information you’re receiving. Clairsentience is just another way to receive that information, and through use of feeling, which often has a lot more need for correctly interpreting that information.
While clairvoyance and clairaudience are easier to use for breakthroughs in divination, clairsentience is more of an all-purpose gift that you’ll note is always going alongside or working in tandem with your other gifts.
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Something difficult to explain but important: your team isn’t giving you a specific kind of psychic hit, the vast majority of the time. (Though they may try if they’re trying to help you build a gift or trying to show you something you’re not getting.) Usually, they’re trying to communicate with you in general and it will then be filtered through you.
Your team doesn’t “show you” a dust bunny as a symbol that it’s time to clean the house; your team says, “It’s time to clean the house,” and your subconscious filters the information and interprets it as a dust bunny. Someone else (or you on a different day) may see a rainbow or hear the words “clean up” or hear a song from youth about tidying or see a picture of grandma shaking her head or just suddenly be inspired to stop and clean something they’ve stepped around for six months. These are a few of infinite possible examples for the way someone might receive the words “It’s time to clean the house” from Spirit. The information comes according to our current (as in right that second) vibrations, knowledge, and ability.
I use all four clairs in my practice somewhat interchangeably, depending on what I’m doing and whom I'm working with. This definitely didn't come all at once; I used to rely heavily on one gift or another. I can now use the four comfortably because of years of my own methodical process to build my gifts, and my taking on mentors and healers who could help me at different times! I still rely on some more than others and prefer some for comfort, and I still have an easier time getting some to come on command, as I explained.
I continue to work with people who can use their gifts to do things no one else can do - it all comes from learning how your gifts work for you and knowing what you’d like to achieve with them. Your gifts may never look how you expect them to, but they will be yours, and there is a science to understanding them and using them reliably, which you can learn and build upon for the rest of your life.
Secondary Gifts
One of my favorite things about our gifts and something that is often misunderstood is that any sub or secondary gift can actually be accessed by any of the main four. Even activities we typically think of as specifically clairvoyant activities, such as aura reading or remote viewing, can be done with any other clair gift. As was briefly touched on earlier, when we smell something psychically, we may actually be using a form of remote viewing using clairsentience, and smelling a location somewhere else. We may remote view using clairsentience and simply feel a location in our body or soak up the energy of it. We may hear a scene which happened a long time ago or is happening elsewhere, and this is remote viewing through clairaudience. Reading auric fields is a significant and regular part of my energy healing practice, and I almost never do so visually. I receive some clairvoyant hits, usually in the form of signs or symbols, but I tend to do most energy healing through clairsentience and let clairvoyance inform here and there. In mediumship readings, I’m likely to move in and out of all four overarching gifts, but use clairvoyance more than in any other part of my practice.
So for one who has all four clairs available to them, one of my best suggestions for building gifts is to attempt practices through secondary gifts, and to shut out or ignore the gift you’re most comfortable with. This forces the others to become more prominent. I’ve had a lot of success with this and with using this technique with my students and clients. If I have a client who is most comfortable only with clairvoyant imagery, I tell them to completely ignore that, and tell me what they are getting which may be auditory, or through feelings in the body, or if they are just recognizing anything without knowing how they do. Often, just looking for a secondary stimulus helps us find it. If we always go through the gift we're most comfortable with, the gifts tend not to develop very far or at least not as far as they could. This is because again, if your team is shouting to you, “You need to make a plan for the future!” You may be receiving this as a personal sign (my sign for this is a lighthouse), but if you ignore that sign, you’re likely also getting it through your other clairs, and you may just not be used to paying as much attention to them. Ignoring the gift you’re most comfortable with helps the others grow.
Some examples of fun secondary gifts to try through one of the main four are: aura reading/sensing (try with people [who have consented], animals, buildings!), psychography, psychometry, communicating with animals, working with elemental beings, soaking up the energy of natural elements, and engaging with telesomatic abilities.
