"How do you know you're psychic? Is it something we can all be taught?"
I was curled up in my favorite glider in the living room just a few days ago, and a dear friend was across from me on my dark charcoal couch peering through inquisitive eyes. I had been telling her about my recent experience with a Peruvian shaman, and suddenly we were neck deep in a conversation about reading energy, talking to spirits and traveling through dimensions.
It's a question that has come up a lot in my work with people over the years. How do we know if we're psychic? Do we all have gifts? Is it something we can be taught or are we just shit out of luck if our intuition seems to be on perpetual snooze?
Drum roll, please.
You're a psychic!
Holy shit!
Yeppers, we are all psychic. We all have the capacity to feel and experience our yummy sixth sense, and we all have a baseline of connectedness to this energetic world we live in. Our bodies are a beautiful symphony of magnetic, chemical and electrical signals that are constantly responding to the world around them, and all we have to do is begin to pay attention.
Are some of us more gifted than others? Absolutely.
Think of it like this. Tiger Woods is what most would agree is a pretty damn good golfer. Yes, he has worked hard over the years, and yes, he has incredible discipline and focus. But undoubtedly he was born with a natural aptitude that almost everyone else on the planet doesn't have.
But that doesn't mean all of us couldn't up our game training with Tiger. Spend a year working with him everyday, and I guarantee that by the end of the year he'd have you playing golf better than you could have ever imagined.
My point is that perhaps we aren't all born with an instant gift for reading energies or channeling with other-dimensional beings, but the possibility is there within us all. We simply have to nurture the energetic side of ourselves and begin believing in alignment with what we'd like to experience in our lives.
These are three tips I give people when they ask about nurturing and growing their psychic abilities:
1. Get to Know Your Energy Body
You can't really call yourself a mechanic if you don't know squat about cars. And a psychic can't really flex their intuitive muscle if they don't know anything about the energetic waters they're navigating. As with any other skill in life, it's important to study your trade, and when it comes to being a psychic, energy is the name of the game.
For me that study began with the chakras, and it's the direction I usually guide my students as well. There is far more going on with the human body than just blood, organs and bones, and it's an empowering practice to understand the vehicle your soul is driving while on this earth.
While there are 114 chakras and over 72,000 "nadis" (energy channels) in the body, a study of the seven major charkas is plenty to acquaint you with your energy field. My older sister Lacy Young and I have an in-depth course about the chakras we have run for the last few summers that we are re-releasing this summer called The Chakra System, and it's a great place to start to beef up your energy body knowledge. (Sign up for my newsletter to be notified when it is re-launching.)
2. Trust Your Gut
Have you ever walked out of your house, felt a hard knot in your stomach and then went back in to see you left the stove on? Maybe you've randomly thought about an old friend and then received an unexpected call or email from them that day? What about that sense of dread you get as a parent when something in your body tells you things just aren't right, and you find out something has indeed happened to your child?
We exist in a matrix of energy that quantum physicists call "the field" that is always communicating with us. Strong energetic bonds exist between ourselves and the people we interact with, the places we visit and the things we touch on a daily basis, and if we pay attention we can feel those connections at work.
Most people brush off gut feelings and knowings as coincidence. They acknowledge that something strange has happened but don't give it too much thought beyond that. But when we begin to give credit to our intuitive sense of knowing, we empower ourselves to trust it and lean on it more. And naturally the connection gets stronger and stronger.
3. Meditate, Meditate, Meditate
If I've said it once, I've said it 8,000 times, meditation is the golden ticket you can't avoid. How can we expect to master energy if we're not willing to bask in it? We must observe what we want to understand, and meditation is the ultimate observation deck for the wondrous world of energy.
As human beings in the everyday world, we are constantly focused on objects. Our sight is trained to find the (seemingly) solid matter in our field of vision, and we fix on that. But when we do that we miss the immense amounts of energy and space between the objects.
Meditation trains us to slip into the spaces in between, the space where the true magic is.
Psychics are adept at what we do because we spend time focusing on the frequencies not picked up by the five senses. We are more interested in what we can't see, taste, touch, hear or smell, and we make it our practice to experience what most would consider the in-experiencable.
When I slip into meditation the sensations are more real than anything I have experienced with my human senses, and the knowings are deeper than if the words were written plainly in front of me. But it is a practice I have honed one day at a time, one sitting at a time.
Being Psychic is simply being AWARE.
The dance of the intuitive is one of subtlety and inquiry. It's paying attention to the thoughts, feelings and knowings that trickle from the body in whispers and then giving a voice to them with our trust and understanding.
I began actively opening my psychic abilities about 10 years ago with the help of a medium and mentor, and my gifts have shifted and broadened with each passing year. This isn't an overnight, turn-the-switch-on kind of thing, or at least it hasn't been for me.
It's a passion. A devotion. A belief that this world is filled with intricate layers of beauty and wonder, and most of them are unseen.