There are some gifts which Spirit refers to as "special gifts:" these are things like shamanism, medical intuition, energy healing, reading the Akashic Record, and more. These gifts are not available to everyone, and are still taking place through the main four clairs. The main difference in these special gifts is that they are harder to use, more difficult to understand, and are typically only present in those who have used them in past lifetimes or who have awakened out-of-body chakras with hard work. That doesn’t mean someone can’t eventually have a breakthrough and create a gift that isn’t there already, but this takes a lot of practice and effort (and in my experience, even those who do have past-life gifts are often unlikely to put in the kind of work it takes to use these special gifts to their best advantage).
Chakras
We touched on chakras in the section about the four clairs, but I think it’s important to go into them a little more thoroughly because their importance to our psychic gifts cannot be overstated. Our chakras can essentially be thought of as little information centers in the body. They hold onto our belief systems, emotions, and thoughts, and they convert this subtle energy into physical energy. That’s their whole job. Each chakra works with a corresponding layer of the auric field to manifest external circumstances based on what that chakra already believes to be true. This means one whose root chakra holds the belief that the world is unsafe and scary will run into every person and situation in the area which can make them feel even less safe. Someone whose third eye chakra holds the belief that the future is easy to plan and that life unfolds easily will run into every helpful thing and person along the path.
So, if one is holding onto a limiting belief about one of their gifts, or even a limiting belief that affects one of their gifts, it’s going to be a problem because those beliefs are stored in those chakras and we need those chakras to access those gifts. If we are trying to access clairaudience, but our throat chakra has a deficiency from holding onto the limiting belief that we should never speak up for ourselves, we aren’t likely to get anything useful. If we are trying to practice clairvoyance, but our third eye chakra has an excess because we hold onto the belief that we don't need any foresight to plan our future, again we will have a very hard time.
Certain chakras, like the crown and root, play heavily into one specific gift or another, but also have a hand in pretty much all use of psychic activity. This is because one who doesn’t feel safe or secure at the root really doesn’t have the right number of resources to make it all the way to spiritual activity. In one whose crown chakra is damaged, the information they’re receiving is being filtered incorrectly right from the get go. I recommend everyone to check in with their chakras once per day, and really feel what each energy center is going through. For best use of any psychic gift, we want a clear channel of energy from top to bottom.
We also each have five out-of-body chakras, which also each corresponds to a layer of our personal auric field, and is helping us manifest our external circumstances (each of our personal auric fields have twelve layers, and each layer corresponds to one chakra - the seven in-body and the five out-of-body). These five chakras hold onto things like past-life gifts, connections to the Akashic Record, special gifts, past-life training on those gifts, etc. We can’t usually open the chakras on our own, Spirit has to have a say in it, so in most of us, these chakras are dormant. When awakened, they have a huge effect on all psychic gifts. For any who cares about developing their gifts, I definitely recommend working with your spirit team to open and engage these out-of-body chakras. This post on chakras goes further into what each of the five out-of-body chakras governs!
The Inner Voice
I regularly have clients ask how they should know the difference between a psychic hit of any kind and their own voice or even paranoia. This is easy and difficult: the two things feel very different. So, one who is self-aware and understands their own emotions and recognizes their own energetic baseline, they tend to have a much easier understanding of when an external being is communicating with them from the outside. This comes from a really thorough understanding of the self and what one feels like without any interference. If we don’t recognize ourselves, how can we hope to recognize an external force? One who is less attuned to their own frequency is going to have a much harder time tuning into the frequency of others, or noticing when another energy is present - really noticing when any psychic stimulus is actually happening. For any who are struggling with this, not knowing whether something is actually a psychic hit or talking to themselves, I recommend spending more time in meditation, and really working to get to know your inner voice and recognizing your own energetic baseline. This is inarguably the best starting point.
Almost building on that, the most important thing is to just start. I could not explain how many clients I’ve had over the years come and say, "Well I almost got into my gifts at this point, but then this came up. So then I had another opportunity to get invested in them a year later, but then something else came up. So then three years later I started Reiki, and anyway now here I am ten years later." And this was the case for me, too! Looking back, I can see myriad opportunities to come to this lifestyle before I actually got invested in my gifts, and now I wish I'd taken the earlier guidance. It is very easy to put this off and say we will work on our gifts later.
For those who do actively want to build their gifts and make this an intentional part of life, the biggest thing is just getting started and practicing. It is quite simply impossible to begin today and be a guru tomorrow. But everyone you admire spent time, effort, practice, and study to get to where they are, and that’s what it will take to get you there, too.
Things Which Regularly Get in the Way of Psychic Gifts
Ego. Spirit feels this happens two main ways. One, our ego tells us we are “done,” and we have no more room to grow our gifts in the first place, and then we stagnate. Every one of us can build our gifts until we die. They evolve right as we do, so as we ascend the mountain, the mountain only grows taller by our ascent.
The other way ego gets in the way is that people tend to speak for their spirit guides and say they are receiving the answers they want to receive, instead of what is actually being said. If someone takes an answer to mean exactly what they want it to mean rather than actually working through it, they really can’t get anywhere. Spirit will almost never give us exactly the advice we want, packaged exactly the way we want it. If we think everything we get from our guides is exactly what we would want to hear, it’s probably ego talking.
Wanting our gifts to look a certain way or just like someone else's. I said it so much at the beginning because it’s really important: no one‘s gifts are going to look just like their friends, their mentor’s, or Raven's on That's So Raven! When we feel the need to direct the outcomes of our practice and say exactly what we need our gifts to look like for us to believe in them, we cut ourselves off completely from the reality of the experience, and it means we can't interpret the data which is actually coming.
Asking the wrong questions. Such as what was touched on with how when we get a pendulum, our first instinct is almost always to breach someone else’s consent or ask a question we have no business asking, this is a big problem with our psychic gifts! If you would use your psychic gifts to talk to your spirit guides, ask how you can work on original research, ask how you can use your gifts to contribute to humanity to the bigger picture - I swear on everything, your gifts would grow day after day. The problem is, this is not what most of us want psychic gifts for. Mostly, people want psychic gifts because they feel it as a way to be voyeuristic, ask questions they have no business getting answers to, and spy on others. If this is what we are trying to use our gifts for, our gifts will simply not work, and we definitely can’t grow them to the best of our ability.
Misunderstanding the point. Kind of building upon that, the point of psychic gifts is not to be psychic; it’s not to “look cool“ or to do fun party tricks. The point is to live a better life. It’s to feel better tangibly because someone who feels good tries to help others feel good and builds upon the picture for all of humanity. Our psychic gifts are helped when we understand the point of them, to make our lives better than they were the day before, to grow our knowledge bigger than it was the day before, or to help someone do something they couldn’t do before. It would be impossible to state how significant improper use is in terms of why people don’t get the results they want from their psychic practice.
Ignoring our inner voice. Our higher self, no matter who they are, talks to each of us all day, every single day. They chose the lifetime we are in, and they chose it with extreme purpose and foresight (no matter how impossible that feels from where we are sitting). They came with a life purpose, with entangled souls, with a plan, and they are trying to convey that to us every second of every day. They cannot succeed if we fail. First and foremost, our gifts are a connection to this inner voice, and to their plan which is our connection to the bigger picture. Long before we're ready to work on the mysteries of the universe, we need to be able to tune into our higher self's wisdom and handle the mysteries of day-to-day living. Our inner voice is a guidance system which has significantly more information than we do, and which is trying to guide us toward our purpose and fulfillment. Sadly, most of us would love to call all the wrong things psychic hits and signs and symbols, but when we actually get intuitive guidance from our higher self, which we get all day long, we talk ourselves out of those nudges.
Being on the wrong vibration. Something which is very difficult to understand is that our personal frequency has a 100% effect on how we are doing and how we receive information. Whether you are on the vibration of grief or on the vibration of passion, your Spirit team (your group of guides and your higher self) is always trying to talk to you and trying to tell you the best way forward. Our spirit guides and higher selves are on such an incredibly different frequency than we are, it’s almost impossible to describe it. Instead of thinking of these words metaphorically, think of them very literally. If you are on the wrong frequency, you cannot tune into a radio station. When your team is trying to talk to you from the frequency of oneness, enlightenment, and wholeness, but you are on the vibration of grief, anxiety, trauma, or depression, you simply cannot hear them because you are not on the right station. When we try to get information from our team and we are depressed, they will sincerely not talk about anything other than trying to get us out of the depression. Our team will always try to raise our frequency high enough so that we can hear them clearly. We have to understand that the lower our personal frequency, the less clear the information we are receiving, point blank. Not one of us is above or outside this. If I know I am in a bad mood or on the wrong vibration, I simply cannot do the job I am supposed to do as well as I am supposed to do it, and it means I either need to back up and do significant cleansing before work, or put work aside and do it another time.
Tips and Tricks to Enhance Your Practice
With any practice, certain things can enhance the information you receive. Especially when we’re first beginning to learn to interpret our personal psychic language/s, but even once we’re well-versed practitioners, there are several, all-purpose techniques anyone can use to get the most out of pretty much any practice!
A lot of these call on the help of the greater Spirit to do the work, so they work for anyone at any level, as long as the goals of the person are aligned with Spirit. I say Spirit to mean God, the Universe, the Cosmos - I use this word for Them as a group. You may choose to substitute the word “Spirit” with Jesus, Archangel Michael, Allah, Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, or about a billion other names, and it doesn’t matter. Spirit is all this and more. They don’t care what you call them so long as you give them the same respect they give you. I recommend using “greater Spirit” because if an enlightened being who is interested in your cause can help, they will, and we’re not limiting ourselves to the help of one being who may not be the best suited to that particular work we’re trying to do. Since many also don’t know their spirit guides or feel comfortable or able to single them out or speak to them by name, this calls on the greater Spirit in general. If one doesn’t feel comfortable with that, I recommend replacing “greater Spirit” with “my higher self,” and this will still enhance results, though not quite as much as calling on help from other beings.
Using Divination to Enhance Your Psychic Practice
Using any divination can enhance your psychic practice, especially because as we stated earlier, using a tool makes one feel that the results are much more tangible, and it makes them easier to believe.
One who uses a pendulum but has access to any psychic gift will eventually find that they had the answer before the pendulum gave it. I recommend using a pendulum when you don’t feel you can trust your gifts, just to enhance and show that the pendulum will actually confirm what you already know to be true. One can also ask their pendulum simple questions but find that they're led to new questions they wouldn't have thought of, or find that new imagery and words are coming along with the answer. There are a lot of ways to use a pendulum to enhance and tune into what is already coming to you! I find many can work with one for a few months and then put it away forever, moving on to use just their psychic gifts.
Tarot can be used to enhance psychic gifts so many different ways! For me personally, tarot has been brought into my other practices to a certain degree. If I’m trying to get a general idea of someone’s personality (when I first work with someone in important contexts like as a student, I like to get a sense of their overall way), my team might flash the king of wands or the queen of swords or the empress card at me. They may also just tell me, "You need the two of wands today." I never pull tarot cards - I don’t really use them in my practice and haven’t for years, but they still end up being a big part of my psychic imagery and things that come to my head often. I associate certain things with certain cards, probably my own associations that no one else would make, and my team can give me psychic hits through these.
I find it’s really helpful to ask a question psychically, see what you can get, and write down all the information that comes to you, even if it’s just a few words, just a feeling, just a picture, etc. Then pull tarot cards about the same thing, and see if you can confirm what you got psychically!
In pretty much any use of scrying, especially, but also a couple other ways, you can receive symbolism through your divination practice, which can then be applied later in your psychic practice. Say that you are black mirror scrying and you ask a specific question. You see clearly the silhouette of a rose. Well, now you know what a rose means to you symbolically, because you know that it was the answer to that question. Later, you may be worrying to yourself or asking yourself questions, and you may suddenly see an image of a rose in your head again, just like how it looked on the mirror. The more you use divination to recognize and learn what your signs and symbols are, the more those signs and symbols will be able to pop up to you in different scenarios and through your psychic gifts. And these symbols are completely unique to each person! My symbol for war may literally be your symbol for peace, so it's important to work with your own symbolism and not try to apply anyone else’s.
Some fun examples of divination which one may not have thought to try include: water, black mirror, or crystal scrying, pyromancy (scrying in ash, flame, or smoke), tasseomancy (reading tea leaves), rune casting, numerology, and palmistry.
One reason there have been so many forms of divination over centuries: bone casting, scrying in the clouds, scrying in dirt, etc., is because really all it’s doing is letting a person’s barriers down enough to recognize that the information is already there and available to them. Trusting that we can receive this information and that it was never meant to be hidden from us in the first place can help us believe in each our divination and psychic abilities.
Spirit Affirmations
Spirit affirmations are a great way to state exactly what you’re trying to achieve, and ensure everyone involved puts their best foot forward. Our spirit guides and higher selves are always trying to give us information, and a lot of settling into our intuition as a way of life is a process of consenting to receiving what’s already coming through and accepting that it’s there to help.
Spirit affirmations is taking a moment to thank the Divine light within your personal spirit, within any spirits helping you with this endeavor, and the greater Spirit for aiding the work. Many like to actually say thanks, some have a visualization process - there are about a billion ways to do spirit affirmations and there are about a billion names for the process. This is because spiritualists have always recognized that thanking, acknowledging, or affirming everyone involved in a process is a way to get better results. It lets your guides know you came to play. And if what you’re doing is interesting, other beings who are not yet your guides are likely to come check it out and offer blessings and help for the process, because they love every use of gifts for good, knowledge, and wisdom, here and everywhere.
I end spirit affirmations by specifically putting whatever I’m trying to achieve in the hands of the greater Spirit. I do this about 100 times per day - I put everything in the hands of the greater Spirit before every reading or healing session, as well as many personal situations. Thanking my spirit, helping spirits, and the greater Spirit, and putting everything in the hands of the greater Spirit, ensures we all show up as our highest selves. I always and will always suggest thanking all spirits involved and putting any spiritual work completely in the hands of Spirit for innumerable reasons, an especially good one being that it gets big results.
This process can be heavily personalized, and I suggest one does so! I I have a document full of different versions of spirit affirmations and I use it a crazy number of times per day, for everything from my morning journal to every single reading or healing session I ever do. I don’t even come up with these myself - when I take on a new aspect of my practice, my guides are happy to tell me how I should do spirit affirmations ahead of time.
Here’s an example of what I say before readings, given to me by my guides: “I affirm my spirit. I have willpower, confidence, and connectedness, and this allows me to leave my personal baggage at the door. I affirm all helpful spirits. I am grateful to [this client] for seeking out this reading, [this client’s] higher self and inner child for allowing this reading, and I am grateful to [this client’s] guides for their help in this reading. Only their best selves, as mine, will shine through. And I affirm the greater Spirit. I put this reading completely in the hands of the greater Spirit. I set the intention that I will see what’s most helpful, understand [the client’s] unique essence, and know what they need. I ask the greater Spirit to give me the full chakra package and full auric field package so I am on my best frequency for this reading. I ask the greater Spirit to send me a reading bubble for the entirety of this session which is specific to [this client’s] needs. Thank you!”
(We will get into packages and bubbles) As you can see, this gives it over to the Spirit while acknowledging the best in everyone involved, and my readings come out better since I made a specific spirit affirmations process for them! This can be heavily personalized to your needs and whatever you’re trying to achieve, and the more you do so, the more it will help what you’re doing along. (It shouldn’t need to be said but often is - if Spirit doesn’t agree with your motivations, they aren’t going to help. They won’t help you hurt or spy on someone, and this process does no good to a practice Spirit wouldn’t abide.)
I recommend using this for literally everything. If you want to practice remote viewing, do spirit affirmations first. Even a very short version which ultimately puts things in the hands of the Universe, the higher self, the bigger picture, is better than nothing. If one wants to practice psycography, mediumship, energy work, journeying - there is quite seriously no process that isn’t made more successful and safer by spirit affirmations.
Bubbles
Bubbles are one of my favorite uses of healing elements, and I use them every day! You saw me reference my “reading” bubble, and here’s what that actually entails, per what I set up with my spirit guides some time ago:
Reading bubble:
When I ask for a reading bubble, if my guides agree with my intentions, it will always include the following:
- The Spirit will send healing elements formed as a reading bubble - a bubble of subtle elements around me which acts as my best space for readings
- From within the bubble, I will act in service of Spirit at all times, and Spirit will act in service of me in return. I will surrender to the will of the bigger picture and higher plan
- Introspection and reflection will come naturally as best serves thereading or session
- I will be strong and brave enough to say what needs saying as it needs saying, and my intentions will be understood by the party who receives it
- I will be on a vibration of unity and friendship, truly feeling that we all ascend or none of us do
- I will trust my intuition, trust my spirit guides, trust my higher self, trust the client’s spirit guides and higher self, and trust that all are working toward the highest well-being of the client and of us all
- I will be on a vibration of liberation - liberating the client and liberating myself through information and study
- I will feel timeless, working for the time it takes and not a second more or less. I will allow for readings which take more time when necessary, as everyone needs someone on their side and if I can be that someone for someone, I want to be
- I will be a strong leader and good communicator - words will come to me easily and I will express them in the way the client needs to hear them
- I will show love and compassion for the client, as I would want someone to show love and compassion for me
- The main concern will be progress for all involved. What will help the client make progress? What will help me progress as a reader? What is most likely to lead to a future relationship between the client and I? All will be well and easily understood
These were the important things to my spirit guides to include, because these are what they think makes a good reader. Honed skill meets natural ability and a genuine desire to uplift the person I’m working for - this is something Spirit can get behind, so they offer me a lot of support as I do readings, and I’m incredibly grateful.
I have a document full of these bubbles for everything from “good intentions,” to “encouraging clarity,” which I use with permission on clients and with students in sessions, and I use many on myself throughout the day.
I encourage working with your guides to make bubbles for anything you want! I encourage a “psychic practice” bubble, in which you may set intentions like “The Spirit will send healing elements to encourage the best frequency to receive information,” “I will understand the language of dream and metaphor, as this is the language my guides most easily speak through,” “I will easily receive and interpret psychic stimuli,” etc.! Come up with your own or work with your guides through psychic gifts or divination to create the best psychic practice bubble for yourself, as well as any others you can come up with!
Packages
Similarly to how I’ve laid out ahead of time what each of my “bubbles” means and my guides and I have already agreed on what they entail, we’ve also worked out certain “packages” so I can quickly ask for a service which will help with something specific. When I ask for a “full chakra package,” we’ve already laid out specific details such as that within reason, the Spirit will quickly cleanse, align, and balance my chakras, clearing any small excess or deficiencies. Anything larger would require more time, attention, and thought from me, but I tend to keep my energetic systems running fairly cleanly and I do small upkeep like this quite a bit! So longer maintenance is necessary less often. (If you don’t click with the words “self-care,” try “system maintenance.”)
My auric field package includes things like filling small holes and scrapes, adjusting small color deficiencies, removing energy which doesn’t belong to me (such as after a session), and more. I would share the details of each of these as I have above, but these are written in an older journal which I haven’t moved to my computer yet.
I encourage playing around with this as well! Work with your guides or higher self to come up with the best use of any of these, and I promise each will really help your practice.
Brain State and Intentions
Asking for a receptive brain state and setting intentions are both helpful, and these are the other two things I would always do to enhance any practice. A good amount of time is spent trying to get into the best brain state to communicate, but you can ask for it right from the beginning and it helps significantly!
Setting intentions is a good, clear way to specify what you’re trying to achieve and to give consent to Spirit to help.
Each of these significantly enhances everything you can do.
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I would love to hear about how any of these works for you, what you enjoy or dislike about them, or anything else about your practice! My clients, whether from mentorships specifically or not, often come back to tell me about their uses of these techniques, and it means everything to me! The way you use them may even help me teach someone something new. 🙂
Thank you so much for reading, if you’re still with me! Through my store here, as well as through my Etsy store, I offer mentorship programs to help build psychic and intuitive gifts, for the overly-sensitive psychic to learn to control their gifts, and for many others looking to live a more intuitive lifestyle.